Lee Miller’s adventurous life and art are finding a new following

Lee Miller’s photographs demonstrate her shrewd view on the world, and how she found herself at the centre of 20th century events.

Lee Miller self portrait with headband, New York, c.1932.

The standard cliché today about someone like Lee Miller (1907-77) – duly repeated in every press release or article about her – is that she was not just the model, muse and lover of a famous artist, but a significant artist in her own right. Like so many clichés, this is not actually a false claim; it is a simplification rather than a falsehood, but also a truism rather than the whole truth.

Her relationship with Man Ray in the years 1929-32 was of course a complex one: he was inspired by her beauty and her talent as a model; love and passion can be powerful sources of stimulation and energy when they are aligned with aesthetic vision. But for her, a young woman and his pupil, this intense engagement as both model and lover was an equally important part of her initiation as an artist.

The pair’s close connection has been the subject of recent exhibitions, including Man Ray / Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism in 2012 and Lee Miller – Man Ray: Fashion, Love War in 2022-23. The relationship is alluded to in the present exhibition at Heide as well, and in the publication that accompanies the exhibition although it is not strictly a catalogue of the works shown, Lee Miller: Photographs, by her son Antony Penrose.

Lee Miller’s work as a photographer was indeed informed by her experience as a model, even before her ­relationship with Man Ray introduced her to new ways of thinking about the medium. In childhood and early adolescence she was the constant subject of her own father’s pictures. Her professional career began fortuitously when, at the age of 19, she was pulled out of the way of a car in Manhattan by the celebrated publisher Condé Nast, who then offered her work as a model for Vogue.

She was a great beauty, distinctive and different from the ordinary run of pretty girls in her clear and classically harmonious features, with a touch of sensuality but also short hair and, especially in profile, an unusually strong chin for a woman. Beauty with a hint of the epicene was perfect for the 1920s, and she was extraordinarily successful until the use of her image in an advertisement for sanitary napkins apparently ended her career overnight.

This is when she went to Paris – perhaps at the suggestion of Edward Steichen – to meet Man Ray (1890-1976), who had been born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, and originally named Emmanuel Radnitzky. The family moved to Brooklyn a few years later and changed their name to Ray in 1912 in response to rising anti-Semitism. He moved to Paris in 1921, where his mistress Kiki de Montparnasse modelled for the most famous of all surrealist photographs, Le Violon d’Ingres (1924).

Nude bent forward, Paris c.1932.

Man Ray had already experimented with the camera-less method of photograms – which he called Rayographs – and with Lee Miller he also invented or rediscovered the technique of solarisation; momentarily turning on the light in the darkroom during the development process, they caused a tone reversal and a kind of dematerialisation of the image that endows it with dreamlike unreality.

Among the many remarkable photographs that Man Ray took of Miller are a couple of solarised profiles, and in the present exhibition there are also solarised portraits taken by Miller, including one of Meret Oppenheim, who was also a model for Man Ray, notably in Erotique voilée (1933).

Miller made a number of other pictures inspired by Man Ray and Surrealism: several nudes, a surprising shot of rats’ tails, and perhaps most memorably Exploding hand (1931), in which a woman’s hand reaching for the door handle of the Guerlain Parfumerie in Paris seems to dissolve in light defracted from scratches made on the glass door by diamond rings. She also became friends with other artists during the years in Paris, especially Picasso, who painted her several times and with whom she most likely had a liaison, and Jean Cocteau, who cast her in his film Le Sang d’un Poète (1930).

Miller left Man Ray in 1932, apparently because he was jealous and possessive. He was devastated and made several famous works dealing with his sense of loss, including a painting of her disembodied lips floating in the sky, and a metronome with a photograph of her eye attached to the end of the inverted pendulum (the metronome was also an instrument used by the surrealists to determine the speed of automatic writing exercises). The Tate Gallery has a short reel about another of these works.

They met again and reconciled in 1937, remaining lifelong friends, but in the meantime Miller had married a wealthy Egyptian and moved to Cairo. There are some memorable photographs from this period of her life, including a view from the top of the Great Pyramid looking down on the vast shadow it cast, and another gazing out through a tear in the flyscreen of a tent towards the endless expanse of the desert.

The cosseted life in Egypt did not really suit her, however, and in 1937 she travelled to Europe, reconnecting with her friends in Paris and meeting the English surrealist Roland Penrose (1900-84), who became her lover and later her husband in 1947, the year their son Antony was born; she and her Egyptian husband separated amicably in 1939.

Detail from Lee Miller’s Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt, 1937.

When war broke out, Miller remained in England, and her strongest work was made during the following years. At the outset of the war, she documented the destruction of the Blitz but also continued her work as a photographer for Vogue, the same publication for which she had once been a model. Normal life did not entirely come to an end with the war or even with the bombing of London, and that included the world of couture.

The violence of war produced its own dislocated surrealist objects, such as her poignant shot of a smashed typewriter, and images of bombed streetscapes speak of the brutal rupture of civilised existence. Yet she also found a way of posing fashion models against the background of ruins and other reminders of conflict in a way that feels like an assertion of life rather than an expression of flippancy or indifference.

In a series of intimate images she documented the lives of women at war, including their various forms of war work, from acting as searchlight operators to packing parachutes. This last subject is in the book but not the exhibition; a young woman, squatting down among hundreds of hanging parachute cords, looks up with complete concentration as she makes sure she is folding the parachute accurately, aware that a man’s life could depend on how attentively she carries out her job.

When the invasion of Europe began in 1944, Miller secured an appointment as a war correspondent attached to the American army, and was in France within five weeks of D-Day, as soon as women correspondents were permitted to go. There are pictures of American troops behind the lines and painful images of field hospitals treating the wounded; and although women correspondents were not allowed at the front line, she did in fact find herself witnessing live fire at Saint-Malo.

With the liberation of one part of France after another, there was retribution for collaborators, many of whom were summarily executed. Women who had slept with German soldiers were publicly humiliated, paraded through the streets of town with shaven heads while crowds jeered at them. Such scenes are not prominent in the exhibition but are reproduced in the book.

Lee Miller’s Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London 1941.

On a happier note there are pictures of Miller’s reunion with old friends like Jean Cocteau after the liberation of Paris, and an especially touching picture of her with Picasso, whom she had gone to visit, completely unexpectedly, at his studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins. This shot – taken apparently with a camera set up on a tripod – was used to promote another recent exhibition, Lee Miller and Picasso – a selection of the more than 1000 photographs she took of the artist – first shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2015.

Far grimmer but perhaps the most important images in her oeuvre are those she took in Germany in the last weeks of the war. There is, for example, a shot of the Nazi mayor of Leipzig who has just committed suicide rather than be tried for his crimes; through the window we can make out the statue of Justice with her scales, standing outside the Town Hall.

Most shocking are the pictures of the liberation of Dachau, with emaciated survivors, skeletal corpses and piles of bones from the incineration ovens, evidence of the greatest crime of the 20th century, carried out in cold blood and yet obsessively, systematically and as a matter of state policy. Perhaps most grisly of all is one picture of a partly-burnt cadaver that was in the oven when the gas was cut off as the Allies approached the camp. The Nazis were still pursuing their extermination program even when it was clear defeat was imminent. She is a model again in the famous shot of Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s own tub; she and her colleague David E. Scherman, who took this picture, had been billeted in the fuehrer’s private apartment in Munich, and the photograph was taken, fortuitously, on the very day that he killed himself.

After the war, Miller did little more serious work. She suffered from depression, exacerbated by post-natal depression after the birth of her son in 1947, and became increasingly alcoholic. According to Antony, she was “not much of a mother”, remote, given to anger and hysteria when not morose or drunk. He much later learnt that she had been raped by a babysitter as a child and later witnessed the drowning of an early boyfriend; he came to believe that these early traumas had bred in her a kind of detachment or dissociation which explained some of her good and bad traits, but that the early trauma had been ultimately compounded or reawakened by the horrors of the war.

Most remarkably, however, Antony had no idea about his mother’s earlier glamorous and adventurous life or her work as a photographer – even though he knew that Picasso and others were family friends – and it was only after her death in 1977 that he and his late wife discovered a cache of papers, of articles she had filed for Vogue and above all her thousands of negatives. He was astounded to find that his mother had been completely unlike the woman he had known throughout his childhood. And he has largely devoted his life since to reconstituting this lost mother and to ensuring that her work achieves the recognition that it deserves.

Lee Miller Surrealist
Heide Museum of Art to April 14

Antony Penrose
Lee Miller: Photographs
Thames & Hudson, 2023