To mark what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery has mounted an exhibition exploring the actress’s enduring place in popular culture. While tracing the chronology of Monroe’s life, the exhibition interweaves her story with the ways in which artists and photographers have interpreted and presented this most elusive of icons. Photographs by Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and many others attempt to capture the fascination she exerted, while works by Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol demonstrate how her image transcended Hollywood to become the raw material of modern art. Mesmerising clips from her films provide a reminder of the charisma that first made her a star. More than six decades after her death in 1962, Monroe remains a singular presence in the collective imagination. Other celebrities have enjoyed their moment in the spotlight and faded, but her allure endures. There is the classic rags-to-riches narrative, shadowed by an inability to find fulfilment in success; the tension between her serious artistic ambitions and the carefully manufactured persona of the blonde bombshell; and the contradictions within that image itself, which fused an almost childlike vulnerability with an unmistakable eroticism. Famous for her unreliability on film sets, Monroe was also a consummate professional, collaborating closely with photographers and diligently studying the Stanislavski Method in an effort to be taken seriously as an actress. Perhaps it is these paradoxes that continue to fascinate. Monroe remains both a woman and a myth, a cultural symbol whose meaning seems endlessly open to reinterpretation. This superb exhibition does not attempt to solve the mystery. Instead, it reveals how that mystery was created, sustained and endlessly reinvented. Visitors are left with a renewed appreciation of both the woman behind the image and the extraordinary cultural phenomenon she became.
Rated: ★★★★
Reviewed by J.C.
Image: Marilyn Monroe 'Ballerina' sitting, 1954 by Milton H. Greene.
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