Marilyn Monroe

This 1967 screenprint portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Although her film career spanned just fifteen years -­ from 1947 to 1962 Marilyn Monroe remains deeply embedded in the American psyche as a perennially alluring sex symbol. Emerging from an unhappy childhood spent in foster homes and an orphanage, Monroe worked as a pin-up model in her teens and· had developed into a gifted comic actor by her mid­twenties. Both on and off the screen, she tempered her electrifying sex appeal with a tragic air of vulnerability that became indelible following her sudden death from a drug overdose at the age of thirty-six. Andy Warhol's fascination with celebrity drew him to Monroe, whom he portrayed in a series of screenprint portfolios. He based the ten prints in his “Marilyn” series on an overexposed publicity still from Monroe's 1953 film Niagara, which he over­printed with successive screens of visually dissonant colors, transforming the familiar face into an abstract mask. -- National Portrait Gallery