The birth of modern society’s obsession with celebrity will be explored by the National Portrait Gallery at a key show this year. Pop Art Portraits will include important works by leading figures including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Sir Peter Blake and David Hockney.

The exhibition will show how Pop artists used images of Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger and John F. Kennedy, among others, to invent a new way of seeing the world and comment on the emerging consumer society of the 1950s and 1960s. However, its dominant subject will be Marilyn Monroe, chronicling her dizzy ascent to stardom via Playboy magazine, and the price she paid for her celebrity.

Paul Moorhouse, the gallery’s 20th-century curator, said: “In Pop Art we see the beginnings of the fascination with the phenomenon of fame. The Pop artists were ahead of the game. They could see that this was going to be one of the great preoccupations of society, how an ordinary woman like Norma Jean Baker could become this iconic individual: Marilyn Monroe.

“People could now become famous overnight, but equally they could be plucked from obscurity and lose their identity. These are issues that we are still working through today, with Big Brother and the Kate Moss at Topshop phenomenon; everybody’s obsessed with fame.” Early works will show Marilyn as an emerging star, depicted as a pin-up alongside Gina Lollobrigida and Kim Novak on Blake’s Girlie Door and in Ray Johnson’s collage Hand Marilyn Monroe.

Later in the exhibition visitors will go into a “secular chapel” to Marilyn, with works made after her death in 1962.

The room will reunite five works from Homage to Marilyn Monroe, the tribute show held in 1967 at the Sydney Janis Gallery in New York. They include ten screen-printed portraits of the actress by Andy Warhol, taken from a publicity still for Niagara; Richard Hamilton’s My Marilyn, based on a contact sheet from a photo session on a beach; and Claes Oldenburg’s haunting sculpture Ghost Wardrobe for Marilyn Monroe.

Mr Moorhouse said: “She is a thread running through the show . . . She is revered, and then, like Princess Diana, her death sanctifies her and she becomes a secular goddess. It seems to be symptomatic of the mechanisms of fame that in the process it destroyed her. That’s what these paintings are essentially about: the tragedy of fame. The message of these works is that it chews you up and spits you out.”

Warhol still looms large over the movement. Last week his 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold at auction in New York for $71.7 million (£36.3 million); another Marilyn image, Lemon Marilyn, sold for $28 million .

There are five Warhols in this show, including the Marilyns: two self-portraits, the Double Elvisimage of a revolver-toting Presley and the silent film Screen Test, featuring Salvador DalÍ and prominent figures on the New York Arts scene.

Other highlights include works by Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson and Jim Dine.

The show will run from October 11 to January 20.

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