Timed to mark the centenary of Marilyn’s birth, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is a landmark exhibition that brings together paintings, photographs and rarely seen material to discover the real woman behind the most recognisable face in 20th-century popular culture, the woman who understood, perhaps better than anyone, how images could both build and imprison a life.
That is what makes this exhibition feel so substantial. The National Portrait Gallery is not simply presenting Marilyn as Hollywood relic, tragic blonde or Pop fantasy. It is foregrounding her as an active participant in her own making: a performer who worked the camera with intelligence, instinct and control, and who would direct shoots and veto pictures she disliked.
This matters because Marilyn’s image has long suffered from overexposure and under-reading. We all know the platinum hair, the half-smile, the white dress over the subway grate. But the enduring fascination lies in the tension between surface and self-possession. The gallery’s decision to frame her through portraiture works. Portraiture is never just about likeness; it is about power, projection and what remains elusive, left to the imagination of the viewer.
Left: Marilyn Monroe, 1946, by André De Dienes, © André de Dienes / MUUS Collection.
Middle: Marilyn Monroe (reading Ulysses by James Joyce), Mount Sinai, Long Island, 1955, by Eve Arnold. © Eve Arnold Estate.
Right: Marilyn Monroe, 1962, by Allan Grant, © 1962 MM LLC (Photographs by Allan Grant).
The line-up alone is enough to suggest the scale of the undertaking. There are photographs by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Eve Arnold, André de Dienes, Philippe Halsman and Milton Greene, alongside works by Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty and James Gill. Warhol’s Marilyns, of course, remain the defining act of canonisation. As MoMA notes of Gold Marilyn Monroe, he based the work on a publicity still from Niagara, turning Monroe’s face into an icon suspended between celebrity culture and religious devotion. In other words, he embalmed Marilyn in modern myth.
Pauline Boty offers something more tender and more cutting. Her Colour Her Gone (1962), created in the wake of Marilyn’s death, actively subverts the sexualised male gaze. Thi oil-on-canvas masterpiece shifts the narrative away from Hollywood glamour to offer a deeply empathetic, woman-to-woman tribute. That is one of the strengths of the exhibition’s premise: it lets us see how different artists used Monroe to think about glamour, femininity, grief and fame itself.
Then there are the photographers who knew her in the round. Eve Arnold, for one, had a relationship built on trust. Marilyn came to see her in a pseudo-maternal role. Over a decade, Arnold photographed the star six times, capturing candid, naturalistic images that cut through the typical, male-dominated shots of the era. Milton Greene, too, was not a passing image-maker but a close collaborator whose archive describes years of friendship and repeated work together.
Left: Colour Her Gone, 1962, by Pauline Boty. © Pauline Boty Estate, Reproduction by permission of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
Right: Green Marilyn, 1962, by Andy Warhol, © 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Perhaps the exhibition’s most affecting draw, however, will be the previously unseen Allan Grant photographs made at Marilyn’s Brentwood home just a day before her death. Grant shot 432 images, of which only eight were originally published, capturing Marilyn in moods that shift from brightness to introspection. It is hard to imagine a more poignant closing note: not Marilyn the slogan, but Marilyn in the fragile space between performance and private reckoning.
The timing is clever. Across the river, BFI Southbank is also marking the centenary with Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star, a season explicitly designed to move beyond the tired caricature of Marilyn as tragic sex symbol and instead stress her intelligence, ambition and role in reshaping her own career. The National Portrait Gallery’s show appears to be doing something similar in visual terms.
Ultimately, this is a seminal show for all fans of Marilyn, and an essential destination for those who want to discover the brilliant woman behind the sex symbol.
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait
National Portrait Gallery
4 June – 6 September 2026
More information and tickets, HERE.
Author: Lina Ress
Lead image: Marilyn Monroe, Ballerina Sitting, 1954, by Milton H. Greene. Milton H. Greene © MHG Collective, LLC.
Other unmissable art shows this summer in London include Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A South Kensington, Winston Churchill: The Painter at The Wallace Collection, and The Serpentine Pavilion 2026, a serpentine at Serpentine South.
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