Marilyn the muse

Marilyn Monroe, Ballerina Sitting, 1954, New York City

Marilyn Monroe, Ballerina Sitting, 1954, New York City, by Milton H. Greene. (Milton H. Greene/Winnipeg Art Gallery)

Everyone from Joyce Carol Oates to Paris Hilton seems to have an opinion on Marilyn Monroe. Macho American novelist Norman Mailer saw her as the ripe, receptive embodiment of the feminine ideal, while feminist writer Gloria Steinem viewed her as a victim, martyred by 1950s patriarchy.

To most commentators, Monroe is a bundle of paradoxes. She’s sexual but innocent, that lush, womanly body vying with that little-girl voice. She’s vulnerable — think of Elton John’s Candle in the Wind — but also driven and calculating in her pursuit of star status. Photographer Milton H. Greene, a glamour photographer who worked for Life, Look and Vogue and later became Monroe’s business partner, catches some of these contradictions in the so-called “Ballerina Sittings.” The white tutu Greene picked for this 1954 shoot was too big; Monroe clutches it to her chest, a gesture that seems chaste and yet invites erotic imaginings.

After Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967/1978

After Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967/1978, by Andy Warhol. (Winnipeg Art Gallery)

Some like it hot when it comes to Marilyn, but Andy Warhol preferred it cool. His dispassionate gaze took a photographic studio portrait by Frank Powolny and flattened it into endlessly repeated silkscreen prints. Warhol replicated the half-closed eyes, the parted lips and famous beauty mark, but showed no interest in Monroe’s sexuality. Instead, the commodity- and celebrity-obsessed Pop artist was turned on by her aura of fame and money.

According to Shawna Dempsey, a Winnipeg-based artist and curator who will be participating in a panel discussion of the WAG show, “Monroe represents consumerism, or perhaps our rampant consumer nature as a culture. We used her up for our own ends.”

DD and MM, 2003

DD and MM, 2003, by Wolfgang Loesche. (Wolfgang Loesche/Winnipeg Art Gallery)

The Life as Legend exhibition originated in Hamburg, Germany. Many of the contemporary European artists seem fascinated by America’s cult of celebrity, pairing Marilyn with pop culture symbols like Mao, Madonna and Donald Duck.

These pieces emphasize the malleability of Monroe’s image. As the idea of Marilyn travels through decades and cultures, it becomes whatever people need it to be. Madonna’s version of Marilyn, for example, referenced in a painting by Martin C. Herbst, was quintessentially ’80s, all hard-bodied discipline and steel will.

Detail from Actress Marilyn Monroe posing for husband Arthur Miller, 1960/2003

Detail from Actress Marilyn Monroe posing for husband Arthur Miller, 1960/2003, by John Bryson. (John Bryson/TimePix)

In 1960, John Bryson snapped Monroe hamming it up for her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. (Predictably, the catchphrase-loving media dubbed the pair “the Egghead and the Hourglass.”) This impromptu image, which catches its subject with one eye half closed, demonstrates what many of the still photos can’t — that Monroe was a gifted, self-aware comedienne, able to play the ditzy blonde and send her up at the same time.

One Night with Marilyn (3), 1961/2003

One Night with Marilyn (3), 1961/2003, by Douglas Kirkland. Inkjet print. (Douglas Kirkland/Winnipeg Art Gallery)

The camera couldn’t get enough of Monroe — she was possibly the most photographed individual of the 20th century. But her need for the camera was just as insatiable. According to Ernest Mayer, senior photographer at the WAG, “she must have had an instinctive knowledge of how to pose, how to get the best view. And she must have been willing to try many things — that always acts as a catalyst.”

In this famous 1961 series, she works the camera — and the photographer, a young Canadian named Douglas Kirkland. On his first major assignment, the Fort Erie, Ont.-raised kid found himself alone in a room with a naked Monroe and an unmade bed, and he shot her wearing nothing but a cream silk sheet.

In the photos, she seems pliant and submissive, languid with sexual longing. After the shoot, she was anything but: the next day, Monroe ordered Kirkland to get a grease pencil and scissors and went through the shots, image by image.

Marilyn Monroe Collage, 1971/2001

Marilyn Monroe Collage, 1971/2001, by Peter Beard. Mixed media on silver gelatin. (Peter Beard/Arne Zimmerman/ Winnipeg Art Gallery)

For many postmodernist theorists, Monroe expresses the constructed nature of identity, particularly gender identity. Her life can be seen as a series of virtuoso performances, supported by hair, makeup, dresses so tight she was sometimes sewn into them — all the gorgeous props that have enthralled generations of drag queens.

According to Angela Failler, professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies at the University of Winnipeg, “representations of Marilyn Monroe from the ’50s and ’60s emphasized the naturalness of her femininity, insisting that her essence was femininity.

“There was virtually no acknowledgement that Monroe’s femininity was work. But I think she did work it.”

Here's to you, from the series The Last Sitting, 1962/1978

Here's to you, from the series The Last Sitting, 1962/1978, by Bert Stern. C-Print. (Bert Stern/Winnipeg Art Gallery)

Bert Stern’s series The Last Sitting took place at the Hotel Bel-Air six weeks before Monroe’s death. Shot over three days, the marathon session yielded more than 2,600 images. Divorced from Miller and recently fired from the set of the aptly named film Something’s Got to Give, Monroe is physically revealing — there are nude studies in which she’s barely covered by a chiffon scarf — but seems emotionally exhausted. A glass of champagne looks effervescent in this image, but other shots hint at Monroe’s much darker relationship with booze and pills.

Marilyn Monroe (2), 1962/2005

Marilyn Monroe (2), 1962/2005, by Willy Rizzo. C-Print. (Willy Rizzo/Winnipeg Art Gallery)

Willy Rizzo, on assignment for Paris Match, shot Monroe at a house in Beverly Hills in July 1962. Monroe tries gamely to play to the camera, but several shots show her looking weary or confused. Her makeup is a little squiggly — she’d done it herself — and her fabled platinum hair is paying the price of years of peroxide.

Two weeks later, she was dead of a barbiturate overdose. “If she’d grown old like Elizabeth Taylor, would she have been so celebrated?” Delacretaz muses. “Nobody’s organizing an exhibit of Liz Taylor images.”

The decade of the ’60s, with its twig-thin models and free-flowing fashion, would have been an inhospitable time for Monroe's postwar curves and elaborate femininity. And the culture that defined her by her radiant girlishness would have punished her cruelly as she aged. Paradoxically, it’s the ephemeral nature of Monroe’s beauty that has allowed it to endure.