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Marilyn Monroe at 100: Bert Stern’s ‘The Last Sitting’ Comes to Sag Harbor
Photographs from Marilyn Monroe’s legendary final portrait sessions, shot just six weeks before her death, go on view at Keyes Art Gallery as part of a centennial tribute curated by Bert Stern’s widow, Shannah Laumeister Stern.
More than six decades after Marilyn Monroe stepped in front of Bert Stern’s camera for what would become one of the most famous photo shoots of the 20th century, those images still have the power to stop you.
This Saturday, Sept. 5, Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting® by Bert Stern™ — Sag Harbor Centennial Tribute opens at Keyes Art Gallery in Sag Harbor, marking what would have been Monroe’s 100th year.
The exhibition, curated by Stern’s widow, Shannah Laumeister Stern, draws from the extraordinary series Stern photographed for Vogue over three days at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in June 1962.
Six weeks later, on Aug. 4, Monroe was dead at 36.
What began as a magazine assignment became known as The Last Sitting, a collection of more than 2,500 photographs capturing Monroe at a moment when the meticulously constructed Hollywood image seemed, at times, to fall away.
“I wanted for her centennial anniversary to do a tribute to Marilyn Monroe,” Laumeister Stern told Spark Hamptons when we spoke with her at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair in July. “I had all this incredible work, so I curated this show. It took me days. I wanted it to be Marilyn happy. I also wanted it to be pure Marilyn.”
Marilyn, Unfiltered
The story behind the photographs has become nearly as famous as the images themselves.
Stern chose the Hotel Bel-Air because Monroe loved it. He rented a suite and arrived with scarves, roses and a case of Dom Pérignon, setting the stage for a shoot that would ultimately stretch across three days.
“He prepared for her arrival like a lover,” Laumeister Stern said. “But he was there to photograph her, and he knew that.”
Perhaps most remarkable was what happened once Monroe arrived.
“A wonderful thing is they were alone, which you’ll never see today,” Laumeister Stern said. “He took her in the room and photographed her alone, and everybody else was in the other room. So his creativity and her creativity were both unimpeded by other people. Something magical happened between them.”
The resulting photographs move between playful, glamorous, sensual and strikingly exposed — a Marilyn who could look every inch the movie star in one frame and startlingly human in the next.
“She must have trusted him,” Laumeister Stern said.
The Photos Marilyn Didn’t Want Seen
That trust did not mean Monroe loved every image.
After the shoot, she asked to see the photographs. According to Laumeister Stern, Stern did something he ordinarily would never have done: He sent Monroe the contact sheet of the photographs.
It was Marilyn Monroe, after all.
When they came back, some had been scratched and crossed out.
“She X’d out the photographs she didn’t like,” Laumeister Stern said, explaining that Monroe used a bobby pin to scratch some images and marked others with crosses in red lipstick.
Laumeister Stern believes Monroe may have found some of the photographs simply too revealing.
“I think that it’s too raw for her,” she said. “All the pictures of her were very polished. She was the Hollywood star.”
Rather than discard the rejected images, Stern ultimately incorporated Monroe’s markings into the work. Among the best known is the haunting “Crucifix Portrait,” in which the red marks become part of the image itself — Marilyn not only the subject of the photograph, but, in a sense, its collaborator.
Silkscreen from The Last Sitting®, 1962. Photo: courtesy of the Bert Stern Trust
Decades later, Laumeister Stern sees those photographs differently.
“I think if she could see it now, she would love it,” she said. “Bert said that something through her was making art, which is true.”
That may be part of why The Last Sitting continues to resonate. We know now what Monroe could not have known when she looked at those photographs: They would be among the final images made of her, and generations later, people would still be looking.
Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting® by Bert Stern™ — Sag Harbor Centennial Tribute
Opening reception: Saturday, Sept. 5, 5-7 p.m.
Keyes Art Gallery
45 Main St., Sag Harbor
