Many have deemed Lee Miller a “muse” for her
mysterious, sexual beauty and her status as inspiring lover, wife
or object of desire to prominent artists such as Man Ray, Roland
Penrose and Pablo Picasso.
Even though half of the works in the J. Paul Getty
Museum’s current exhibition “Surrealist Muse: Lee
Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray” are Miller’s own
photographs, the exhibition title focuses on her role as the woman
behind the men rather than as an accomplished artist standing on
her own.
The show, which runs through June 15, documents Miller’s
life from her modeling career to her tumultuous love affair with
Ray to her work as a war correspondent and photographer in Europe
during World War II.
With the exhibition and an upcoming movie about her life (Nicole
Kidman is said to have bought the rights to her biography), Miller
is finally recognized not only as a muse but as an artist herself
who influenced a generation.
Most of Miller’s photos in the exhibit were first
uncovered by Antony Penrose, Miller’s son with Roland
Penrose, who found 40,000 negatives and 12,000 of his
mother’s prints in her attic years after her death.
“I knew nothing of my mother,” he said. “I
knew nothing of her art. These (photographs) spoke to me about her
libertarianism, her love of humanity, love of
surrealism.”
Miller started her frenzied life and career as a model after
being discovered by a Condé Nast proprietor. The first in the
United States to model for a feminine product, Miller caused a
scandal with her Kotex ad in 1928, after which she fled to
Paris.
In Paris she starred in Jean Cocteau’s “Le Sang
D’Un Poet” and became an apprentice to photographer
Ray, which led to their romantic involvement.
Miller is said to be the inspiring force, if not the inventor,
of Ray’s noted solarization technique, which occurs when a
negative is exposed to a burst of light while wet and still being
developed, rendering an eerie, part-positive, part-negative effect.
According to Penrose, the story is that while developing photos in
the dark room, Miller suddenly turned on the bright white light
when a rat ran over her foot. When Ray attempted to save them by
dumping them in the fixer, he ended up being pleased with the
accidental second exposure which later became a hallmark of his
artistic technique.
The exhibit displays a vast collection of Ray’s photos in
which either Miller had collaborated or was the subject, revealing
her profound influence on his artistry. One relic on display is a
page from Ray’s journal of a drawing of Miller’s face
and her name obsessively scrawled repeatedly on the page.
Working as Ray’s apprentice soon led to Miller’s own
work as a photographer in which she sought to capture elements of
surrealism.
A close friend of surrealists Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte,
many of Miller’s works show homage to their influences. For
example, “Untitled, Paris” depicts a sparse Parisian
scene, the Eiffel Tower dark yet diminutive against the
overpowering snow, with a man carrying an umbrella (a motif of
Magritte’s art) visible in the background.
“There’s a surrealist element to all of her
photos,” Penrose said. “The umbrella man in
“˜Paris’ is like she just added a little icon of
Magritte.”
But Miller’s artistry in her photographs wasn’t
limited to works that she did for the sake of art. During World War
II, she was the only female combat photographer able to move
independently in the European war zones. She sent some of her
pictures to Vogue magazine, and began a career of photojournalism.
In these works she gave a hard-hitting portrayal of war-torn
France, yet still included some surrealist touches.
In one intimate photograph, “Leipzig, Germany,”
Miller shows a young German girl, beautiful and glossy and
appearing as if she were in the state of sleep, showing
Miller’s surrealist aim to join dream and fantasy with a
rational world. Yet a photo next to this one zooms out from the
same shot, revealing the girl to actually be dead next to her
mother after completing a suicide pact after the fall of
Hitler’s regime.
At the end of the war, Miller was disillusioned with the visions
of Holocaust victims and other atrocities that she witnessed and
soon became a recluse and an alcoholic. Yet her vast collection of
photos have left behind fragments of the vibrant woman who captured
the heart and eye of Ray, Picasso and her husband Roland
Penrose.
“The photograph “˜Picnic at Mougins’ that my
father took always makes me smile,” Penrose said. “Amid
the carefree, bare-breasted women, my father is sitting there as if
he landed in heaven. This is the perfect representation of a
repressed English man discovering happiness. Lee Miller was his
liberation.”
But more than an inspiration to other people, Miller was her own
artist, her own muse.
“First and foremost, she was a surrealist. But beyond that
she was a libertine,” Penrose said. “She thought you
should not be bound by convention. And she wasn’t ““
both in her behavior and her art.”