Richard Avedon's Hollywood Opens at Gagosian Beverly Hills, From Marilyn Monroe to Spielberg

More than 120 portraits spanning 1947 to 2004 are on view free through Dec. 19, a week before Ron Howard's documentary about the photographer reaches Netflix.

By Herald Staff · Nov. 4, 2026, 2:30 PM ET

A modern gallery with a pale stone facade and tall glass windows glows on a palm-lined Beverly Hills street at dusk, its white walls hung with large black-and-white framed photographs, under an indigo and amber sky. — "Richard Avedon: Hollywood" is free to visit at Gagosian, 456 N. Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, Tuesday through Saturday until Dec. 19.

More than 120 photographs by Richard Avedon, spanning 1947 to 2004, the year he died, go on view Wednesday at Gagosian's Beverly Hills gallery in an exhibition called "Richard Avedon: Hollywood." The show runs through Dec. 19 at 456 N. Camden Drive, and admission is free, according to the gallery. An opening reception is set for 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday.

The gallery describes the exhibition as a look at Hollywood "as a profoundly American construct whose glamour and power have made it a global cultural touchstone." It mixes some of Avedon's best-known portraits with rarely seen images and was curated by the Richard Avedon Foundation.

Hollywood as an Idea, Not Just an Industry

Curator Laura Avedon, the photographer's daughter-in-law, told the Los Angeles Times that she was not limiting the show to film people. "I'm looking at Hollywood as an idea, a particularly American idea that encompasses so much of America, fame, money, creativity, talent and vision," she said. "If you look at each individual portrait in the exhibition, every single one of them can be connected back to Hollywood in some way."

The first section, the Times reported, gathers Avedon's early muses and subjects, mostly from the 1950s and '60s, including Suzy Parker, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Brigitte Bardot. It includes his May 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe in a Norell dress, caught in a rare melancholy moment, and Charlie Chaplin holding his fingers up like devil's horns. Avedon's 1955 photograph of the model Dovima in a black Dior gown between two circus elephants, one of the most famous fashion pictures ever made, is also on the walls.

The second section turns to the people who held power behind the camera and around the industry: directors such as Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles; writers including Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag; and presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the Times said. A 1993 picture from the Academy Awards at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion shows Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino and Sharon Stone together, and Gagosian lists a 1994 portrait of Spielberg taken in Los Angeles among the works.

"I want people to come away with a sense of how interconnected Hollywood is," Laura Avedon told the paper. "How powerful those connections are and that they even involve presidential power."

A Documentary Arrives Next Week

The exhibition grew out of a film. Laura Avedon came up with the idea while Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment was searching the foundation's archive of roughly 500,000 images for "Avedon," Howard's documentary about the photographer, the Times reported. She is a co-executive producer of the film.

"Avedon" premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and arrives on Netflix on Nov. 11, Netflix announced. It runs 1 hour and 44 minutes and was made by Imagine Documentaries and Fifth Season with the Richard Avedon Foundation. Netflix says it draws on never-before-seen stills, behind-the-lens footage and new interviews with Avedon's closest collaborators.

In an audio clip in the film, Avedon is asked why he took up photography. "I still can't type," he answers, as quoted by the Times. "I can't read my own handwriting. I don't think consecutively. I'm anecdotal. I'm instinctual. But I can see like a son of a bitch."

A Long Tie to Los Angeles

Avedon's own life brushed against the movies. He served as a visual consultant on Stanley Donen's 1957 musical "Funny Face," in which Fred Astaire plays a photographer loosely based on Avedon, opposite Audrey Hepburn. In the summer of 1956, while consulting on the film in Paris, he briefly considered giving up photography to direct films, according to Gagosian.

Larry Gagosian's relationship with Avedon also has deep Los Angeles roots. Gagosian brought an Avedon exhibition to ArtCenter College of Design in 1976 and to Broxton Gallery, his first space in Westwood, before opening his own gallery a few years later, the Times reported. The gallery has held more than a dozen Avedon shows in the past 15 years.

The Beverly Hills gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., according to its website.

Original reporting by The Los Angeles Herald, drawing on the Los Angeles Times, Gagosian and Netflix, as linked above.