National Portrait Gallery Recasts Marilyn Monroe at 100 as Architect of Her Own Image
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jun 1
National Portrait Gallery Recasts Marilyn Monroe at 100 as Architect of Her Own Image
5 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jun 1
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery on June 4, framing Monroe’s 1960s photographs as evidence that she actively directed, edited and vetoed how she was seen.
1962 pool-shoot stories from photographer Lawrence Schiller anchor that case: Monroe swam to better light despite directions, proposed the nude setup herself and even cut up color negatives she disliked.
Curator Rosie Broadley says the show challenges the long-dominant image of Monroe as a passive “blond bombshell,” arguing she exercised creative agency even when major photographers held the camera.
That control over still images contrasted with her off-camera decline: weeks after the shoot, Fox fired the 36-year-old and sued her for $750,000; two months later she died of a drug overdose.
Timed to what would have been her 100th birthday, the exhibition runs through Sept. 6 and casts Monroe’s legacy less as studio-made myth than as self-fashioned performance.
If Marilyn Monroe was asserting such control, why did her life and career collapse soon after?
Was Monroe a pioneering artist controlling her destiny or a tragic victim of the Hollywood machine?