On one side of the Canaday Gallery, Marilyn Monroe purrs, exuding sensuality in 200 sultry photographs. Monroe, who famously said, "The body is meant to be seen, not covered up," shares her everything with the cameras that adored her.

On the gallery's other side are 85 delicate woodblock prints by Japanese artists spanning 200 years. The subjects are famous actors, some women, whose most sensual elements are the nape of the neck and an occasional bare foot.

Staff at the Toledo Museum of Art conjoined these shows, which open today and runs through Dec. 31, with tenuous threads of beauty and celebrity.

"These exhibitions share a focus on artists' capturing, or being complicit in, the creation of celebrities' images and public personae," said museum director Don Bacigalupi.

I Wanna Be Loved By You spans 17 years in Monroe's life, from fresh-faced cover girl to a marathon photo session in a hotel room by fashion photographer Bert Stern, six weeks before she was found dead in her home. Included are the oft-reproduced swirl of a white skirt as Monroe stands on an updrafting subway grate and her birthday song to President Kennedy.

"I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else," Monroe said.

Stern's three-day session in June, 1962, for a Vogue magazine spread has come to be known as the "Last Sitting." His 59 contributions to this show are culled from the 2,500 photos he took.

In oversized prints, Monroe is bathed in warm, yellow light. With most details washed out, she is clothed and unclothed, draped, tousled, sly, coy, belly down, profiled, and teething pearls. In a dreamy series that celebrates her perfect proportions, she holds scarves, rounded and rumpled to look like giant roses, over her breasts. Untouched is the ugly three-inch scar below her right ribs.

"That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing," Monroe said. "But if I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it sex than some other things we've got symbols of."

The exhibit, from the collection of Leon and Michaela Constantiner, was organized by and shown at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year. It includes a red-carpet walk where viewers can see themselves in a big mirror surrounded by 30 life-sized cardboard cutouts of the blond bombshell.

But Monroe paid a dear price for the niche she carved and maintained for decades longer than she might have imagined - in 1999, she was voted the sexiest woman of the 20th century in People magazine. "Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt, and bewildered," she said.

Take a few acclimating breaths between the tropics of Marilynworld and the adjacent exhibit. The temperature dives between her steamy sensuality and the 85 finely wrought prints from the land of the rising sun.

Created between 1720 and 1931, they are mostly portraits: women in everyday activities, kabuki actors in character, beautiful women, entertainers (geisha), courtesans, warriors, and actors who portrayed and sometimes lived as women (onnagata).

"Nakedness, it could be said, obscures rather than reveals, and garments define rather than hide," wrote art historian Jack Hay, quoted in Strong Women Beautiful Men, a new, 96-page book the museum has published in conjunction with the exhibit.

Teams of artists, woodcarvers, printers, and publishers produced prints that were often sold by subscription to middle-class people who saw them as posters and were likely to paste them on room-dividing screens. A print cost about the same as a bowl of noodles, said Carolyn Putney, the museum's curator of Asian art.

Two years ago, Putney and Julie Melby, former curator of works on paper, dug out and surveyed the museum's carefully boxed collection of 140 Japanese woodblock prints. Most were donated after popular TMA shows in 1930 and 1936, organized by artist Hiroshi Yoshida. He promoted a contemporary movement by himself and other Japanese artists who aimed to revive a traditional style of woodblock printing.

At the time, an assistant curator named Dorothy Blair wrote catalogues for those exhibitions, which remained popular for years because they were the only materials published in English on the subject.

Putney and Melby called in Japanese print scholar Laura J. Mueller to describe and translate writing on the prints, and then to research and write the new book. It was published by Hotei Publishing in the Netherlands, a specialist in Asian art.

This is cache, read story here