25-foot Marilyn Monroe statue causes uproar in Palm Springs

They’ve got a three-year itch.

A group of Palm Springs residents are fighting to remove a towering statue of Marilyn Monroe in one of her most iconic poses, arguing that the work is a sexist eyesore that blocks traffic.

On Feb. 23, The Art Newspaper reported, California’s 4th District Court of Appeals overturned a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by the Committee to Relocate Marilyn (Crema), which is battling to remove Seward Johnson’s 2011 sculpture “Forever Marilyn” from its current place outside the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Standing 25 feet tall, “Forever Marilyn” shows the blonde bombshell in a famous scene from the 1955 comedy “The Seven-Year Itch” in which her white dress is blown up by a subway grate, revealing her backside.

Originally displayed in Chicago, the work was purchased for $1 million by the tourism agency PS Resorts in 2020. Later that year, the city council unanimously voted to place it outside the Palm Springs Art Museum for up to three years.

In the lawsuit against the city, the elite members of Crema – including fashion designer Trina Turk – argue that officials did not have the right to stop traffic on the street where the statue now sits.

The California laws that allow cities to enact temporary road closures, the group protested, “do not vest cities with the expansive power to close public streets — for years on end — so statues or other semi-permanent works of art may be erected in the middle of those streets.”

Even before the lawsuit, however, “Forever Marilyn” was the subject of fierce local criticism. When the statue was first purchased, Louis Grachos, then the executive director of the Palm Spring, argued that the work objectified the late star, who died in 1962.

“You come out of the museum and the first thing you’re going to see is a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe with her entire backside and underwear exposed,” he reportedly said.

“We serve over 100,000 school-age children that come to our museum every single year. What message does that send to our young people, our visitors and community to present a statue that objectifies women, is sexually charged and disrespectful?”

Around the same time, Los Angeles artist Nathan Coutts commented on a change.org petition against the installation, calling Johnson’s work “derivative, tone-deaf, [and] in poor taste.”

 “If it must be displayed, move it down the road with the concrete dinosaurs near Cabazon, where it can exist as the campy roadside attraction it excels at being.”

Protestors also showed up at the official installation, wielding signs that read “It’s not nostalgia, it’s misogyny.”

“Forever Marilyn” is far from the only artwork of Monroe – born Norma Jean Mortenson – to make headlines in recent months: Last spring, Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” sold for $195 million at Christie’s, setting the record for the most expensive work of American art ever sold.

“The painting transcends the genre of portraiture, superseding 20th-century art and culture. Standing alongside Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus,’ Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,’ Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’ is one of the greatest paintings of all time,” Alex Rotter, chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at the auction house, said of the piece at the time.