The National Portrait Gallery is set to bring together the most revealing and enduring depictions of Marilyn Monroe through the decades, highlighting her role in establishing herself as a iconic figure in American memory.
, the pictures were taken amid the pink stucco and California palms of Hotel Bel-Air, where Monroe had lived as a fledgling starlet under contract to Columbia Pictures.
There, less than two months before her death,photographer Bert Stern installed a makeshift studio across Suite 261 and Bungalow 96, with Ella Fitzgerald on the record player, rails ofand Dom Pérignon 1953 on ice. Over three sessions, Stern shot more than 2,500 exposures, with Marilyn alternately posing nude save for various props – chiffon scarves, crucifix necklaces – and dressed in the likes of diaphanous gowns by Dior, her platinum curls teased into a chignon by Mr Kenneth.ran only the latter images, accompanied by a tribute to Monroe subsequently attributed to Joan Didion.
The news of Marilyn’s passing, the author wrote, had broken as the issue had gone to press, but “after the first shock of tragedy”, the magazine had “decided to publish the photographs in any case. For these were perhaps the only pictures of a new Marilyn Monroe – a Marilyn who showed outwardly the elegance and taste which we learned that she had instinctively.
” Her death,added, “brought a sense of personal loss to millions of people who never knew her. She has given them a warm delight, made them smile affectionately, laugh uproariously, love her to the point of caring deeply – often aggressively – about her private unhappiness. ”Sixty-four years on, that love still lingers; to quote Stern, Monroe may be “gone, but she is everywhere”, even now.
This month, the National Portrait Gallery’sbrings together the most revealing and enduring depictions of Marilyn through the decades, foregrounding the role Norma Jeane played in establishing herself as “the magnificent blond image in the American memory-stream”, from marking up Richard Avedon’s contact sheets to embodying Clara Bow for Milton H Greene’s lens. As her acting coach Miss Collier once told Truman Capote: “What has – this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence – could never surface on the stage.
It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight; only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. ” Fashion took longer than most to understand that poetry.
If Marilyn wore Dior suits accessorised “with fresh red roses at the plunged neckline” and slept nude save for a spritz of Chanel No 5, she never established a working relationship with a Parisian house in her lifetime, her look deemed more “pop” than Rue de la Paix. It’s only from the ’90s onwards that designers really began to tap into the power of her iconography, starting with Yves Saint Laurent’s couture offering for spring 1990, when the designer paid homage to creative influences ranging from Marilyn to Marcel Proust.
In the years since, brands ranging from Comme des Garçons to Christopher Kane, Mugler to Marc Jacobs have followed suit, endlessly reinterpreting Monroe’s Travilla costumes forA 34-year-old Andy Warhol had just started playing around with screenprinting at The Factory when Monroe passed away in 1962. As caught off guard by her death as the rest of the world, he lifted a Gene Kornman shot of Marilyn taken to promote 1953’sfrom his news-clipping archive, making the first of his Monroe-inspired works, “Gold Marilyn Monroe”, which recast the 20th Century Fox starlet as a Byzantine saint.
For spring/summer 1991, Gianni Versace channelled Warhol’s portraits in turn, transferring his silkscreen images of Monroe and James Dean onto rhinestone-studded dresses, worn by Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista down a 15-metre-long marble runway in Fiera Milano. Tellingly, when Donatella designed her tribute collection to Gianni for spring/summer 2018, it’s one of the key prints she chose to revive.
, McQueen’s autumn/winter 2005 collection riffed on the frigid glamour of Tippi Hedren, the camp embellishments of London’s Pearly Kings and Queens and the fishtail gowns of Charles James – yet the final look was a spangled tribute to the Jean Louis dress Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr President” to JFK at Madison Square Garden. All soufflé gauze and iridescent beading, the original design was expressly conceived to give the illusion of nudity.
Asreported after the Democratic fundraiser: “Onto the stage sashayed Marilyn Monroe, attired in a great bundle of white mink. Arriving at the lectern, she turned and swept the furs from her shoulders. A slight gasp rose from the audience before it was realised that she was really wearing a skin-tight, flesh-toned gown.
” Marilyn’s first appearance at the Garden in 1955 was even more of a spectacle, with Monroe riding in on an elephant painted fuchsia as part of a circus-themed charity gala organised by director Mike Todd. Marilyn’s influence has permeated Dolce & Gabbana’s sensual collections almost since the house’s founding , but their most overt tribute came in autumn/winter 2009, when they sent exaggerated crinolines printed with Monroe’s studio portraits down the runway.
Said images were in large part what cemented her fame; as photographer Philippe Halsman once noted, “While the movie studios had yet refused to make this girl their star, the still photographers had made her theirs. Through them she had become better known than many actresses who had been on the screen 10 years or more. ” In part, that was down to her modelling experience.
In 1945, aged just 19, Monroe had signed with the Emmeline Snively Blue Book Agency, and it was there that she learnt how to pose in shoots promoting the likes of DC-6 aeroplanes. Yet Marilyn was also naturally attuned to the camera.
“She understood photography,” Avedon once said, “and she also understood what makes a great photograph. Not the technique, but the content. ”A fortnight before her death, George Barris became one of the last people to take Marilyn’s portrait. The pair had grown close on the set ofin 1954, with Monroe asking him to shoot her visual autobiography – starting with relaxed pictures taken in the golden light of her native California in the summer of ’62.
For one of their final sittings, Marilyn posed for Barris on the coast of Santa Monica while wearing a geometric-patterned cardigan designed in Mexico.
“That particular beach,” Barris later recalled, “brought back memories of her childhood, when she spent many wonderful days there with her mother and her friends. ” For autumn/winter 2015, MaxMara sent a recreation of the jumper down the runway, later modelled by Gigi Hadid in the ensuing campaign – with the collection also nodding to Marilyn’s more relaxed style while taking extension courses in Western art at UCLA.
Monroe wore Ferragamo’s shoes on-screen and off; it was the Florentine house that made both the vampy stilettos in, with Marilyn personally visiting the designer’s Park Avenue boutique to purchase her preferred court shoes . When Maximilian Davis made his debut at Ferragamo in spring/summer 2023, his inaugural collection – particularly Look 31 – was inspired by a pair of bright-red, crystal-studded heels designed for Marilyn’s turn in 1953’s, reportedly worn to perform “Two Little Girls From Little Rock” with Jane Russell.
Auctioned by Christie’s for $48,300 as part of The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe sale in 1999, the original pair now rests in the Ferragamo archive.
Marilyn Monroe National Portrait Gallery Art Exhibition
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