Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera.
Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling.
‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.)
Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself
Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators (Sam Shaw, Bruno Bernard) who shot Monroe over months and years. Here she’s fully glammed for a magazine cover; here, casual and windswept on a beach. Some images are familiar from a thousand reproductions, others are on show here for the first time.
Going beyond photography (and a few personal artefacts: shoes, dresses, letters), the show also includes paint and collage portraits of Monroe by Willem de Kooning, Richard Hamilton, Pauline Boty and – of course – Andy Warhol. We watch as she goes from movie star to metaphor: her face is distorted, replicated, reflected and remixed, until it’s hard to remember there was ever a real person behind it.
The show is an onslaught of images – gorgeous, brilliant, occasionally disturbing – of Marilyn Monroe, the troubled icon. In that regard, and in staking her claim as an active participant in how she was perceived during her lifetime, it’s a success.
But Monroe is so chameleonic, so charming, so conscious of audience and image that – between star and photographer – we only get an occasional glimpse of the human behind the pictures. Even in the many candid shots here, it feels like the star is performing: is she really finishing the last page of Ulysses, or just messing with our clichéd assumptions about dumb blondes?
In some ways, the most powerful picture in the show is the very first: the only portrait here that was made with no one in mind but Marilyn herself. It’s a tiny photobooth self-portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, a teenager dreaming of the fame that would kill her – and make her live forever.
