Now an in person event instead on on line only!

Let’s talk more about women and art. Do join us to discuss Griselda Pollock’s new book with her.

Following the recent publication of her latest book with its daring thesis about Marilyn Monroe as a presence haunting the New York Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, Griselda Pollock will join us for an illustrated discussion with British artists, Nicky Bird and Kerry Harker, about the uses, and abuses, of images of Marilyn Monroe,  a working class, white woman who was herself a creator of an iconic image in the tradition of the great Hollywood stars. 

They share her emphasis on what Monroe created as a performer before the camera with still and moving images. These images continue to circulate long after her films and the Hollywood star system that produced them have become history. Given the recent release of yet another dark film about the tragedy of Monroe’s life as an abused child and woman, why are these two British artists, like Pauline Boty in the1960s before them, drawn as feminists to Marilyn Monroe’s image?  What qualities keep us looking at her? What other narratives should we produce? What has all that to do with 1950s painters like Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?