The Legend of Marilyn Monroe – Mondo – Arte.it

World – A hundred years of questions, questions. What remains of Marilyn Monroe A century from birth? The answer is not easy, because his image escapes, multiplies, reinventing himself. There National portrait gallery van London, on the occasion of the hundred years after birth (Norma Jeane Mortenson He was born in Los Angeles on June 6, 1926), the exhibition will devote them from 4 June to 6 September 2026 Marilyn Monroe: a portraitTransform the myth into a research field instead of in a nostalgic party. Photographers and artists who have depicted it, from Richard Avedon A Eve Arnold, Da Cecil Beaton A Bert Stern, there Andy Warhol In Pauline Boty they form a mosaic of appearance that never returns a unique face, but a continuous mirror game. Marilyn is never only Marilyn: it is projection, desire, cultural construction.

The photo He played a decisive role in his climb. Avedon saw a invented character in her, a double that comes to life for the goal. Eve Arnold sought the woman behind the icon, followed her on the set and away from the lights, grabbed hesitations and vulnerability. Bert Stern, with the famous The Last Sitting series, has put the last ambiguity of a body of a body and together wounded while Douglas Kirkland He accentuated theatricality, the exaggeration of glamor. Painting, on the other hand, has strengthened the myth: Warhol has transformed it into serial icon, infinite reproduction machine, while Pauline Boty and Richard Hamilton folded his image into reflections on femininity, objectification and consumerism.

Andy Warhol, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964), Acrylic and Serigraphic ink on linen, 101.6 x 101.6 cm. | Thanks to Christie

The cinema remains the place where Marilyn has made a legend. In Niagara Seems magnetic and threatening, in Gentlemen prefer blondes The order Diamonds are the best friend of a girl is a manifesto of an era, in How to marry a millionaire It is measured by irony next to Lauren Bacall E Betty Grable. The seven -year -old itching Delivery to the world The scene of De Witte Skirt raised by the metrowind, one of the most reproduced images in the history of cinema. In Bus stop tries to emancipate from stereotypical roles, in Some like it nice hot conquers with perfect comic times while The MassfitsHis latest film, reveals a tragic tension that coincides with his personal parable.

Why does Marilyn keep exercising? Because it has never been a uniform or predictable figure. She is the actress who is taken seriously and the diva playing with her image, the fragile woman who reads Joyce and the Pop icon that is consumed by the media, the star who smiles at the flash and the girl who finds no peace. His early death frozen all this in a tragic myth, but infinite reproductions prevented him from being relic: Marilyn is still alive because it does not stop generating interpretations.

The London exhibition is not limited to bringing photos and paintings together: it also organizes personal objects, clothing, scripts, books that were up to her. Apparently ordinary materials that acquire a different weight, because they tell another Marilyn, the one he read, studied, noticed. It is a counterpoint for Glamor: not only icon, but a woman with desires and intellectual ambitions.

And in 2026 it will not only be London to wonder about the myth. Los Angeles, a symbolic city of his career, will also organize a great retrospective: theAcademy Museum of Motion Pictures Will celebrate Marilyn Monroe with the exhibition Hollywood -iconBringing together original costumes, personal objects and archive materials. A path that follows his cinematographic parable where it was born, which strengthens the idea of ​​a centenary as a global opportunity to reconsider his inheritance. London and Los Angeles thus become two complementary Poles: a Marilyn Explorer as a visual icon through portraits and contemporary art, the other gives it back to the heart of the cinema that made it a legend.

Review Marilyn today means that you measure yourself with the contradictions of our time. The culture of the image that you have embodied has become our daily life: self -construction, public exposure, hidden vulnerability. Perhaps this is the reason why we don’t stop, because in that face we still recognize the unsolved knots of celebrity and desire. Marilyn was many things, and all together: actress, body, myth, tragedy, artwork. A century later he continues to escape us. And it is precisely in this elusiveness that his immortality is lurking.

Marilyn Monroe, photo by Sam Sam Shaw, Courte Shaw Family Archives – Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles