Which American painting, do you think, is the most famous? Not the best. Simply the best known.

This was the question buzzing around Datalounge — our favorite all-gay message forum. The candidates put forth included Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, even — a real blast from the past — Whistler’s Mother (more properly known as Arrangement in Grey and Black), a sentimental favorite of the sanctimonious Fifties.

We, however, have to cast our lot with Andy Warhol’s Marilyn – there are hundreds of them, some in large squares that dwarf the viewer, others — the more troubling and profound “assembly line” versions — in slyly ugly diptychs of 50 Marilyn’s back-to-back.

Just on the face of it — if most famous can be measured by most reproduced — our contention is supported by the rough measure of Google’s image search:

Both Nighthawks and American Gothic rate 20 pages each. Warhol’s Marilyn comes in at 28. (Whistler’s Mother doesn’t even signify, poor dear — on life support with a feeble 8 pages worth of acclaim.)

We would also argue, however, that Warhol’s silkscreen is more than a lucky child of Fortune; it is, in fact, a great painting. We wonder if it might not one day rank as the most famous painting of all, edging out the longtime heavyweight, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In many ways, Warhol’s Marilyn is the hardboiled 20th Century answer to the Mona Lisa.

Like the assembly-line Marilyns, Leonardo reproduced the face of the Mona Lisa every time he drew a woman. She is his Virgin, his St. Anne, his St. Elizabeth. The Mona Lisa has yellowed with age and acquired something the freshly painted portrait might have lacked, a patina of strangeness. A strangeness that is inexplicable for she seems removed from us by something more than time (statues of Roman goddesses do not seem half so remote.)

This, surprisingly, may be the final fate of Marilyn Monroe. As she becomes less a part of popular culture, as she is forgotten in time, she will seem less banal — banality perhaps was Warhol’s original reason for choosing the image, an indifferent studio publicity shot. Warhol’s Marilyn — the mid-century blonde with the cement hair and clenched teeth — may appear finally as alien as Leonardo’s Dark Lady.

We should also remember that the reputation of the Mona Lisa as a pillar of Western civilization — at one with Beethoven’s nine symphonies and the Parthenon — is an estimate of recent vintage. She was rediscovered — rehabilitated, really — by the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th Century, who saw in her strangeness a sort of divine feminine, as well as a morbidly beautiful “vampire,” (a fixation of the late 19th Century.)

Our contemporary eyes see her not as the 15th Century Italians might have — as a fashionable woman, no odder perhaps than a calculated Vogue model is to us — but through the trappings of a decadent, death-loving phase of Romanticism, as something half divine, half ghoul.

Consider: In a strange and barren wilderness, her hands folded contentedly over her stomach, the Mona Lisa sits before us with her great saturnine moon face, a sallow, sickly Madonna.

She is rendered in the smoky style known as sfumatto, her features created more by shadow than definite lines. She looks out at us engagingly; yet something is kept in reserve: She seems also to look serenely inward. Her smile that is made so much of in the famous Nat King Cole song that bears her name is simply the Renaissance smile of sapience, the understanding mind. It is a a smile that is not so much amused at what it sees — though there is that — as it is benevolent and generous toward it.

Even the most prosaic and benighted among us can not escape the musty whiff of 19th Century theosophy that clings to her — still.

In New Age terms, the Mona Lisa is the Priestess card in the Tarot deck, who sits squarely before the entrance to the temple, dealing with us mortals on this side of the Occult Veil, which she guards, granting or refusing access beyond the Veil to the inner sanctum of what is commonly called, by secularists, “spiritual enlightenment” — that is, a beatific vision of God.

Warhol’s Marilyn blows all this mysticism apart. His Marilyn is a Mona Lisa of the highway, the billboard sign, the repeating line of street posters bubbled and ripped and distressed by the weather. A peculiarly 20th Century kind of weather, that of assembly-line wars, one right after another, and assembly-line diversions, each quickly replaced by identical but paler versions. A disposable zeitgeist that might just as well be summed up by the chilling nursery rhyme that threads through George Orwell’s 1984:

The mystery of life has become a cheap mystery, easily merchandised. Or so it was fashionable to believe immediately after World War II, with the hydrogen bomb fresh in everyone’s nightmares. And so the Muse of the Atomic Age becomes a publicity shot of a movie star, rendered in shallow depth, under flat, unmodulated colors.

For all that, Marilyn is still a daughter of the Mona Lisa, a vessel of mysticism — or rather of what became of mysticism. Whereas Mona Lisa seems to be looking out on eternity, Warhol’s Marilyn looks inward at mortality, at perhaps her own suicide. Warhol did the silkscreens a few months after Monroe’s death and purposely chose an anachronistic photo of the actress from the film Niagara.

At the time of her death in 1962, Marilyn was no longer the cuddly, bouncy punchline of lighthearted sex comedies. Her look had softened and thinned (Marilyn on the set of her last movie, Something’s Gotta Give, left). Her hair was sleeker and longer, a modish bouffant favored by Jackie Kennedy. She had adopted the Empire style of Camelot.

So the Niagara shot was already nostalgia when Warhol chose it, purposely pointing to the past, opening his work to the interpretations that soon came, that like the artist’s similar silkscreenings of electric chairs and car crashes, his Marilyn was a memento mori, a death symbol.

The artist, who seemed to enjoy being oblique, would admit to none of this. “I just see Marilyn as another person.” he contended. “As for whether it’s symbolical to paint Monroe in such colors; it’s beauty. And if something’s beautiful, it’s pretty colors, that’s all.”

This child-like pose of being an idiot savant, with its gay emphasis on trivia and “pretty things,” apparently served to make some aesthetic point: artist as know-nothing aw-shucks American, perhaps — running on instincts and impulses. In this sense, he was in a direct line from his immediate American precursors, the paint-splattering Jackson Pollack and the freewheeling, swaggeringly heterosexual Abstract Expressionists.

We must, as with all art, trust our eye, rather then depend on the historical “intentions” of the artist. The very method of turning painting, made so recently visceral and personal by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950′s, into a cold printing process, via the Warhol silkscreen, is all we need to know of intention, and the look of the Marilyns, as the movie star deteriorates or bursts into day-glo colors, is clear and direct in its impact on the viewer.

Rather than being about “beautiful colors” pleasingly arranged, as the artist professes — which in no way explains the many times he uses inkily smudged Marilyns or dank, conflicting color combinations — Warhol’s Marilyn, like the Mona Lisa before her, seems to be signaling over the artist’s head and having an intense dialog with the viewer, one that is profound in subject matter and troubling in scope.

This 20th Century Mona Lisa is a death figure, but no longer a mystic guide to the Underworld. The mysticism has been drained out of her as she grits her teeth and smiles with heavy-lidded “bedroom” eyes, a theatrical effect, no longer a living woman behind the sfumatto, contoured by shadow and moonlight, but flattened down and turned into a graphic, a roadside sign of sexuality: Curves Up Ahead. Speeds Checked by Radar.

What was once a passage to vision and occult meaning is now small and without consequence, repeated in assembly line rows, sometimes so offset that the color glops over the outlines, other times, smudged and half missing. What you see is what you get, this Marilyn seems to tell us. And there is nothing behind Curtain Number 3 — formerly the Occult Veil — not even a booby prize.

Great paintings, it is said, change as we do, mean different things at different stages of life. This gives them the illusion of being living entities. We think Warhol’s Marilyn may one day be as famous as the Mona Lisa because, like the Leonardo, it poses more questions than it answers, and more questions than the artist could possible intend. The questions we ask of our culture at any given time are a matter of fashion, but the answers great art throws back at us — sometimes perplexing, half-heard or simply misunderstood — are eternal.

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