Visitors look at Mao paintings by US artist Andy Warhol during the Le grand Monde d'Andy Warhol exhibition at the Grand Palais museum in Paris yesterday. The exhibition runs till July 13.

Smiling, cherry-lipped princesses, rock royalty, politicians, artists in eye-popping hues and, of course, Marilyn Monroe, her melancholy face reproduced over and over.

A vast new exhibition that opened at Paris' Grand Palais yesterday brings together Andy Warhol's iconic celebrity portraits and works of those who had $40,000 to spare for a set of commissioned canvases.

Warhol churned out an estimated 1,000 portraits - most of them commissions.

"He used to say, 'I have to pay the rent; I have to bring home the bacon'," says the exhibit's curator, Alain Cueff, adding that he thinks the irreverent and often-flippant pop artist had something more serious in mind.

"Warhol mentioned that all the portraits should have the same size and that altogether they could form a portrait of society," he said one recent day while the works were being hung.

Hence the name of the show, Le Grand Monde d'Andy Warhol, which translates as "Andy Warhol's Big World". It runs through July 13.

The show arranges the portraits of some 130 subjects by profession, so Mick Jagger, his famous lips a delicate baby pink, shares a room with Blondie's Debbie Harry, with alarming cobalt eyes and her platinum mane painted bright pink.

A facetious portrait of a green-faced Richard Nixon - entitled Vote McGovern - is interspersed among the Maos, a 1972 series of paintings of the Chinese leader that includes a monumental-size canvas in blue and military drab.

The hall dedicated to movie stars brings together portraits of a leather-clad Marlon Brando - made from a still from his 1953 motorcycle movie "The Wild One" - Dennis Hopper, Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda and Sylvester Stallone.

Warhol's iconic, 1962 portraits of blonde bombshell - Marilyn Monroe - smile out from another wall. Peach Marilyn features the actress' oversized face, with yellow hair and Ceylon eye shadow, on a tangerine background. Twenty Marilyns shows the same image with similar coloring repeated over and over, like on book of stamps.

Cueff explained that Warhol was fascinated with Monroe and had collected images of her. After her 1962 suicide, he chose one to paint, with dead eyes and a pasted-on smile that convey her inner sadness.

It was Monroe paintings that launched Warhol into the lucrative business of commissioned portraits: Upon seeing the Marilyns, New York cab company owner and art collector Robert Scull thought of having his wife done, Cueff said.

The result, Ethel Scull 36 Times, features three dozen photo booth pictures of Ethel Scull - laughing, pursing her lips, donning sunglasses - in a rainbow of colors.

By the early 1970s, Warhol's atelier, known as the Factory, had developed a systematic technique for producing the portraits. Warhol first photographed his subjects using a Polaroid Big Shot camera. The chosen image was then transferred to a large-scale sheet of acetate, which Warhol used as a guide in painting the canvas. Finally, he silkscreened over the color-blocked canvas.

(China Daily/AP, March 19, 2009)