Fallingwater & Marilyn Monroe @ Warhol

First ever visit to Fallingwater on Saturday. No idea why it took more than two decades of living so nearby to visit the home (in that time, I’ve been to the Frick residence at least half a dozen times, though I guess that’s a five-minute drive rather than an hour-and-a-half; and there are cocktails and cakes at the Frick; and I’ve always been a bit of a nut for the Victorian Era, as evidenced by my Samantha American Girl doll early on and my Victorian sexualities class later on, so that’s that).

For all its glass and steel, Fallingwater is amazingly organic, more a part of the surrounding stone and stream than any sort of growth or construct. I’m sure the house and grounds are lovely with autumn leaves or summer blooms, but the veil of snow and crunch of ice lent the entire experience a cozy-sexy air of Bond villainy or Cold War naturalism.

Marilyn Listening to Music, 1952, Philippe Halsman

Today, Sunday, I checked out the Marilyn Monroe exhibit at the Warhol (admission, usually $18, was free thanks to friends’ CMOA memberships; thank you, friends, from this mooch to you). The exhibit opened in October and closes the beginning on January. Go. I’d always enjoyed Marilyn in the cursory way one do when one’s got hips and today’s sex symbols don’t, but after reading Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde this summer — a fictionalized biography of Ms. Monroe — I became a woman obsessed. The exhibit made me sad as only Marilyn can.

A billboard advertising the M.M. exhibit in Lawrenceville (Liberty & Herron) has been tagged with an anarchist A and the decree that “women’s bodies are not objects.” But that’s the thing. Marilyn’s was. And she knew it. And used it. And, ultimately, was used by it.