Eve Arnold was a renowned photojournalist, and the only woman in her field to have worked extensively with Marilyn. Her first major UK retrospective in a decade, To Know About Women: The Photography of Eve Arnold is now open at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, until January 7th, 2024.
“Exploring themes of social injustice, civil rights, religion, power, fame, sexuality and birth, over 90 black-and-white and colour photographs will be on display, including Eve Arnold’s career-defining documentary of the fashion shows held in Harlem in the 1950s. Rarely seen photos from this body of work will be exhibited for the first time in 70 years.”
Michael Arnold, Eve’s grandson and archivist, will give a talk about the collection next Friday, July 21st, at 6 pm.
Michael was interviewed for the Jewish Chronicle recently…
“‘They were such close friends, when Marilyn was napping on set, Eve could just wander in and take a picture,’ says the artist’s grandson, Michael Arnold, the son of Eve’s only child, Frank.
For his part, Michael first had an inkling that the bubbe who made him chicken soup wasn’t perhaps like other people’s bubbes when he was just five. ‘Eve was doing the set photography for the 1985 film White Nights, and I was made a fuss of by Isabella Rossellini and Mikhail Baryshnikov. They were so respectful of her I realised she must be very important,’ says Arnold, an acupuncturist living in London’s Mill Hill, and the person in charge of his grandmother’s photography archive.
He got to know his grandmother better when he turned 12 and his family moved from Manchester to London. ‘My grandmother lived in Mount Street, Mayfair, where in the 1960s she had managed to buy a flat for £10,000. It was on the third floor and there was no lift, but even at the age of 90 she was climbing the stairs. Five years previously she travelled to Cuba to photograph a woman she had met there four decades ago. She was no ordinary granny, but she was a very close friend with whom I could be myself.’
When she photographed Monroe on the set of The Misfits, her last movie, she captured the actor struggling to learn her lines, and became convinced she was losing the plot and that her marriage to Arthur Miller, who wrote the screenplay for the film and who accompanied his wife on set, was moribund.
‘My most poignant memory of Marilyn is of how distressed, troubled and still radiant she looked when I arrived in Nevada,’ the photographer wrote in a memoir. ‘It occurred to me then that when she had lived with the fantasy of Marilyn that she had created, that fantasy had sustained her, but now the reality had caught up with her and she found it too much to bear.’
Eve came to London in 1962 and although she lived the rest of her life in the city, frequently working on stories for the Sunday Times colour supplement, she was never finished with the US.”
The exhibition has already attracted considerable media interest. Writing for The Observer on June 11th, Tim Adams recalled discussing Marilyn with Eve (who died in 2012, aged 99.)
“I interviewed the photographer in 2002, when she was 90, and she reminisced about Monroe, her muse and her friend: ‘She made me feel as if I were brilliant,’ Arnold said, ‘and I suppose I made her feel as if she were brilliant. Actually we were two young women starting out in this quite male world, so we just played together, had the most fun we could.’
That fun was in fairly short supply on The Misfits, however. The film was shot in the 40C-plus heat of the Nevada desert. The director, John Huston, was drinking and gambling, and Monroe’s prescription drug addiction saw her frequently absent from the set and finally hospitalised for two weeks. ‘She was being atrocious to Arthur [Miller],’ Arnold told me. ‘It began in the heat of the summer and ended in the cold of the desert. It was not a happy set, and it got less happy.'”
And finally, a selection of the images on display – including Eve’s 1952 portrait of Marlene Dietrich which first caught Marilyn’s eye; and a joyful photo of Marilyn during her 1955 trip to Bement, Illinois – was featured in The Guardian.
UPDATE: An exhibition catalogue and two Marilyn prints are now available – more info here
The Marilyn Report 
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