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Marilyn Monroe - real or not

I am going to an auction tomorrow and there is a lot of autographed photos including this signed photo. Now I am no expect on Miss Monroe and have scanned the web to see if I can find this photo. I have been unsuccessful so....Has anyone seen this signed photo before and if so, do you think this is a pre-print. Any help would be appreciated.

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Permalink Reply by Martin Slack on November 17, 2023 at 9:03am

I have hundreds of autopen photos and you can see the ink but I tried to see ink on this photo and it wasn't visible to me.

I could be wrong because I sit by a window at home in my office and there is plenty of light

Today was in a dimly lit auction room so I could be wrong !!

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on November 17, 2023 at 9:14am

Sounds like a print from what you could see.

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Permalink Reply by a pug called eva on November 17, 2023 at 8:43am

I think this must be a print. The white line that runs through "Love & Kisses" seems to give this away. Why they would use such a lousily-formed "Marilyn" is a mystery to me.

To be fair to the auctioneer, MM isn't even mentioned in the lot particulars. The card appears in the second of the lot images. How they came to their estimate of £3-5k for the names they do list is another mystery to me but there you are...

https://auctions.bhandl.co.uk/auctions/8729/bearne10137/lot-details...

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on November 17, 2023 at 8:48am

That is where I am too. Some kind of print facsimile. Might explain the very even fade to the last name. The estimate seemed very low for the lot to me as well. Is it modern and malicious or vintage and vague? The paper and finish appear the usual double weight/card stock of the period with indications of natural age.

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on November 17, 2023 at 9:12am

Monochromatic letterpress halftone on glossy photo stock?

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Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on November 17, 2023 at 9:17am

There's a good chance it's a coated stock like they use in magazines, but the back needs to be seen.

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Permalink Reply by Martin Slack on November 17, 2023 at 9:47am

Funny you say that Steve so… I thought you might wanna see the back but sadly a lot of the photos in the lot have damage after being removed from an album.

I will enclose a photo that I took but I don’t think it will help.

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on November 17, 2023 at 9:54am

Well, it is not a modern photo.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on November 17, 2023 at 10:09am

Was the photo was glued to the album? That's what it looks like. It also looks like the paper has a separate backing layer to provide rigidity. That could explain the magazine stock. Sometimes magazines and books had special editions bound with a full-page image of a star.

The autograph is almost certainly not preprinted. There's no dot or printing pattern in the blue ink, which there would be whether there were one or two printing passes. Take a good, upright photo of this and run it through Google Image Search and see if there's a match including the autograph.