"I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?"

Andy Warhol (artist)

The artist Andy Warhol was accustomed to unusual happenings. At The Factory, his studio in Manhattan, he often hosted strange guests and even stranger parties.

Some visitors were wackier than others. The antics of one Dorothy Podber left a particularly memorable mark on Warhol and his work.

Photograph of Andy Warhol and his assistant Gerard Malenga filming Taylor Mead in the film "Taylor Mead’s Ass at the Factory" (1963).
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Podber strolled into The Factory one day in 1964. A series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe were stacked one in front of the other against the wall. These brightly colored portraits were silkscreen prints, made by pressing ink through a stencil and a screen of taut silk and onto a blank canvas.

Podber asked Warhol if she could "shoot" his Marilyns. Busy filming a different project, he gave her the go ahead to photograph the prints.

Standing before the stack of Marilyns, Podber got to work, but not with a camera. After removing her gloves, she pulled a revolver from her purse and before anyone could stop her... shot Marilyn right between the eyes.

Andy Warhol, "Shot Light Blue Marilyn", 1964, acrylic on canvas, The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ADAGP, Paris 2016.
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Some say the shooting was performance art, a live event in which an artist often uses her own body to enact a piece of work. Podber was known for staging bizarre performances around town. Marilyn Monroe could have been a casualty of her artistic practice, or the victim of a mean joke. "Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty," Podber once admitted.

Performance artist Marina Abramović (left) in her piece "The Artist is Present" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Whatever the intention, Warhol wasn’t amused. He used white paint to patch up the hole in Marilyn’s head (the scar is still visible today!) and renamed the series Shot Marilyns.

What happened to Podber? She received a severe punishment for her crime: lifetime banishment from Warhol’s studio.

Detail of white mark in Shot Light Blue Marilyn. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ADAGP, Paris 2016.

Jack Mitchell’s photograph of Andy Warhol (taken between 1966 and 1977).
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WRITTEN BY

Christelle Méchain

APPROVED BY

Gérard Marié

Professor of Art History

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