2 Marilyn Monroe's exhibitions after 50 years of her death

Marilyn

Exhibition plans

Museo Salvatore Ferragamo

June 2012 – January 2013

and

Bard Castel

Fifty years after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Museo Salvatore Ferragamo’s upcoming exhibition revolves around more than just her seductive power and charisma, it explores her complex personality as well. After its shows on Audrey Hepburn in 1999 and Greta Garbo in 2010, Museo Salvatore Ferragamo plans to present another timeless Hollywood icon. The exhibition on Marilyn Monroe will run from June 2012 to January 2013 at the Florence museum, which owns over 20 pairs of shoes worn by the actress from the mid-1950’s to her death. They are shoes that were crafted specifically for her by Salvatore Ferragamo himself, founder of the Salvatore Ferragamo brand, and which have been purchased over the years on the international antique market.

Through his shoes, Salvatore Ferragamo helped make Marilyn a legend. He designed them to accentuate the innate and intense physicality of the woman whom he likened to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty. Each pair featured an identical design of understated elegance – a pointed toe and four and half inch stiletto heel – emphasising the femininity of her famous sway and revealing much about her personal tastes.

In addition to displaying the costumes she wore for her most famous roles and items of clothing from her personal wardrobe, all on loan from private collectors, the exhibition will juxtapose portraits of the actress with works of art from ancient to contemporary times, many of which, in their exaltation of timeless feminine beauty, served as the intentional or subliminal inspiration for the great photographers who immortalized her, including George Barris, Milton Greene, Samuel Shaw, Cecil Beaton, Douglas Kirkland and last, but certainly not least, Bert Stern, who undeniably captured her most intimate side. These are masterpieces that portray Monroe as a myth of eternal beauty, a myth that moves us to empathy and enthrals us still today.

In keeping with Museo Salvatore Ferragamo’s mission, which, since its inception, has been to organise innovative exhibitions in terms of their curation and subject matter, this show aims to provide a new and original interpretation of this great American actress’s persona, seeking to rise above the inevitable murky areas of her life revealed by her tragic death at a young age. Marilyn does not only embody a fascinating and seductive femininity, she is emblematic of innocence lost, that quality which, in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini, written immediately after her death, made her seem a “poor younger sister” unaware of her beauty and therefore devoured by the greed for beauty “of the stupid ancient world/ and of the ferocious future world” (La Rabbia, 1963).

Even the image selected to represent the exhibition is an unusual portrayal of Marilyn. In the photograph taken by Cecil Beaton in 1959, one sees how the great English photographer wanted to reflect, in her face, the very idea of feminine beauty, as it was seen in classical sculpture, becoming a source of inspiration in the Renaissance and a combination of the spiritual and sensual in Baroque art. Thus, Marilyn is an ancient Venus, she is the sweet-faced woman of the Renaissance Madonnas, and she is the saint in ecstasy, experiencing a union of the senses with her God.

This interpretation of Marilyn as a sacred Venus, a divinity of the ancient world rather than a profane Venus, protector of carnal love, is the exhibition’s leitmotiv and explains how she has transcended the unhappier events of her life to embody the myth of beauty.

The first section of the exhibition will include Barris’s well-known photographs of Marilyn wrapped in a sweater at the seashore. Not by chance, the photographs will be compared with Botticelli’s masterpiece of Venus rising from the sea, conserved at the Uffizi Gallery, and with the ancient Medici Venus, which was the source of inspiration for Botticelli’s depiction. In this exhibition, it will be shown in the form of a fine porcelain copy on loan from Museo Ginori. It is not without reason that writers and artists referred to Marilyn as a Venus or Aphrodite and that she kept a small bronze bust of the Venus de Milo in her home. In allusion to this, the exhibition will display the Venus owned by Fiesole’s Archaeological Museum, which is a Roman copy of the original Greek statue dating back to the third century B.C., by Yves Klein in a modern interpretation of this statue, sculpted by the artist in 1962, the year of the actress’s death.

That Marilyn’s body, even nude, was never vulgar but instead conveyed a sweet, primordial innocence, which the world of men, as Pasolini wrote, destroyed with its atrocities, can be seen in Bert Stern’s stunning series of photographs of Marilyn under the sheets, with her flirtatious and playful, yet childlike, poses, calling to mind the elegant femininity of the women painted by Boucher and Fragonard, which the photographs appear to reference.

Certainly Marilyn cannot be considered an unimportant figure in post-war American film. Her modern training at Strasberg’s Actors Studio and the female roles she played revolutionised the industry for women. Above all, she mastered a profound sense of irony and self-mockery, particularly with respect to the female image created by men and for men in classic Hollywood films, often reduced to a body, an object. In this way, she laid the groundwork for the birth of the modern woman, who is aware of a man’s desires and knows how to use them best to her advantage. In this way, we can see how, in the roles created by the young actress, she clearly and completely restored clear-headedness to the women she played, a quality she also demonstrated when she founded her own film production company, in the way she managed her personal life and how she framed her thoughts, which we have come to know only recently. In this section of the exhibition, writings and memorabilia reveal the characteristics of a determination that emerges in some of her interviews, in the lesser known photographs of her in everyday life and in her relationships with the fashion world, as can be seen in the section on her Salvatore Ferragamo shoes and the documents that attest to her relationship with the creative genius himself.

However, Marilyn’s femininity was often exploited, not only by Hollywood and advertising, but also by political powers, as we can see in the photographs and film clips of the actress in Korea, when the government sent her to lift the spirits of the young American soldiers and convey an image of a positive, triumphant America.

It is from this view point of the sexy bombshell serving her country that the curators have chosen to include the work of contemporary artist Paolo Canevari, displaying a bomb completely covered in woven luminous mirrors, very similar to the dress worn by the actress for the famous concert that was held for the American troops, but also alluding to images of nuclear explosions, a symbol of the violent times.

The following section is devoted to Marilyn’s well-known appearance at Madison Square Garden in New York, when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mister President” to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Documents, film clips from the era, and a reproduction of the iconic dress she wore illustrate the event that launched her on her trajectory and marked the beginning of her ambiguous relationship with the political world at that time.

An entire room will be devoted to great heroines who have given their lives for love. Marilyn will be likened to Cleopatra and Dido, shown through two seventeenth century works of art, Cesare

Dandini’s Cleopatra and Andrea Scacchi’s Dido, in which red is used to emphasize the heroine’s dramatic power. Red is also the colour of one of the actress’s dresses and her most famous pair of shoes, covered in red Swarovski crystals, as well as the dominant hue in a celebrated photograph by Milton Greene. Although Marilyn did not love the colour red, as demonstrated by its near absence in her wardrobe, it has many meanings in the history of colour. It is the quintessential colour of love and seduction, and this is certainly how Milton Greene interpreted it in his portrait of Marilyn, but it is also the colour of blood and the passion of Christ. In this section of the exhibition, it is presented as the symbol of sacrifice, introducing the theme of love and death with respect to Marilyn’s tragic end at only 36.

The section that follows is dedicated to clothing Marilyn wore in her private life. The predominance of black and white and the near total absence of colour carry this ambivalence of her spirit, between black and white, negative and positive, dark and light, into her wardrobe. Completing this section are two masterpieces by Andy Warhol, the great artist of the Twentieth century, who contributed to making Marilyn and others icons of his time. The painting with her four faces in black is juxtaposed with Warhol’s portrait of the only woman who truly contrasted her fame, Jacqueline Onassis. Seemingly two very different women, they were brought together when they met their bitter fates just one year apart. On 5 August 1962, Marilyn was found lifeless in her Los Angeles apartment, while Jackie, on 22 November 1963, witnessed the assassination of her husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America.

The show continues with a high-impact installation on the death of Marilyn. The legal questions surrounding the event are not of interest to us, as our focus lies in what her death meant to her contemporaries and to the generations that followed. In a white space alluding the time of her passing and the discovery of her body, the voice of Giorgio Bassani will recite “La rabbia” (“The Rage”) by Pierpaolo Pasolini, while a 1960’s-style television set will show a short film made by Pasolini after Monroe’s death.  The back wall will feature the breathtaking portrait shot by Bert Stern a few weeks before the actress’s death, in which we see, in that beautiful face, the anticipation of what was to come, and the end of an extraordinary woman and the innocence she embodied, the entry into a world dominated by man’s negative passions, pain and ferocity.

The violence experienced by Marilyn near the end of her life and the media’s exploitation of her death are the crimes to which history is condemned in its endless repetitions, like a never-ending tragedy.

Quotations of famous people who knew and loved her, from Truman Capote to Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg, accompany visitors in this last space, dedicated to Marilyn the star, a talented actress who never won an Oscar but who will remain in the hearts of all generations to come: the costumes of her most memorable roles – from the white dress in The Seven Year Itch, the romantic costume she wore for The Prince and the Showgirl and the slinky black dress from Some Like it Hot –are brought back to life alongside images of her films.