When I was a teenager, Marilyn was on half the bedroom walls of people I knew, boys and girls alike. I’d like to pretend we were drawn to the brilliance, the wit, the tragedy, but that would be a lie. We wanted a pretty face on the wall and hers was the prettiest we could think of. Nothing more complicated than that. Complications came later.
I was reminded of this recently at the National Portrait Gallery, whereMarilyn Monroe: A Portraitmarks the centenary of her birth and where visitors arrived already feeling like they knew her. They filled in the blanks as they went: what was going on in Monroe’s life when the picture was taken, what she must have been thinking, if the sadness in her eyes was already there. Everyone seemed to know him so well. Everyone always has.
Perhaps the difficulty with Marilyn is that none of us come to her empty-handed. We arrive carrying our version of her. Smiling Marilyn. Lonely Marilyn. Damaged Marilyn. Ambitious Marilyn. The great comic actress. Woman trapped by fame. The woman who owned it. We want images to confirm what we already believe.
Curated around more than 200 works, the exhibition is largely chronological and refreshingly unencumbered by theory. It begins with the young Norma Jeane, before she became Marilyn, and moves through Monroe’s career through the photographers, artists and image makers who helped build her public identity. There are famous masterpieces and unexpected discoveries, contact sheets and magazine covers, paintings, publicity materials and personal possessions. Rather than arguing for a single interpretation, the exhibition gathers perspectives and allows contradictions to sit side by side.
The first room belongs mainly to Philippe Halsman and his abundant photographs of Monroe dancing. It’s hard not to enjoy. There she is, airy, laughing, game for him, somehow funny and glorious. Nearby, Halsman and Salvador Dalí transform him into Chairman Mao, a genius touch that immediately establishes Monroe not just as a person but as an image. Long before Warhol began reproducing Marilyn as a cultural icon, Dalí and Halsman already realized how endlessly she could be recreated while remaining instantly recognizable.
The room I returned to was the one dedicated to her early years, much of it given to André de Dienes – one of the first to photograph her. They met in 1945, when she was an unknown model still using her given name; for a while they were lovers, for a while engaged. Much later, after fame, after her death, he went back through his photos from those first sessions and marked them by hand. One page reads: “Norma Jeane 1944 (The Future Marilyn Monroe).” What moved me was not the phrase but the moment he wrote it. An old man, flipping through pictures of a girl he had loved, writing them with everything to come. By then, the future he points to was already complete. Those early photographs are fascinating in part because they invite the most dangerous kind of viewing. It’s almost impossible not to look to them for clues. The tilt of the head, the guarded smile, the girlish glow. The future is there, because we know it is there. She didn’t.
And yet, much of the exhibition’s pleasure is rougher than that, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Again and again, I stopped in front of images I already loved: Cecil Beatons, Milton Greenes, portraits of Sam Shaw from the years she was married to Arthur Miller. I did exactly what I had done as a teenager. I watched because she was beautiful. Bigger questions can wait.
Eve Arnold’s photographs are as outstanding as ever. One shows Monroe from behind standing next to a bathroom mirror, her skirt clung to her waist, her arms raised in her hair. We see almost nothing of her face. Arnold and Monroe knew each other for years, and the photos hold a closeness that few other photographers have managed to capture. Not the sincerity of a stolen shot, but something Monroe seems to have allowed, even wanted. She is not performing for the target as much as she trusts her. Like the best pictures here, it leaves room for uncertainty.
Richard Avedon’s famous 1957 portrait may be my favorite image of Monroe ever taken. I’ve seen it many times, but I still felt a pull towards it in the gallery. It remains surprising because it feels so modern. Years before frailty became a form of celebrity currency, Avedon presented Monroe without the dazzling smile and passion that had become part of her public image. She appears pensive, confused, somewhere out of reach of the camera. Not exactly sad. Just present.
Monroe’s greatest gift may not have been in front of the camera at all. To me, she is more alive on screen – moving, singing, laughing, transforming herself moment by moment, so alive that watching her can still feel amazing. And yet, surrounded by her in these galleries, I felt something completely different. The camera captures something that the moving image lets slip: a quality of presence that no frame of film quite captures. Room after room, I didn’t want to look away.
The paintings left me cold – almost all of them – but I have to be fair, because their presence is the point: a show about Monroe’s afterlife must reckon with what the artists did to her. And mostly they weren’t painting Monroe at all. They were painting the idea of her, or fame, or themselves, which is their right, but it still left me cold. Pauline Boty’s portraits are candid, the reverence clear in them; however to me they feel lifeless. Warhol’s, the most recognizable in the show, is where she completely disappears: an icon still gilded and repeated until the woman becomes the surface, the product, belonging to anyone. The One That Stops Me is by Marlene DumasMarilyn deadpainted from the photograph taken at the mortuary. It seemed unseemly, an intrusion on a woman who could no longer refuse to be seen, and yet I keep returning it, unsure if the discomfort is a failure on my part or intentional. It’s the only painting in the room I can’t get rid of.
Surprisingly, one of the most moving things in the exhibition is not a photograph or a painting at all, but a pair of white shoes displayed in a glass case. Scratched, creased and visibly worn, they undid me a bit. The accompanying label explains that Monroe became such a devoted customer of Salvatore Ferragamo that the company kept a custom shoe mold for her, allowing her to reorder favorite styles. It’s a small, surprisingly charming detail. The woman who became one of the most recognizable faces in history turns out to have had the same habit as many others: finding something she liked and sticking with it. Behind all those rooms of images, here was something that belonged to her. The skin had softened around her legs. The heels were worn from use. Looking at them, I wasn’t thinking about the icon Marilyn Monroe, but about someone who got dressed in the morning, rushed to a studio, walked around a room, lived an ordinary life. Unlike photographs and paintings, shoes offered no interpretation. They made no argument. They proved she was here.
The last pictures have always bothered me. Knowing what comes next, every expression risks becoming evidence, every glance a clue. Some viewers see tragedy in her eyes. I’m not sure anymore if that’s really there or if we project it back through history. However, there is a noticeable absence in some of those images that I don’t feel in Avedon’s portrait from five years ago. The difference isn’t happiness versus sadness—it’s presence versus vacancy. The one exception stopped me: Monroe in a black dress, in profile, her head resting on her hand. Something in him has returned.
In the last room, I was thinking less about the woman herself than about our endless desire to explain Marilyn to her. Biographers, artists and audiences have been doing much the same for decades. We seem unwilling to accept it as it appears before us. We need it to mean something bigger. The exhibition’s most striking achievement may be that it resists all such conclusions.
I had wondered if Monroe meant anything to my daughter’s generation, or just mine and the ones before that. Later that evening my nineteen year old self sat down with me and the catalog and we spent much longer on it than I expected. She turned page after page, lingering over the pictures, gripped by the same thing I had been at her age: weakness, “crazy beauty.” She passed over the paintings without a glance. It was the pictures that kept her, where something of the real woman is still waiting to be met.
(Further reading: What does the picture mean now?)
