Elvis Presley #1 (Oedipus)

Elvis Presley #1 (Oedipus) — Ray Johnson. 1956-58.

Medium: Offset lithograph in black on tan wove paper, with brush and red ink and matte opaque red and blue paint, on board. Dimensions: 27.7 × 21 cm (10 15/16 × 8 5/16 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

To make this work, Ray Johnson began with a photograph of Elvis Presley in profile, his eyes downcast and shrouded in shadow. Johnson then covered the work in red tempera, letting the paint drip down around the singer’s sinister sockets, evoking both blood and tears. In doing so, Johnson tethered Elvis, a cult figure of the present, to one from the mythological past: Oedipus, who gouged out his eyes to atone for committing patricide and incest. Works like Elvis Presley #1 situate Johnson among the earliest pioneers of Pop Art. In the 1960s Andy Warhol also gravitated to Elvis’s photographic likeness, incorporating it into silkscreened grids that commented on celebrity culture through the repetition and degredation of popular imagery.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.