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Pop Art tribute at National Portrait Gallery
By Louise Jury, Evening Standard 24.05.07
Famous face: one of Andy Warhol's series of screenprints of Marilyn Monroe
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A new exhibition of Pop Art will reunite several important paintings originally shown in a tribute to Marilyn Monroe 40 years ago.
The National Portrait Gallery is bringing together the works that formed part of the exhibition celebrating the actress, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1967.
The Hollywood star died in 1962 but a combination of her fame and troubled life made her a pin-up girl for the Pop Art movement, with its fascination for the lives of the famous.
The new show, Pop Art Portraits, will feature the famous Marilyn screenprint series by Andy Warhol, one of several artists who commemorated Monroe in his work.
There will also be works by Richard Hamilton, Richard Smith and Robert Indiana that appeared in the New York tribute.
Pop Art is a perennial favourite and has been the subject of many exhibitions but the National Portrait Gallery show will be the first to explore the role and significance of portraiture within the genre.
In all, it brings together 52 works, also including ones by American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein and Britons including David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Peter Blake. It was Blake who incorporated many famous faces into his cover for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Other highlights will include some of the earliest Pop Art experiments in Ray Johnson's portraits of James Dean and some of Warhol's Screen Tests for which visitors to his Factory studio were seated in front of a camera and filmed. Sitters included Bob Dylan and New York poet Allen Ginsberg.
Sandy Nairne, the National Portrait Gallery's director, said: "Pop Art Portraits creates an exciting opportunity to see an important art movement in a new light. The portrait is recreated through the work of these artists."
The exhibition, sponsored by Lehman Brothers, will run from 11 October until 20 January next year. Other exhibitions at the venue in the coming year include one dedicated to celebrating the diversity of London. Four Corners (until 5 August) is being produced in partnership with galleries across the capital to represent the pride people feel for their part of the city.
Another show will present a history of British newspaper photography during the Fleet Street years. Daily Encounters (5 July to 21 October) will draw upon newspaper archives to explore Britain and Britishness, new forms of celebrity and the world of the media itself.
From 14 July, a room will be dedicated to pictures of Diana, Princess of Wales, while other galleries will be dedicated to figures including the poet WH Auden, who was born 100 years ago this year.
