How Shirley Temple Inspired Warhol’s Marilyn

First posted here on December 1, 2014

A signed photo sent by child star Shirley Temple to a young Warhol, thought to have inspired his iconic screenprints of Marilyn, is featured in Love is Enough, a new exhibition at Oxford Modern Art, reports the Sunday Times (full article behind paywall.)

Eric Shiner, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, describes the photo as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of Warhol paraphernalia.  The colour tinting of the photo may well have influenced his images of Marilyn.

“That’s what he wanted to be,” Geralyn Huxley of the Warhol Museum told the Pittsburgh Tribune after Shirley Temple died earlier this year. “He grew up poor as a child. In the case of Shirley Temple, she was rich, loved, taken care of, plus she was a child like him,” Huxley said. “When her films came out, it was the ultimate escape from the Depression that was going on. (Her movies) were emblematic of the American spirit as she soldiered on through adversity, standing up to authority.”

Warhol named Poor Little Rich Girl, his 1966 film starring Edie Sedgwick, after one of Shirley’s most popular films. Born just two years before Warhol, Marilyn was also an ardent movie fan during Temple’s Depression era heyday, and would later become another of Twentieth Century Fox’s greatest stars. I’ve explored some of the parallels between MM and Temple here.