Marilyn Monroe Centenary Exhibition Opens in London
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- The National Portrait Gallery, London opens "Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait" on the centenary of her birth (1 June 1926), running until 6 September 2026, with portraits by photographers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
- Marilyn Monroe's career began in 1946 when documentary photographer David Conover, shooting her at a munitions factory, suggested a modeling career, leading to her first contract with 20th Century Fox and a name change from Norma Jeane.
- Eve Arnold photographed Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses on Long Island in 1955 during a stay with literary friends Hedda and Norman Rosten, at an abandoned children's playground near Mount Sinai.
- Andy Warhol's "Green Marilyn" (1962) anchors the exhibition's afterlife section, part of the artist's famous cycle that, per the gallery, "powerfully evokes the disjuncture of her public persona and private tragedy."
- Pauline Boty is represented by two works — "Colour Her Gone" (1962) and "The Only Blonde in the World" (1963) — among the artistic responses to Monroe's death and the outpouring of grief that followed.
- Cecil Beaton's 1956 bromide print sits alongside the gallery's note that same year Monroe produced Bus Stop, married playwright Arthur Miller, converted to Judaism, and cast Laurence Olivier to direct The Prince and the Showgirl in London.
- Monroe's final Life magazine interview in 1962, shot by Allan Grant in her newly purchased Brentwood hacienda, produced the quote: "I've been on the movie industry for 15 years and I never once felt like a star. If I was a star, it was the people who made me one."
Why it matters: The National Portrait Gallery frames Monroe as a serious artistic subject rather than a Hollywood artifact, pairing canonical photographs (Beaton, Arnold, de Dienes) with Pop Art responses (Warhol, Boty) that grapple with the gap between her screen presence and personal unhappiness. Running only through 6 September 2026, it lands as the defining London tribute for her centenary year and a rare chance to see her image-making process laid out by the photographers and artists who defined it.
