The myth phenomenon Marilyn Monroe even today, after sixty years (she died on August 4, 1962), she does not stop captivating the world public with her always interesting uniqueness. The Hollywood star still enjoys the status of a planetary symbol today, embodying the rapture of lust and the beauty of eros. What is the secret of her myth? One of the answers without a doubt is the one related to her fate. The depth of the personal tragedy of the anonymous Norma Jean Mortenson is obscured by a carefully thought out "product" that was launched through the spectacle and entertainment industry in the world fame of the carefully chosen new name of Marilyn Monroe.
The permanent antagonisms in her being created by the new life circumstances, mainly the external glamor of the public scene, with the intimate feeling of insecurity and emptiness acquired from childhood were too strong for her fragile and vulnerable personality to bear. Marilyn Monroe's being must have cracked. To collapse. From these fragments, a statue of the star that became an idol was carefully assembled and carefully polished. The strength of that idol is paradoxically reflected in its vulnerability. Alienation, fear and depression lived under the mask of pleasure and sensuality, which fed the insatiability and hysteria of mass worship through celluloid film reality, attractive posters and photos of the actress's face and body. The "case" of Merlin Monroe can be seen from several aspects; social, psychological, erotic, aesthetic, cinematic, fashion...
But what constitutes the essence of its special attraction, if I can say it in a Baudelaire way, is that combination in which any true beauty, in order to bewitch us, must have something tragic in it, something from a lived personal tragedy. The biography of Norma Jean Mortenson confirms this for us. In this sense, one detail from Marilyn Monroe's life at the time, unknown to the general public, is particularly indicative, a detail that is revealed to us with its symbolic persuasiveness precisely through art. She is a famous actress one day in the company of friends Sam Shaw visited the exhibition incognito Gojin's engraving held at New York's Metropolitan Museum. The actress was without make up, with a scarf tied around his head. She looked carefully at the exhibited works. She stopped in front of the artist's engraving "Black Demon" and with a stunned expression said to her companion: "I know this man very well, we have the same dreams." I had the same dreams in my childhood." Under the starry night sky, Goya's engraving shows a group of figures with repulsive deformed anatomy, with suggestive facial expressions participating in some secret demonic world, while the ominous shadow of a specter looms in the background. In what contrast is this honest and spontaneous, intimate confession of the famous actress with the usual idea of Marilyn Monroe as a stupid, frivolous and pliable beauty. It is therefore a humiliating statement Arthur Miller: “She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex”.
Thus, the sensibility of a writer came down to an insulting statement of raw masculinity about a woman whom, precisely because he was a writer, he could characterize differently and try to see in his ex-wife something more than an ordinary object for satisfying sexual urges. What in the eyes of many others, such as the famous writer, was "most valuable" in Marilyn Monroe, her beauty and sensuality, evidently meant the curse of fate for her.
It seems that the ravishing vedette surrendered herself to others only to escape from herself. Each such escape was a delusional hope that by surrendering to another, in pursuit of his own happiness, he would try to save himself. Every escape of the actress was a stumble into her gloomy, unbearable self. The glittering halo of Marilyn Monroe's fame hovered over her inner decay, over the fragments of a tragic fate that found salvation in death.
The "Angel of Sex" and the "Black Demon" are reconciled in the icon of the goddess of popular culture. Marilyn Monroe was and remains, unlike other popular stars of the world of spectacle and glamour, the favorite model of artists from pop art painters, especially Warhol or Ramos, Hamilton or Rotel up to quite young contemporary, lesser-known creators.
In the early nineties of the last century, I did a cycle inspired by the image of a Hollywood star. The turn compared to my previous cycles is visible primarily in the thematic sense. However, on that inner line of continuity that "logically" joins all my selected thematic units, and whose character reflects equally eroticism and death, beauty and ugliness, harmony and expression, wholeness and disintegration, Marilyn Monroe appears as a typical model. After the cycle about the biblical heroine Judith, that "femme fatale" of the Old Testament, the cycle of works inspired by Marilyn Monroe is dedicated to the contemporary femme fatale. The biblical Old Testament space has been replaced by the Hollywood decor of modern times.
Unlike the aforementioned artists, my approach to the famous actress was radically different. There are three elements on which I based the "group portrait" of Marilyn Monroe. These are beauty, eroticism and death. The fame and defeat of a popular icon are the measure of its tragic fate. In the cycle of those works, I was interested in the other dimension of the Hollywood femme fatale myth. The dark side of her shining star, the dark shadow in the depth of her icon, behind which the unattainable "Madonna of pop art" was collapsing more and more within herself in proportion to her spectacular success. The glittering halo of her glory hovered over the ruins of her fortune. The beauty of Marilyn Monroe is beauty imbued with tragedy, ecstasy shaded by pain. The cuts and deformations on her face and body are symbolic representations of the reflection of her tragic inner self. We have never experienced anyone's eroticism as suggestively and no one has offered themselves to us as spontaneously as Marilyn Monroe knew. Doesn't it also seem to us that her half-open mouth expresses an erotic sigh and a dying exhalation, that her slightly lowered eyelids are simultaneously moved by erotic lust and impending death?
Marilyn Monroe occupies a central place in the temple of modern deities produced and canonized by the contemporary culture of mass consumerism. One of the characteristics of that culture is that it establishes a sign of equality among the objects of its consumer desires. For example, Coca Cola and Marilyn Monroe are tied. Not only as symbolic iconography, i.e. typical motifs of pop artistic aesthetics and art, but also as automaticity of superficial and quick perception. The "queen" of soft drinks and the queen of "pin-up girls". The reality of drinking and lascivious fantasies about the symbol of sex create a sense of satisfaction in the tiring everyday life of alienated existence. Thus, the fate of an unfortunate personality turned into a myth of collective idolatry. Norma Jean was transformed into the immortal Marilyn Monroe.
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