Exhibitions

Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait

London, United Kingdom

Marilyn Monroe was not just photographed. She helped create one of the most powerful images of the 20th century — and then spent a lifetime trying to be seen beyond it.

Marilyn Monroe, by Cecil Beaton

Image credit

© Cecil Beaton Archive / Condé Nast. Marilyn Monroe, by Cecil Beaton, 22 February 1956

Meet the artist

Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas, James Gill, Rosalyn Drexler, Audrey Flack, Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, André de Dienes, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Milton Greene, Sam Shaw, Richard Avedon and George Barris.

The Movement

Photo

ArtLovers Tip

Stand in front of one image of Marilyn and ask: who is really directing this moment — the photographer, the camera, the audience, or Marilyn herself? The power of this exhibition is that it turns a familiar icon into a more complex question: how does a woman become unforgettable without disappearing inside the image the world wants from her?

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Celebrate what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday! Portrait photography, Hollywood image-making, fashion photography, celebrity culture, Pop Art and contemporary portraiture. This exhibition looks at Monroe not only as a screen icon, but as a collaborator in the construction of her own image — someone who understood the camera, performance, desire and public myth with extraordinary precision.

Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait follows the life, career and legacy of Monroe through portraits made by major photographers and artists across the 20th and 21st centuries.

You’re watching:

  • Norma Jeane becoming Marilyn Monroe
  • Hollywood glamour as performance, not accident
  • Portraits that move between vulnerability, seduction, control and myth
  • Photographs by some of the defining image-makers of the modern era
  • Artworks by Warhol, Boty, Dumas and others showing how Monroe became a visual language far beyond cinema
  • A cultural icon whose image was endlessly reproduced, desired, interpreted and misunderstood

The exhibition asks you to look twice: first at the icon everyone knows, then at the person and creative intelligence behind the image.

Worth the trip

Especially if you love photography, cinema, Pop Art, fashion, celebrity culture or women who shaped their own mythology.

Monroe matters because her image became one of the most recognizable in modern visual culture. But the stronger reading here is not “Marilyn as victim” or “Marilyn as sex symbol.” It is Marilyn as an active image-maker — a performer who knew how to work with photographers, poses, light, costume and persona. The National Portrait Gallery foregrounds her collaborative role and creative agency in image-making.

At the National Portrait Gallery, where the central question is always who gets remembered and how, this exhibition feels perfectly placed. It is not just about Monroe’s beauty. It is about authorship, fame, performance and the cost of becoming an image.

How to experience it

Don’t move through it as a fan wall of famous images — look for control, repetition and performance.

Compare early portraits of Norma Jeane with later images of Marilyn Monroe.

Notice how photographers shape her, but also how she shapes the photograph back.

Look at Warhol and Pop Art as evidence of what happens when a person becomes an icon.

Ask what each portrait reveals — and what it still protects.

London, United Kingdom

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