The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2026 - Issue 39

biteexhibition The exhibition features the actress’s film career through clips, scripts, costumes, and personal items, including the iconic white dress worn over the Lexington Ave- nue subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. The Beatrice Dawson-designed satin dress, adorned with a soufflé overlay, simulated pearls, and faceted glass florets, that the actress wore as Elsie Marina in her company’s inde- pendent production, The Prince and the Showgirl. Film clips from Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Misfits, Bus Stop and others are also shown. Paintings by Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, Marlene Du- mas, James Gill, Rosalyn Drexler and Audrey Flack punctuate the rooms like visual echoes. Warhol’s ‘Green Marilyn’ is here, its flat, electric colour reminding us how quickly she became a symbol of modernity. Bo- ty’s ‘Colour Her Gone’ carries a tender, mournful, and defiantly human charge. While these portraits are not in the traditional sense, they are meditations on fame, femininity, and the strange alchemy that occurs when a person becomes an icon. The joy of watching the actress’s performances in the viewing room is saddened by the ‘Losing Marilyn Mon- roe’ section. Here, creatives such as Joseph Cornell, Peter Blake, and Margaret Harrison pay tribute to the Hollywood icon, even years after her death. A disturb- ing portrait is ‘Dead Marilyn’ by Marlene Dumas, who commented on her 2008 piece as: “In a sense, it is a por- trait of death. But it is also a portrait of Marilyn Mon- roe. It is a portrait of a period. It is a portrait of one’s own potential death.” However, the sad emotions are slightly lifted in Allan Grant’s rarely seen photographs, taken at her Brent- wood home one day before her death. Originally shot for Life magazine, only eight of the 432 images were ever published. Here, the more intimate images show Monroe reading the transcript of her final interview, shifting through expressions of joy, concentration, and reflection. They also capture the nuance and the com- plexity of a woman who had long been reduced to a sin- gle, shimmering idea. In the final rooms, her last photo session includes George Barris’s images from Santa Monica in 1962, in Marilyn Monroe - A Portrait at NPG - Marilyn Monroe 1962 by Allan Grant