Marilyn’s Birthday Auction at Julien’s

Julien’s Auctions are holding an online sale of Marilyn-related photos and memorabilia, ending on June 1st (her 94th birthday.) Here are some highlights.

Program for the 1972 exhibition, Marilyn Monroe: The Legend and the Truth, curated by Lawrence Schiller; and catalogue for The Berniece and Mona Rae Miracle Collection, a Sotheby’s online auction from 2001.

Photos of a young Marilyn by Andre de Dienes

Original still photo and lobby card from River of No Return (1954.)

Candid photos from Marilyn’s 1954 trip to Korea.

1955 photo of Marilyn with a Pekingese dog by Milton Greene. Another image from the session can be seen in this Look magazine cutout.

Still photos from The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Let’s Make Love (1960.)

Marilyn in 1957, signed by Sam Shaw
A 1972 copy of Show magazine (cover photo by Bert Stern)

2017 real estate brochure for Marilyn’s last home at 5th St Helena Drive, L.A.

Photographs by George Barris, 1962

UPDATE: View results here

Tate Modern’s ‘Virtual Tour’ of Warhol Exhibit

Although London’s art galleries are currently closed, you can still view a seven-minute ‘virtual tour‘ of Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol retrospective online – as reviewed by Brian Allen for The Art Newspaper.

“After treating his early commercial work, the exhibition makes hay of the big serial pictures using Warhol’s signature screenprint and acrylic paint technique. It is what you’d expect from Warhol—ironic, fun, sly, colourful, oh, and a plane crash, a car wreck and a suicide. Everything is perfectly installed. Marilyn, Jackie and Mao are there, as are a few Brillo boxes tucked in a corner.

Again, the show’s about his presence. It took plenty of his handwork to degrade Marilyn Monroe’s multiple images, side by side, row after row, as if she’s fading from overuse and overexposure. Making these works look mass-produced was Warhol’s retort to the Abstract Expressionist painters and their love of paint and gesture. I know Warhol’s Marilyns, Coke bottles, and Elvises celebrate, even parody, mass-marketing, but seeing them in the flesh reaffirms their sheer beauty. Lots of Warhol’s later work, especially the portraits from the 1970s and 80s, is jaunty and gaudy. His work from the 1960s can be very moving.

Warhol made Marilyn Diptych in 1962, right after Monroe died. Americans were used to movie-star crash and burn but Monroe, via her looks, marriages and headline struggles, wasn’t your average star. The picture’s neon palette turns grisaille, while the contours go from bold to broken and faded. The luscious, full-lipped, peroxide blonde Marilyn slowly recedes into fragments. Memory and oblivion aren’t far. Warhol’s newspaper pictures like 129 Die in Jet! (Plane Crash) or A Woman’s Suicide, both from 1962, make me shiver. Part of the pathos comes from realising how fleeting those 15 minutes of fame really are. Fleeting, too, is life. Warhol takes the Old Master vanitas and gives it a makeover.”



Warhol’s Marilyn at Tate Modern

Photo by Matt Durham

A major Andy Warhol retrospective opens at London’s Tate Modern tomorrow, through to September 6, featuring his original Marilyn Diptych from 1962.

“Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, having overdosed on barbiturates. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.”

Bert Stern’s Marilyn at HGU New York

A collection of Bert Stern’s photographs from his 1962 Vogue session with Marilyn is on display until April 13 in Marilyn Monroe: The Red Party, a pop-up exhibition at the HGU New York Hotel’s Gallery 151 Annex on East 52nd Street. with a Monroe-themed menu also available in its Lumaca restaurant, the Evening Standard reports.

“‘I was preparing for Marilyn’s arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs,’ Stern said … ‘Not to take her in my arms, but to turn her into… an image for the printed page.’

The shots were chosen by Vogue‘s art director and had been sent to print when the news of Monroe’s death came out.
It was too late to stop publication and the issue ended up becoming a final tribute to the late actress.

The editors decided to use the photographs that had been selected and added a note in the opening copy that read: ‘The word of Marilyn Monroe’s death came just as this issue of Vogue went on the press. After the first shock of tragedy, we debated whether it was technically possible to remove the pages from the printing forms. And then while we waited for an answer from our printers, we decided to publish the photographs in any case.’

‘For these were perhaps the only pictures of a new Marilyn Monroe – a Marilyn who showed outwardly the elegance and taste which we learned that she had instinctively; an indication of her lovely maturity, an emerging from the hoyden’s shell into a profoundly beautiful, profoundly moving young woman.'”

New York Stories: Marilyn at the Circus

This somewhat inelegant shot of Marilyn on a pink elephant, taken by Arthur Fellig (aka ‘Weegee’) backstage during the Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden in March 1955 is featured in New York Stories: Vintage Postwar Photographs, on display at the Keith de Lellis Gallery on East 57th Street until March 27. (Some more of Weegee’s photos from the evening are posted below.)

George Rodriguez’s ‘Double Vision’ of Marilyn and José

Photographer George Rodriguez, who captured Los Angeles life for forty years – from Hollywood glitz to Chicano civil rights movement – is the subject of a retrospective, George Rodriguez: Double Vision, at the Vincent Price Art Museum in LA until February 29, We Are Mitú reports. (Rodriguez photographed Marilyn at the Golden Globes in 1962 with her date, Mexican screenwriter José Bolaños, though it’s unclear whether these images of part of the exhibition.)

Marilyn Dons ‘Snap Cardigan’ for Agnès B

Fashion designer Agnès B  has assembled a group of creatives to put different spins on her classic black ‘snap cardigan’ for a new exhibition, opening in Manhattan this weekend and on display until March 1st, Flaunt reports. Among them is photographer William Strobeck, who has put the cardigan on a lifesize cutout of Marilyn in Bus Stop. A Monroe fan herself, Agnès B has said she was touched by the simple elegance of Marilyn’s possessions during a private view of The Personal Property of MM at Christie’s in 1999.