Before she became Marilyn Monroe, the star who would be named by Playboy magazine as the “sexiest woman of the 20th century” was Norma Jeane, an aspiring model trying to escape her destiny as a parachute factory worker and running around. with her dark hair flying in the wind on the beaches of California without anyone recognizing her. Elvis Presley was also a second-rate singer before becoming a rock ‘n’ roll sensation who needed police protection to defend himself from fans and ended his days as a kitsch caricature, dressed in tacky clothes and stuffed with drugs and kilos in the stages of Las Vegas. An exhibition at FotoNostrum, Becoming Marilyn
Norma Jeane was 19 years old when in 1945 she crossed the path of André de Dienes, a young photographer of Hungarian origin who, after doing fashion reports for Vogue, had changed New York for California in search of a model for a personal project on beauty. Californian. Together they undertook a series of road trips, in which they took thousands of photographs “that allow us to see the process in which Norma Jeane became Marilyn,” in the words of curator Leonor Fernández. Through the images of Dienes, who would later write a secret memoir about his relationship with the actress, Marilyn, Mon Amour, discovered when Monroe’s fans ransacked her home after her death in 1988, you can see how little by little the young smiling woman who runs around or poses under an umbrella on the beach, modeling her image, increasingly blonder and with a sexier wardrobe.
The exhibition brings together fifty photographs taken between 1945 and 1953 in which the complicity between the two is palpable, with Marilyn shown happily lying in bed, in a foam bathtub or reading lazily between the sheets. “She was immortalized by numerous photographers throughout her life, but only De Dienes had the privilege of capturing her innocence and natural beauty,” says the exhibition’s curator Leonor Fernández. Some decisive years in which she signed her first contract as Marilyn Monroe and obtained her first role as a protagonist in The Asphalt Jungle, which launched her to stardom and would allow her to make films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, both released in 1953. From that same year there is a black and white image, a close-up of the actress in which her depression begins to be glimpsed, taken by the photographer in the wee hours of the morning with the only illumination from the headlights of a car. Struggling with her insomnia, he had called on her to take his portrait.
Vintage photographs of Marilyn, like those of Elvis, are for sale, with prices ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 euros, with the latter corresponding to the highest prices. Aware of her enormous appeal to thousands of fans who are renewed generation after generation, FotoNostrum dedicates the entire underground floor to her, reconstructs her dressing room and includes a room where her music plays non-stop. Here, the time arc in which we can see an innocent and carefree Elvis, but convinced that he was going to become a star, is much shorter: the ten days in which Alfred Wetheimer, then 26 years old, portrayed the young man. singer, 21, on the television program Stage Show and her subsequent two-week tour of several American states. A crucial moment in his career.
Elvis had debuted two years earlier, he was relatively known in the southern United States, but he was far from taking the throne of the King of Rock. Not even the photographer had ever heard of him when he was commissioned, but he granted him unlimited access to his life, allowing himself to be photographed in the airplane bathroom, carrying a gigantic stuffed panda bear in mid-flight, buying a shirt in a store , sleeping on the train or shirtless next to his mother or brushing his tongue with that of a young woman at the back of the stage. Along with the photos from the tour, the photos he took in 1958 during the press conference before serving in the US Navy are also shown.
The exhibition, which will be on display until March 24, opens the new season of FotoNostrum, a hybrid center between an exhibition hall and an art gallery, which is embarking on a new editorial line with the volume The World of Photography and in the coming months will offer two other exhibitions: one dedicated to the world of cosplay and another about Tim Walker and his recreation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, which could be seen at the Victoria and Albert in London.
Tickets for the exhibition ‘Becoming Marilyn
