As the 4th-highest-grossing worldwide box-office actor of all time, Scarlett Johansson is one of the most valuable performers of the modern age. Her rich, husky voice sounds laced with whiskey and smoke and seems to teasingly belie her peaches-and-cream complexion, hourglass figure, and heart-shaped face. It’s easy to fall head over heels for this blue-eyed creature who is the embodiment of sensual guile and whose likeness to Marilyn Monroe is undeniable.

Despite her screen-goddess superpowers, Scarlett Johansson is an actor’s actor who continues to challenge herself in unexpected roles. She can seamlessly shift from drama to comedy, a feat not many actors successfully master. Her extensive acting range covers all genres from drama to comedy, and includes a comic-book hero blockbuster franchise, sci-fi indies, animation voiceovers, and the thespian also happens to be a three-time Woody Allen muse and Tony Award winner (Best Featured Actress, A View from the Bridge), the pinnacle for actors who honor their craft above fame and fortune (which the actress happens to have in abundance anyway).

Scarlett embodies a calm confidence on screen, an almost hypnotic allure. She is in a league of her own, and therefore we were tasked with the responsibility of creating a feature that goes beyond the typical magazine editorial—we wanted to turn her into a collectible work of art, but how? We decided to pair her with a contemporary artist, but who would the artist be, and what would be the result of this collaboration? Scarlett is an actor who does her homework, so it was not surprising to learn that she knows art and the important artists working today. This multi-award-winning actress with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame tasked us with finding an artist whose style is unmistakable, whose name commands respect, and whose work is collected by the biggest museums and esteemed galleries around the world—in other words, we needed to find an artist as important in the art world as Scarlett is in the entertainment industry. Many names came to mind, but the name that resonated the most was a contemporary American artist recognized as one of the guiding lights of postmodern painting, David Salle.