The New York Times | The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time

The New York Times T Magazine has chosen Bert Stern’s photographic cover of Avant-Garde Magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe, as one of the 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of all time.

Marilyn Monroe, Avant Garde, March 1968

When the American photographer Bert Stern and Marilyn Monroe met in the summer of 1962 for a Vogue feature, he was more interested in the woman than in the clothes. A suite at Hollywood’s Hotel Bel-Air served as the set, and he brought along a suitcase full of necklaces and scarves — accessories that suggested easygoing spontaneity when compared to the magazine’s chosen dresses and furs. (A second day of shooting with some of those items followed.) The resulting portraits were luminous and unguarded, rare qualities (back then and especially now) when it came to celebrity subjects. Monroe reviewed a number of the contact sheets, striking out frames with an orange X, though she died by overdose before the issue was published. The roughly 2,500 photos from “The Last Sitting” defined Stern’s career but left him unsatisfied: “They never quite communicated the dazzling image of Marilyn that existed in my mind’s eye,” he explained in a 1968 issue of Avant Garde, a short-lived magazine edited and published by Ralph Ginzburg in collaboration with the designer Herb Lubalin. (The latter’s slanted logo gave rise to a typeface of the same name.) A forerunner to zine culture and art-book publishing, Avant Garde offered Stern another chance to get it right by running “The Marilyn Monroe Trip,” a collection of experimental, acid-colored serigraphs, based on his original images, that brought the screen star into the pop-psychedelic era. By contrast, the cover struck an unassuming note, with kraft-style paper in lieu of the usual glossy stock and a palette of umber tones informed by the Southern California landscape: Marilyn Monroe, a natural beauty at last finding her light.