The National Portrait Gallery London opens an exhibition on June 4 that brings together 200 objects—photographs, dresses, scripts and personal objects—to reconstruct the different identities of Marilyn Monroewho I would have been one hundred years old this week. The exhibition can be visited until September 6.
The actress died at the age of 36 from an overdose of barbiturates and was, according to Commissioner Rosie Broadley, one of the most photographed artists of all timecomparable on that point with Queen Elizabeth II herself. The exhibition proposes a journey that begins with the young model Norma Jean —his real name— and ends with the posthumous portraits that other artists dedicated to him, as reported EFE.
The material comes from different museums and private collections. In addition to the photographs, there are dresses from some of her shoots, white Ferragamo shoes, letters from fans, original scripts and some notes that she herself wrote on the back of a restaurant menu.
The images of adolescence and early youth—among them a photo booth capture from 1940—give way to series of his film career. Legendary filmings are represented, such as that of «Temptation lives above»with the famous shot in which she holds her skirt over a street ventilation opening, but also «With skirts it’s crazy» y «Rebel lives«.
A woman of many layers behind the myth
If the image that endured was that of a carnal and seductive figure, the portraits gathered in the exhibition show other dimensions. There is a photograph of Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, shots of her looking fragile and insecure, and spontaneous captures: putting on makeup in an airport bathroom, reading a newspaper in a park, sunbathing on a beach or simply sleeping.
The photographers who photographed her agreed in describing an unusual magnetism in front of the fixed camera. «She knew how to use the lens better than any artist I’ve ever photographed,» he said of her. Philippe Halsmanin an assessment that, in different words, almost all of his portraitists ended up repeating.
But not everyone saw it only from that angle. Cecil Beatonafter spending an afternoon photographing her in New York, noticed something more disturbing beneath that energy: «It’s a simple, lively performance of contagious joy, but it will probably end in tears,» he noted.
The list of photographers who worked with Monroe includes names such as Eve Arnold, Inge Morath and Milton Greene, many of them linked to publications such as Vogue, Life, Harper’s Bazaar or Town, which competed to have her on the cover.
The museum director, Victoria Syddallstressed that the exhibition seeks to go beyond the myth: «This exhibition explores what Marilyn was like during her life, her determination and her independence,» she explained, and recalled that at one point Monroe set up her own production company to leave the studio system and thus choose the characters in which she wanted to participate.
That desire to control his image reached the extreme until the last months of his life. In 1962, the photographer Ben Stern He spent several hours with her in a hotel and later reported that Monroe demanded to review the 2,500 shots of the meeting to discard them one by one with crossed outs, because he considered that they showed her too sexy, an image of which, according to him, he had possibly already had enough.
The sample also includes the posthumous portraits that other artists dedicated to her, including three silkscreens by Andy Warhol and paintings by the British pop artist Pauline Boty, who portrayed her just after her death.
