Today is the 46th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, whose light george Burns as brilliantly as always. Jean Harlow was more a vamp, Carole Lombard more an actress, and both died younger than Marilyn, wHO was 36. Yet they are remembered mainly by film buffs whereas she is known by just about anyone with ideas of sexiness and glamour.
But "known" is, of course, the wrong word. Her image is known, and that, as she remorsefully said, was an invention. Even today, with the facts of her living having been repeated for more than half a century, it's the look-alike rather than fact that holds interest.
"Life as a Legend: Marilyn Monroe," a huge exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center through Sept. 21, traces her trajectory from model to starlet to sex symbolization to icon. It provides nearly all the famous pinup, publicity and objective photographs instrumental in that ascension. It also offers many paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures by contemporaneous artists, mostly German � the exhibition was organized in Hamburg � wHO treated the subject later her death. But partly because the works are not ordered chronologically we get only if a cloudy idea of the transformation of Norma Jeane into Marilyn, and partly because her image remains so strong we find the artists accepting rather than clarifying it.
That means the private Marilyn, who had 400 books in her library and constantly strove to "better" herself, does not appear in the show aside from quoted remarks.
Instead, there are rafts of pieces in which familiar photographs have been appropriated and reworked, often more than once. So, inevitably, the later pieces become about how earlier artists tempered Marilyn, and that ordinarily takes
