Marking what would have been Marilyn Monroe's hundredth birthday, the National Portrait Gallery traced the photographers and artists, Warhol among them, who built and reinterpreted her image.
The National Portrait Gallery on Trafalgar Square marked what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s hundredth birthday from Thursday 4 June to Sunday 6 September 2026. Its exhibition gathered the photographers and artists who built her image.
Monroe began as Norma Jeane, a teenage pin-up model whose earliest “cheesecake” photographs gave little sign of what followed. By the 1950s Eve Arnold, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Philippe Halsman were photographing her, and she directed her own image as much as any of them.
Andy Warhol turned her into a symbol after her death in 1962. He screenprinted the same publicity still from Niagara until it lost any resemblance to a specific woman.
Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas, James Gill, Rosalyn Drexler and Audrey Flack each returned to her afterwards. They read the same face for grief, desire or vacancy, depending on the decade.
The exhibition read each portrait as a collaboration between the sitter and its maker.
The show ran from the earliest studio sittings to the last photographs of her, taken on a Santa Monica beach weeks before she died. Her own scripts and clothes hung alongside.