This Saturday, 30 May, marks the opening of a two-week celebration of Marilyn Monroe at Zebra One Gallery — a tribute to a woman who would have turned one hundred this year, and who, somehow, still feels as present as ever.
A hundred years of Norma Jeane
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, Marilyn's beginnings were anything but the gilded story the world would later attach to her. She grew up between foster homes and an orphanage; her mother's mental illness kept them apart for much of her childhood. By sixteen she had married a neighbour to avoid being returned to the system. A factory floor and a wartime photographer's lens, almost by accident, are what changed her life.
By the early 1950s she was Marilyn Monroe — the platinum hair, the breath, the small mole — and Hollywood had a star it didn't quite know what to do with. She made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, The Misfits. She founded her own production company, an extraordinarily bold move for a woman in 1950s Hollywood. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio when the industry was telling her she was a face, not an actress.
She was also, almost always, photographed. By Eve Arnold on the dunes of Long Island in 1955, reading Ulysses. By Milton H. Greene in white robes at the Schenck mansion. By Douglas Kirkland the night she wore nothing but a white silk sheet. By Bert Stern, days before her death, in what became known as The Last Sitting. The photographers loved her because she was generous to the camera in a way few of her peers were — playful, melancholy, intelligent, completely awake.
Her untimely end
On 4 August 1962, at 36 years old, Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home in Brentwood. The coroner ruled it a probable suicide by barbiturate overdose. The decades since have brought theories and counter-theories, biographies and films, but the simpler, sadder truth is that she had been unwell for a long time, and the industry that had built her image had given her precious little to lean on.
What she left was an iconography. Andy Warhol's Marilyn silkscreens, made the month after her death, transformed her into the defining visual subject of Pop Art. Sixty years on, her image is one of the most reproduced — and most argued over — in the history of photography and printmaking.
What's on at the gallery
For the centenary, Zebra One brings together the gallery's full Marilyn collection under one roof:
- Eve Arnold — thirteen prints from her intimate 1950s work with Marilyn, including the celebrated Reading Ulysses and the Long Island shoots.
- Milton H. Greene — eight gelatin silver prints from the Black Sitting, White Robes and Schenck Mansion sessions, alongside the very rare Last Sitting portraits.
- Douglas Kirkland — the famous 1961 Bedsheet session, made when Kirkland was twenty-seven years old, in three sizes.
- Andy Warhol & Sunday B. Morning — the Classic Marilyns, the Golden Marilyn and the Diamond Dust Marilyn, printed in Belgium from Warhol's original photo negatives.
- David Studwell — the Diamond Dust screenprint series in seven colourways, each hand-embellished in his Sussex studio.
Every print is available to buy. Browse the full collection on the Marilyn Monroe page.
Join us
We'd love to see you over the next two weekends.
- Saturday 30 May, 2 – 4 pm — opening day. Fatboy Slim's Peppito Coffee will be on the espresso machine, and there will be cake. Please come.
- Sunday 31 May, 2 – 5 pm — a glass of something cold. Sipsmith Gin will be pouring, and Gabrielle and the team will be in the gallery to talk through the work.
The exhibition runs 30 May – 14 June 2026 at the gallery in Hampstead. No booking required for the weekend events. Please get in touch if you'd like a private viewing.
"I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful." — Marilyn Monroe
— Gabrielle du Plooy, Owner & Director, Zebra One Gallery
