More than six decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe is still the most written-about and mythologised star in Hollywood history. To mark the centenary of the actor’s birth, the National Portrait Gallery is putting on a show of photographs, prints and paintings that capture Marilyn up close (4 June–6 September). Photographs taken during her lifetime – from her earliest work as a pin-up model to previously unseen shots taken for Life magazine the day before she died in August 1962 – remind us how she commanded the camera with seeming effortlessness. But the curators are just as interested in Monroe’s afterlife, and present not only the best-known works that helped immortalise her, such as Warhol’s prints and Pauline Boty’s The Only Blonde in the World (1963), but also more recent works such as Marlene Dumas’s Dead Marilyn (2008), an unnerving painting of a real autopsy photograph of the star’s corpse.
Find out more from the National Portrait Gallery’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
