{"id":681953,"date":"2026-06-03T14:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T14:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/681953\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T14:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T14:14:14","slug":"marilyn-monroe-at-the-national-portrait-gallery-review-the-secrets-that-the-pictures-dont-tell-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/681953\/","title":{"rendered":"Marilyn Monroe at the National Portrait Gallery review: The secrets that the pictures don\u2019t tell us"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Marilyn Monroe<\/a>, Death Valley\u201d reads one of the photo captions in the National Portrait Gallery<\/a>\u2019s new exhibition about the most famous dead woman in history<\/a>. The image shows a 19-year-old Monroe, her hair brown and in curls, her nose not yet tweaked through rhinoplasty, ascending a rocky cliff edge for the photographer Andr\u00e9 de Dienes. In another by De Dienes, taken too in 1945, Monroe sits barefoot in the middle of a desert highway. A vehicle speeds downwind along the next lane, meaning she\u2019s directly in the path of any car hurtling towards her. Or is De Dienes\u2019s camera the car in this scenario? Are we?<\/p>\n

It feels a bit on-the-nose, doesn\u2019t it? Death Valley, California. A woman scaling something impenetrable. That same woman grinning prettily in the face of certain doom. If the NPG\u2019s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait does anything, it demonstrates how remarkably easy Monroe\u2019s life was to narrativise<\/a>, and how easily a little bit of pop-psychology can be applied to every facet of her existence<\/a>. Norma Jeane Mortensen became Norma Jeane Baker became Marilyn Monroe, as if each new reinvention would fix what was broken. She never knew her father (his identity was only proven, through DNA testing, in 2022), so called each one of her husbands \u201cDaddy\u201d. Letters to the father of her third husband Arthur Miller, some of which are on display here, show that she called him \u201cDaddy\u201d, too. The Spanish-style bungalow she died in \u2013 where she accidentally overdosed, or killed herself, or was killed, depending on whom you believe \u2013 had a Latin motto inscribed on a plaque outside the front door: \u201cCursum perficio\u201d, or \u201cHere ends my journey\u201d. Even Ryan Murphy wouldn\u2019t dare try to get away with that one.<\/p>\n

Scholars and authors, artists and publicists, studio heads and Reddit sleuths, tabloid hacks, Marilyn herself \u2013 all had a go at shaping and tweaking and projecting the story of Marilyn Monroe, in ways that are both thrilling and exhausting. It\u2019s 100 years since she became (briefly) earthbound \u2013 she died in 1962 at the age of 36<\/a> \u2013 and we\u2019re still no closer to a definitive word on her, nor much closer to putting her to bed. We\u2019ve seen photos of her breasts, read copies of her medical records, clicked quickly off blurry snapshots of her corpse when they came up on Google. In its selection of images and the stories behind them, the National Portrait Gallery has attempted to give Monroe back her agency. It aims to reframe her as the architect of her own life story, rather than the subject of it, or the victim. It\u2019s admirable. Occasionally contradictory. Perhaps fruitless.<\/p>\n

\"PaulinePauline Boty\u2019s \u2018Colour Her Gone\u2019 (1962) (Pauline Boty Estate\/Reproduction by permission of Wolverhampton Art Gallery\/Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and the Friends of Wolverhampton Arts and Heritage)<\/p>\n

The exhibition unfolds more or less chronologically, from Monroe\u2019s early modelling days to the nude calendar she posed for (images for which were later bought by Hugh Hefner and published against her will in Playboy), to her career in Hollywood. Men are largely avoided \u2013 there\u2019s no mention, to my knowledge, of her second husband Joe DiMaggio, or the affair with John F Kennedy that played so heavily into her final months, or the conspiracies that swirl around her death. An entire room is devoted to the artists she played posthumous muse to: a negative image of her face is replicated over and over in Andy Warhol\u2019s famous multicoloured screen prints; she is radiant at the centre of swirling, ominous greys in works by Pauline Boty, who herself met a tragic, early demise just four years after Monroe; she doesn\u2019t appear at all in Joseph Cornell\u2019s tribute, in which a celestial being overlooks a broken chain.<\/p>\n

We are told of Monroe\u2019s rich attachments to particular photographers. We see Cecil Beaton\u2019s off-the-cuff glamour portraits, Sam Shaw\u2019s hazy street shots, Eve Arnold\u2019s wounded candids from the set of Monroe\u2019s final finished film, 1961\u2019s The Misfits. Her eyes are sleepy and glazed from drug addiction; her body, barely clinging on, is slumped in the back of a pickup truck. Philippe Halsman asked her, as he did many of his subjects, to leap into the air for his camera; all the better \u2013 he believed \u2013 to see a person\u2019s true self. He wasn\u2019t sold at first. \u201cMarilyn,\u201d he later recalled telling her, \u201ctry to express your character a little more.\u201d The photos are pure joy, and are beamed against a wall by a projector.<\/p>\n

\"MarilynMarilyn Monroe reads \u2018Ulysses\u2019, as captured by Eve Arnold (Eve Arnold Estate)<\/p>\n

Monroe studied her own contact sheets, vetoing pictures she disliked and selecting her personal favourites, cultivating her image in a way that\u2019s routine today but was unusual back then. Much is made of how she craved \u201can honest picture\u201d, which seems a bit antithetical for a woman so endlessly self-editing.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonesty\u201d, when it comes to Marilyn Monroe, has always been up for debate. Arnold\u2019s earlier photographs of her, taken a few years before The Misfits, are often framed as being particularly truthful, and reflective of the smarts underpinning the actor\u2019s early screen image of a \u201cdumb blonde\u201d. But I\u2019ve always found the shots of Monroe reading Ulysses in a children\u2019s playground, or studying Michael Chekhov\u2019s To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting while reclining on Arthur Miller\u2019s couch, to be a little clumsy. Not because Monroe was stupid, or an unsophisticated reader, but because these \u201ccandid\u201d snapshots feel artificial by design \u2013 like those paparazzi pictures of fledgling pop queen Addison Rae walking the streets of Hollywood reading Britney Spears\u2019 memoir, or when a celebrity \u201cdiscreetly\u201d shows off their engagement ring while shopping for groceries. Even if they\u2019re rooted in reality, something is off.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s a feeling driven home by the sheer volume of images here in which Monroe is performing. Photographs I\u2019ve seen over and over through the years, in books, magazines or on Pinterest boards, are suddenly transformed when contextualised by the curator\u2019s captions. Milton H Greene\u2019s images of her, taken on the Fox backlot in 1954, in which her face seems so bereft, were actually of Monroe in character: as \u201ca French peasant\u201d, \u201ca London girl\u201d, \u201ca hooker\u201d. Likewise, De Dienes\u2019s images of Monroe wrapped in an old army blanket, her face stripped of makeup, were a product of Monroe being asked to embody a variety of emotions. \u201cAn entire spectrum of life,\u201d De Dienes recalls, in a caption. \u201cHappiness, pensiveness, introspection, serenity, sadness, torment, distress. I even asked her to show me \u2018death\u2019 … She threw a blanket over her head.\u201d These shoots are all a bit of a show, their meanings massaged, exaggerated or entirely made up over the decades.<\/p>\n

\"MarilynMarilyn Monroe, as captured by Andr\u00e9 de Dienes in 1946 (Andr\u00e9 de Dienes\/MUUS Collection)<\/p>\n

Ironically, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait seems to say that if you want to truly understand Monroe, looking at pictures of her isn\u2019t the way to do it. Instead, these images are myth machines, artistic inspiration, visual demo reels for the dramatic career Monroe craved. Everything on display fits into whichever narrative you want for her: the cursed beauty; the feminist pioneer; the harlot. Truth is less of a factor, perhaps because we\u2019ll never know it. The stories we make up in our heads about her are just so much more satisfying.<\/p>\n

\u2018Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait\u2019 runs at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery from 4 June to 6 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-681953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}