Inside Marilyn Monroe’s image machine

 

MATTHEW D' ANCONA

A triumphant National Portrait Gallery exhibition shows how the star created her own myth

“She is gone but she is everywhere”: so said the fashion photographer Bert Stern, who shot a series of images of Marilyn Monroe for Vogue shortly before her death on August 4, 1962, aged only 36. The posthumous cultural ubiquity that he identified is both opportunity and challenge for an exhibition such as the NPG’s, which marks the 100^th anniversary of her birth.

In the first gallery – as if to confront the problem at the very start – a faded monochrome photobooth self-portrait of Norma Jeane Baker in around 1940 faces Andy Warhol’s Nine Multicolored Marilyns (Reversal Series) 1979-1986, which are screenprint reversals in acrylic paint of the Pop artist’s earlier silkscreen versions of Gene Korman’s iconic publicity still of Monroe for Niagara (1953). It is an image of an image of an image.

The response to this dilemma of co-curators Rosie Broadley and Georgia Atienza is to centre Monroe’s agency; her insistence, as the former writes in the exhibition catalogue, on being “an active partner in the creation of an extraordinary body of photographs.”

Though broadly chronological, this terrific show is defined by a series of such collaborations: with Cecil Beaton, Eve Arnold, Sam Shaw, André de Dienes, Richard Avedon, Philippe Halsman and many more. Avedon recalled how she would “pore over the contact sheets for hours.”

When de Dienes photographed her on Malibu beach in 1946 – the year before her first on-screen bit part in Sol M Wurtzel’s Dangerous Years – she evoked, in his words, “[a]n entire spectrum of life, depicting happiness, pensiveness, introspection, serenity, sadness, torment, distress – I even asked her to show me what ‘death’ looked like in her imagination. She threw a blanket over her head; that was how she interpreted it.”

Sixteen years later, when death was no longer a performance on Californian sands but an imminent reality, she was still sending back contact sheets to Stern, crossing out the images she disliked.

Many accounts of Monroe’s life are structured around her often toxic relationships with men – Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, the Kennedys, studio moguls – to the extent that Andrew Dominik’s controversial movie Blonde (2022), starring Ana de Armas, was essentially an artefact of the #MeToo era. The NPG’s exhibition does not gloss over the male gaze or its impact upon Monroe (“A sex symbol becomes a thing, I just hate to be a thing.”)

But it devotes more space to her individuality, intellectual ambition – she read widely, studied “The Method” with Lee and Paula Strasberg, and became immersed in psychoanalysis – and yearning for creative pilgrimage. Halsman’s shot of her in jeans, working out with dumbbells in 1952, is a million miles removed from, say, Shaw’s legendary image of her, taken two years later, in a billowing white dress on the set of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Instinctively or otherwise, Monroe anticipated the postmodern world and the age of Instagram, in which the self would be fragmented but could be redefined by rummaging in the dressing-up box of available identities: creation would be curation. As she observed: “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person.” Yet, as this exhibition shows triumphantly, her legacy is so much greater than a hall of a billion mirrors.

THE NEW WORLD