Culture Maven: Lee Miller’s life at SFMOMA

September 13, 2008

Lee Miller, Self Portrait in Headband, 1932. @Lee Miller Archives,
England 2008.

Lee Miller’s life at SFMOMA
by Geneva Anderson

Most of us are vaguely familiar with Lee Miller… a talented artist born 100 years ago who lived her life both in front of and behind the camera. She began as high-fashion model for Vogue, was Man Ray’s muse and apprentice and the celebrated subject of a great number of portraits by famous artists. Miller’s own work embraced many different types of photography— from her striking surrealistic images and portraits of figures like Pablo Picasso and Charley Chaplin to her fashion and advertising work, to her documentary photography in Egypt and Romania to her well-known photo-essays of WWII through the post war period, when she snapped pics of her famous house guests at work. SFMOMA’s “The Art of Lee Miller,” which closes Sunday, September 14, examines Lee Miller in her glory and also manages to expose a great deal of her shadow side, equally as compelling. The retrospective, which includes roughly 140 of her works, originated at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and was curated locally by Sandra Phillips, SF MOMA’s Senior Photography Curator.
Is she worthy of all this attention? Her war reportage alone qualifies her. The astonishing breadth of her life stands in addition—a remarkable feat to some, others hold her beauty and how she capitalized on it against her. Miller described her life as a “water-soaked jigsaw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design.” Her extraordinary career and life are here, spread out in all their pieces—defying stereotypes and open to interpretation.

While Miller is well-known for her looks and the famous artists she bumped arms with and bedded, her childhood was no picnic. Born Elizabeth Miller in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, she grew up on a farm with her two brothers. A 1985 biography published by her son, Anthony Penrose, revealed that she was raped at age seven by a family “friend.” If that were not harrowing enough, she suffered with gonorrhea for seven years until a treatment came out when she was 14. As a teen, she frequently posed nude for her father, a serious amateur photographer. One of his portraits, included in the show, from 1928, reveals a detached Miller, physically present but emotionally vacant. Those early traumas may explain the self-defense mechanisms and evasive behaviors that her son has written were her “hedgehog spikes.” What we do know is that under the glamour, Lee Miller was a steely and driven survivor. She positioned herself to capture a series of remarkable events in world history on film and was committed to her creative process throughout her life.

At age 18, Miller left for Paris where she studied stage design. She returned to the New York to continue her studies and was spotted by the publisher Conde Nast and catapulted to Vogue cover girl fame. She credited Edward Steichen, Conde Nast’s chief photographer, whom she sat for, for inspiring her to study photography and for a letter of introduction to Man Ray. When she moved back to Paris in 1929, she took up with Man Ray, as his assistant and lover, helping him refine solarization techniques and honing own her skills. She quickly became the muse of the Surrealist movement, inspiring

iconic imagery. Man Ray’s radiant “Lee Miller: Neck” (1929) hails from this period.

By the 1930’s, Miller had sufficient experience to open her own portraiture studio in New York, Lee Miller Studios. A good portrait, Miller told Mario Amaya, catches its subject “not when he is unaware of it but when he is his most natural self.” Miller shot portraits for Warner Brothers and commercial works for advertising agencies and cosmetics companies such as Elizabeth Arden, Camay, Saks Fifth Avenue, etc. She also made a number of solarized portraits, such as “Floating Head (Mary Taylor) (1933), reminiscent of Man Ray. Her own “Self Portrait in Headband” (1933), for Vogue, shot in her studio, evokes the pure glamour of the era. The lighting and composition are masterful as are the details–Miller’s coiffure, velvet wrap and sofa. Miller’s plastic tortoise shell headband, the advertising focus, is a curious detail in presence of her captivating beauty. She lamented that much of her work from this period went unsigned.

Miller shut her studio down in 1934, married the prominent Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey and set sail for Cairo, stepping into an atmosphere much like that depicted in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Overall, this was a flat creative period. She did not parlay her husband’s extraordinary connections into any large projects. Instead, she took to the streets with her conspicuous Rolleiflex and made several stabs at capturing whatever she encountered, largely complicated by the fact that she was spotted first by her subjects. She later took solace in desert expeditions where she captured remarkable architectural forms, such as the breast-like domes of Wadi Natrun monastery (1936) or the richly patterned Red Sea dunes “The Procession,” (1937), evocative of Paul Strand.

After a series of encounters with the British Surrealist Roland Penrose, who welcomed her into his Bohemian circle of famous avant-garde artists, Miller’s spirit and creativity seemed to soar. She left her husband and set off for Bucharest, Romania, with Penrose, and thus began a 40 year collaboration that would lead to marriage. They traveled to the Carpathian Mountains to record folk music for the Romanian national archive. Miller captured rural village life, sharpening her recording eye for her documentary work to follow. Her Surrealist sensitivities powerfully informed her gaze, from the odd rubber shoes made from car tires she photographed to the crosses in local cemeteries.

Miller’s strongest and most memorable work was done during WWII. One of six female

accredited war correspondents, she was the only female photojournalist officially active in combat areas during WWII. She covered the fighting in Normandy, the Liberation of Paris, the Nazi death camps and the closing scenes of war. British Vogue or “Brogue” commissioned and published—sometimes in partnership with Vogue, New York—her remarkable stories and photo essays. Her reportage from this period—in words and photos– and the actual issues of Vogue, spread out in glass curios with her work is the exhibition’s most riveting aspect.

Despite her excellent experience, connections and fame, the job was not easy to secure. She started unpaid in 1940 at “Brogue” and turned up day after day trying to make herself useful until a position opened up. From 1940-44, Miller photographed war-time London and was rewarded by seeing her photos published regularly–often full page—and fully credited. She soon became Brogue’s most prolific photographer, competing with Beaton.

“Where is fashion going?” Brogue asked a panel of experts in September, 1944. Miller’s powerful answer came in the form of her first war reportage, “Unarmed Warriors,” a visceral essay about front-line nursing in the aftermath of Normandy. One of the most interesting aspects of this show is the opportunity to reflect back on history, through Vogue, a publication which has since slipped greatly. The bizarre juxtaposition of Vogue’s high fashion and advertising glitz interspersed with Miller’s war reportage— stacks of skeletal bodies from the Buchenwald Camp at Weimar—is hard to swallow on many levels. We wonder…how did Miller summon the strength juggle this all? In October, 1944, she photographed bombs bursting during the assault of St. Malo. In November 1944, she created a spread about the difficult conditions dressmakers faced in launching the Paris Collections, posing one model beside a bullet-riddled plate glass window looking onto the Place Vendome. And on it went, flip-flopping between fashion and horror. Miller’s world was one of successive levels of complexity, horror and absurdity. She managed to keep the pins in the air, the ultimate surreal act of juggling. Sensitive to light and drama, her best work exhibits a rich stark beauty, no matter the topic. Vogue called the shots as to what was published. As she tracked the war to the front, much of what she considered her best work was deemed too raw for publication. Her correspondence just before she died lament’s that many of her photos disappeared either during the war or had been thrown by Conde Nast in the years that followed.

The atrocities enraged Miller. Instead of just writing about Germany complicity in the Nazi horror, she spoke through images. She staged a perfectly lit and composed portrait of the pretty young daughter of the Burgermeister of Leipzig post-suicide (1945). This stands as a Surrealist illustration of what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” Under the title “Hitleriana,” (July, 1945) Miller gave Vogue readers a spectacular photo tour of Hitler’s Munich apartment to put closure on the war. It was in this apt that she posed for David Scherman’s famous “Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub” (1945) where she bathes naked in Hitler’s tub, her boots in the foreground, caked with mud from Dachau.

Miller wrapped up her reporting with post-war stints in Vienna, Hungary and Romania. She returned to London exhausted at age 39. In May, 1947, she and Penrose married and four months later, their son, Tony, was born. Suffering from post-partum depression and likely PTSD, Miller slumped. In 1949, she and Penrose moved out of London to Farley Farm, in Sussex. During the lackluster 1950’s, they entertained a steady stream of international art-world friends—such as Miro, Picasso, Richard Hamilton, Alfred Barr, the director of New York MOMA. Miller became moody, cooked passionately and drank. Both she and Penrose had dalliances. “Working Guests” her last Vogue project (1953), depicts her famous guests performing various farm chores with serious poses. Alfred Barr is depicted feeding the pigs. Saul Steinberg wrestles a garden hose.

Miller compartmentalized her life, hiding her many accomplishments from her son to unravel posthumously. Just before she died of cancer, in 1977, she took steps to recover some of her photographic past, answering correspondence from curators but it was her son who worked tirelessly after she was gone to make sense of the puzzle.