Marilyn Monroe Wall Art

Marilyn Monroe is not really a portrait subject any more. She became a motif somewhere in the early sixties, when pop art started using her image specifically because it had already been reproduced past the point of being a likeness — the argument of those works was about fame and printing, not about a woman. Every Marilyn print since is standing on that.

Which is why the treatment is the whole decision

A photographic Marilyn is a picture of a person. A stippled, halftoned or high-contrast monochrome Marilyn is a picture of an icon, and the two do completely different things to a room. The pieces here are firmly in the second camp: dot patterns, flattened tone, contrast pushed until the features are carried by shape rather than shading.

The stippled cinematic profiles are the most graphic of them — the face assembled from thousands of points, which resolves at a distance and dissolves close up.

Where it works

Social rooms, and dressing rooms. Marilyn is a glamour subject as well as a pop one, so unlike most celebrity portraits she does sit comfortably in a dressing room or a bathroom with the right palette — black, white, brass, marble.

Kitchens and bars work for the same reason all pop art does: the reference is shared, and somebody will mention it.

Palette and pairing

These are almost entirely monochrome, which is a practical gift — a black-and-white Marilyn will hang beside anything without a colour clash, and she pairs particularly naturally with Chaplin, since the era, the palette and the printing sensibility all agree.

Avoid warm timber-heavy rooms. Flat monochrome against a lot of oak tends to look like it has been put there temporarily.

Scale

She survives being small better than most subjects, because the silhouette and the hair do the identifying even at a glance. A pair of small Marilyns flanking a mirror is a perfectly good use of her; so is one very large one on its own.