Review: Marylin Monroe at the NPG
September 20, 2026Review: Marylin Monroe. There are few faces in modern culture that seem to belong to everybody. Marilyn Monroe’s is one of them. It has been reproduced so many times that it can feel almost impossible to see the woman herself beneath the blonde hair, red lips and knowing smile. The National Portrait Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, staged to mark what would have been the star’s 100th birthday, takes on that problem directly. Rather than attempting to discover the supposedly “real” Marilyn hidden behind the famous image, it asks how that image was made, who helped create it, and, crucially, how much of it belonged to Monroe herself.
It is an ambitious idea for an exhibition about someone who has already been photographed to exhaustion. More than 20 photographers are represented, including Cecil Beaton, Eve Arnold, André de Dienes, Milton Greene, Richard Avedon, Sam Shaw and George Barris. There are also paintings and prints by artists including Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas and Audrey Flack. Alongside the photographs are personal objects, scripts and clothes, intended to bring the woman behind the image a little closer.
Review: Marylin Monroe
The most interesting thing about the exhibition is that it does not present Monroe as a passive object of the male gaze. Instead, she emerges as a remarkably sophisticated collaborator in the construction of her own public identity.
That becomes clear almost immediately. The exhibition begins with Norma Jeane, the brunette young woman before Marilyn Monroe became a household name. Seeing these early photographs is surprisingly affecting. There is already something highly composed about her. She was not simply an attractive young woman who happened to be discovered and transformed by Hollywood. She understood the camera and what people wanted from it. More importantly, she understood what she could make the camera give her.
The transformation from Norma Jeane to Marilyn is therefore less straightforward than the familiar story suggests. There was certainly an enormous amount of manipulation involved. Her hair was changed. Her appearance was carefully constructed. Hollywood taught her how to pose, move and present herself. Yet the exhibition makes a persuasive case that Monroe was not merely shaped by other people. She participated in her own transformation with extraordinary intelligence.
Collaboration
Review: Marylin Monroe. Some of the best photographs are those in which this collaboration becomes visible. André de Dienes’ early pictures have an immediacy that many of the later publicity images lack. Monroe looks young, but she does not look inexperienced. She experiments with expressions and poses, apparently trying out different versions of herself. The pictures are evidence of a woman learning how to perform being photographed.
Later, the relationship between photographer and subject becomes even more fascinating. Milton Greene’s photographs, for example, reveal a Monroe who could be playful, glamorous, sensual or unexpectedly serious. Eve Arnold’s photographs are particularly valuable because they often seem to capture her away from the most obvious machinery of celebrity. Monroe could still be Marilyn while appearing vulnerable, distracted or simply tired.
This is where the exhibition is at its strongest. It encourages us to stop thinking of Marilyn as a single image.
There is a tendency to talk about Monroe as though she was either the glamorous sex symbol or the troubled woman underneath. The two are often presented as opposing identities, as though one must be fake for the other to be authentic. The exhibition complicates that idea. Monroe could be performing and still be herself. She could understand the mechanics of glamour and genuinely enjoy them. She could know that she was being looked at while retaining a degree of control over how she was seen. That is a much more interesting portrait of her than the familiar tragedy narrative.
Review: Marylin Monroe
The sheer number of photographs can, however, become a problem. Marilyn was extraordinarily photogenic, but even Marilyn Monroe cannot sustain quite this many smiles, pouts, tilted heads and perfectly arranged blonde curls indefinitely. There comes a point when the repetition becomes almost oppressive. The viewer begins to notice the sameness of the image rather than its variations.
This is also where the exhibition’s central argument becomes slightly uncomfortable. If Monroe was so successful at controlling her image, what happens to everything that could not be controlled?
The exhibition is relatively restrained when it comes to the more painful parts of Monroe’s life. Her difficult childhood, relationships, struggles with the studio system and emotional problems are present, but they are not allowed to dominate the narrative. This is understandable. There have been countless biographies and documentaries devoted to the darker side of Monroe’s story. Another exhibition simply cataloguing her suffering would add little. Yet there are moments when one longs for a little more contradiction.
Complicated
Review: Marylin Monroe. One of the most moving aspects of Monroe’s story is the gap between her extraordinary ability to project happiness and the sadness that sometimes appears in photographs taken away from the official publicity machine. Cecil Beaton’s photographs, in particular, contain something more complicated. The famous face is still there, but it does not always seem to be entirely available to the viewer.
The later photographs are even more affecting. By the time we reach the images taken in 1962, there is an unavoidable sense of time running out. Monroe was only 36 when she died, yet the photographs at the end of the exhibition carry the weight of an entire lifetime.
This is where the exhibition’s emphasis on image-making begins to feel almost tragic. Monroe spent her life becoming increasingly recognisable. Her face became a commodity, a fantasy and eventually a symbol that was larger than the woman herself. After her death, the process continued without her. Artists appropriated her image. Photographers reinterpreted her. Advertisers and fashion designers borrowed her appearance. Warhol turned her face into one of the defining images of twentieth-century art.
Review: Marylin Monroe
The exhibition is particularly good on this afterlife. Warhol’s Marilyns are so familiar that it is easy to forget how strange the idea originally was: a living woman transformed into a repeated commercial image, then transformed again into art. Pauline Boty’s work also reminds us that female artists were responding to Monroe in ways that were quite different from the male artists who repeatedly treated her as an object of fascination.
By the final rooms, therefore, Marilyn is no longer simply a Hollywood actress. She has become a kind of cultural language.
That may be the exhibition’s greatest achievement. It does not really tell us who Marilyn Monroe “was”. Perhaps nobody can. Instead, it demonstrates how many different Marilyns have existed: Norma Jeane the young woman, Marilyn the actress, Marilyn the sex symbol, Marilyn the businesswoman, Marilyn the photographer’s collaborator, Marilyn the troubled celebrity, and finally Marilyn the endlessly reproduced cultural icon.
The exhibition leaves you with a strange feeling. You have seen Marilyn everywhere, and yet you still want to see her again. That may be the most convincing evidence of all of her extraordinary power in front of a camera.
