“You can read about yourself and somebody else’s ideas about you,” so said Marilyn Monroe, “but what’s important is how you feel about you.” It’s just one of the pithy quotations for which the iconic actress is known – her insights range from the benefits of imperfection (“it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring”) and self-confidence (“if you can’t handle me at my worst, you can’t handle me at my best”) to the sort of irreverent witticisms that jazz up the walls of bottomless brunch restaurants and the women’s toilets of cocktail bars worldwide (“give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world”).
And yet the familiarity of her words pales into insignificance compared with the ubiquity of her image. Monroe the person is, for most people, almost entirely divorced from Monroe the picture, Monroe the goddess, Monroe the pinnacle of femininity. But the question of “how you feel about you” felt particularly apt emblazoned on the wall of the new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, which celebrates her centenary and opens today.
In this impeccably curated collection of photographs and paintings – along with some exquisite original dresses, her makeup and her correspondence with friends and lovers – we see Monroe from every angle: from her teen years to the year of her death, aged 36, in 1962; in dresses, in jeans, and in the nude. Yet no matter how many pictures you look at, she becomes no less mysterious a figure. If anything, she becomes more unknowable: she is consistently seen through the eyes of others.
