Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait — the radiant, uncontainable star she wanted to be

I wanted to hate the National Portrait Gallery’s new blockbuster show, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait. It represents two things that really should be binned: anniversary exhibitions (it marks Monroe’s 100th birthday) and exhibitions of celebrity portraits. Anniversaries rarely signify anything other than the passing of time, which is an inevitable and uninteresting fact of life.

And yet I didn’t quite hate this show, and the reason is Monroe herself. We first see her as Norma Jeane Baker, a regular-looking teenager with mousey brown hair, in a self-portrait taken in a photo booth in 1940, and then the radiant, uncontainable, insanely glamorous film star, cheesecake pin-up and actor emerges across photographs, paintings and film excerpts.

Picture after picture and testimony after testimony show she had a special, unselfconscious command of the camera.

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