Richard Avedon

Christopher Cardozo, Inc., Minneapolis

Acquired from the above in 1995 by the present owner

Richard Avedon, An Autobiography (New York, 1993), pl. 134

Richard Avedon: Evidence, 1944-1994 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 138

Richard Avedon, Portraits (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), unpaginated

Richard Avedon, Woman in the Mirror (New York, 2005), pp. 88-9

Michael Juul Holm, ed., Richard Avedon - Photographs 1946 - 2004 (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 60

Richard Avedon, Performance (New York, 2008), p. 103

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Photography: The Collection Grows, 1983 - 1996, May - August 1997

When Richard Avedon made this now-iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe on a May evening in 1957, she was nearing the pinnacle of her film career and was five years from her death at age 36 from a drug overdose. As Avedon later recalled in an interview with filmmaker Helen Whitney,

'There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was someone Marilyn Monroe invented, like an author creates a character. For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that's—she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn't photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.' (quoted in Richard Avedon Portraits, unpaginated)