Brazil's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said Tuesday that it retained 62 pictures of American actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, destined to a photo exhibition in Rio, due to allegedly incorrect procedures to import the pictures by the event's organizers.
Marilyn Monroe in poster of the movie "The seven year itch". (File Photo) According to IRS inspector Jose Antonio Gaeta who is in charge of the apprehension, the organizers hired a company to import the pictures, originally shot by photographer Bert Stern for the U.S. magazine Vogue and described as "works of art".
Gaeta blamed the organizers for the delay in the process, as the company they hired is specialized in importing electric equipment to import art. The IRS determined that the event's organizers need to present an amendment to the contract signed with the importers, stating the necessary changes to allow the company to do the job.
Earlier Tuesday, the exhibition's curator Geraldo Jordao Pereira said that the photographs were withheld at Cumbica International Airport, in Sao Paulo, because the IRS did not recognize them as works of art.
"If they did not take measures to have (the material) released within the appropriate deadline, they cannot blame the customs," inspector Gaeta told the press, referring to the fact that the exhibition "Marilyn Monroe, The Myth," was supposed to have started in Rio's Museum of Modern Art (MAM) Tuesday.
The pictures are part of Monroe's last photo shoot, six weeks before her premature death, at 36. They were the theme of an exhibition at the Maillol Museum in Paris last year, and would move on to Sao Paulo in January 2008.
Source: Xinhua
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