After Andy Warhol, Marilyn — “This is Not by Me” (II)

This 1980s screenprint, After Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, belongs to the provocative “This is Not” phenomenon—an episode that encapsulates Warhol’s influence on authorship, reproduction, and the economics of celebrity imagery. In the wake of the immense success of Warhol’s Marilyn prints, the Sunday B. Morning workshop produced unauthorized editions. Rather than pursuing a conventional repudiation, Warhol’s response—signing select impressions with the disarming, self-referential phrase “Andy Warhol This is not by me”—turned a dispute over legitimacy into a conceptual statement, effectively transforming the object into a document of Warhol’s own mythology and the Pop Art era’s blurred boundaries between original and copy.

Centered on Marilyn Monroe, the defining icon of Warhol’s post-1962 imagery, the work speaks directly to the artist’s enduring cultural relevance and the market’s sustained appetite for Marilyn-related material—reinforced by landmark auction results such as the 2022 sale of “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” at $195 million. Within the print field, Warhol’s market has demonstrated notable momentum, with reported +71.5% performance in 2022 vs 2021 per “The Royal Warhol Year: 2023 Print Market Report,” underlining the continuing investment attention on editioned works. Exhibited in 2022 at the Hyundai Museum (Seoul) in “Andy Warhol Beginning,” this piece offers a compelling blend of Pop iconography, art-historical narrative, and collectible rarity rooted in Warhol’s own ironic authentication—an acquisition that functions both as cultural artifact and as a highly legible entry point into blue-chip 20th-century print collecting.