The Woman Behind the Image: Marilyn Monroe Comes to the National Portrait Gallery
One hundred years since her birth, the National Portrait Gallery assembles the photographers and artists who built the Marilyn Monroe mythology and discovers the woman they couldn't quite capture.
It opened yesterday, and if the queues on St Martin’s Place were anything to go by, London has been waiting for it. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait arrives at the National Portrait Gallery this month – the centenary of her birth – and it’s already shaping up to be one of the unmissable exhibitions of the year. Not because Marilyn Monroe needs an introduction, but because this one promises to go somewhere most retrospectives don’t.
The premise is simple enough: her life, told through portraits. What makes it interesting is the range. The show runs from her earliest pin-up photographs – taken when she was still Norma Jeane, a teenager doing modelling work to get by – all the way to the last images made on a Santa Monica beach in 1962, weeks before her death. Between those two points sits an entire mythology, and the NPG has assembled the photographers and artists who built it.
Cecil Beaton photographed her in 1956, the year she married Arthur Miller, and his images have a quality the more commercial shoots don’t – something watchful and slightly melancholy beneath the glamour. Philippe Halsman, who shot her repeatedly for Life magazine, caught a different Marilyn: more playful, more in on the joke. Eve Arnold, one of the few women to spend serious time with her on set, got something else entirely – candid, unguarded moments that feel genuinely private. Richard Avedon, Milton Greene, George Barris: the list of photographers alone makes this worth the trip.
From the earliest pin-ups as Norma Jeane to her last photographs on a Santa Monica beach, she was one of the most photographed people in the world – and she fascinated some of its greatest artists.
The show also includes art – Andy Warhol’s silkscreens are an obvious inclusion, but there’s work from Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas, Rosalyn Drexler and Audrey Flack too, artists who kept returning to Monroe’s image long after her death, each finding something different in it. That’s perhaps the most interesting thread running through the whole exhibition: what it means to be photographed that much, by that many people, and still remain elusive.
Alongside the photographs and artworks, the NPG has gathered a selection of personal belongings: clothing, books, annotated scripts, which should provide some necessary ballast. Monroe was a serious reader and a working actress who fought hard for creative control. The exhibition, curated by Rosie Broadley and Georgia Atienza, seems genuinely interested in that person, not just the icon.
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait runs until 6 September. Tickets are £25–£30, and given the subject and the summer crowds, booking ahead is wise.
Credits:
Images courtesy of National Portrait Gallery
Words: Sebastian Kozak
