Andy Warhol’s fascination with the features and shape of women’s lips can be traced back to his earliest personal work in addition to his work as a commercial illustrator. It flourished in his most iconic works of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Chairman Mao, where Warhol would highlight his subjects’ lips, outlining and coloring each pair of lips in ways that made them the focal point of each painting. As if to prove this point, in 1962 he made the painting “Marilyn’s Lips”–a diptych that isolated and repeated MarilynMonroe’s lips 168 times. The painting is now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.