Lee Miller:
Pretty as a picture

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

When Lee Miller was posing nude models in contorted, abstract positions during her early career as a surrealist photographer in post-depression Paris, she was blissfully oblivious to the grotesque subjects that would one day meet her camera’s eye.
Similarly, as she strived to employ her chosen medium to comment against the objectification of women, Miller never could have imagined that a contemporary political leader and his nation would soon dehumanize and attempt to exterminate an entire race of people.
That perhaps is the greatest irony of The Art of Lee Miller, a new exhibition of the trailblazing American’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Born Elizabeth Miller in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1907, she overcame a sexual assault by a family acquaintance as a young girl to become first a world-renowned fashion model, then an artistic and commercial photographer, and, finally, a photojournalist documenting the London blitzkrieg and the Allied advance toward Berlin.
She was the only known accredited female photographer to travel with the troops across Europe. Many of her war photos, including harrowing images of the Dachau Buchenwald concentration camp taken soon after its liberation, are among some 150 mostly vintage prints included in the chronological collection.
The photos of emaciated Holocaust victims stacked in common graves provide a poignant climax to an exhibition exploring many aspects of the subject’s professional and personal lives, including her two marriages, her close friendships with leading artists of the day, such as Pablo Picasso, and her long-overlooked legacy.
"It’s often been said that the only real way to prepare to be a war correspondent is first to be a surrealist," said Antony Penrose, Miller’s son and the conservator of her archives at the family’s longtime home in Sussex, England.
After debuting at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum last year, the exhibition arrived in Philadelphia last week for its lone East Coast showing. It will remain on display at the Art Museum through April 27, when it will travel to San Francisco.
Visitors to the exhibition will first be astounded by Miller’s disarming beauty, much like Vogue publisher Condé Nast was when he discovered the then 19-year-old on a New York City street in 1926. As the story goes, Nast happened to be transfixed by the chorus dancer and aspiring actress as she unknowingly walked into the path of an oncoming truck. The fashion magnate saved Miller from certain death that day and put her on her first magazine cover a year later.
Miller’s short wavy hair and tall, slender figure were an ideal fit for the fashions of the time, and her star rose rapidly. But at the height of her modeling success, her appearance in a print ad for a feminine hygiene product effectively ruined her career in high fashion.
"None of the couturiers wanted the ‘Kotex girl’ modeling their dresses," Kate Ware, the museum’s curator for photographs, said.
Undaunted, Miller traveled to Paris, walked into the studio of Philadelphia-born surrealist photographer Man Ray and announced herself as his assistant.
As a child in upstate New York, Miller had been both a frequent subject of her engineer father’s own hobbyist photography as well as a novice student of the medium.
"Lee Miller would later say that she would rather take a photograph than be one," Ware said.
Miller’s natural ability for seeing the abstract within commonplace subjects allowed her to demonstrate photographically a genre that painters of the time were still defining for the canvas.
Miller photographed typical surrealist subjects like carousels, reflective surfaces and amorphous nudes. For one piece, she convinced a surgeon to supply her with a woman’s amputated breast, which Miller laid on a plate amid an otherwise proper table setting.
"I think she was saying, ‘Here guys. You like breasts so much. Have one; eat it,’" Penrose said.
Many other of the artist’s images show portions of women, perhaps, with their heads and limbs obscured.
In addition to their professional relationship, Miller and Ray became lovers. Their collaboration in both regards ended in 1932, prompting Miller to return to New York, where she opened a commercial studio with her brother, Erik.
Using her personal fame and professional connections, Miller developed an impressive clientele for portrait and promotional work. In 1933, she made her final appearance as a fashion model in an edition of Vogue. Uniquely, she photographed herself for a series on women’s hair bands.
That same year, leading art collector Julien Levy’s gallery hosted the lone solo exhibition organized for Miller during her lifetime. Levy was a major supporter of her work. Many Miller pieces were among the vast Levy collection given to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2001.
Unfulfilled by studio work, Miller married prominent Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved with him to Cairo. The unfamiliar landscape and architecture supplied her with a renewed inspiration to take pictures. Her 1937 Portrait of Space depicts a long view of the vast desert through the torn screen window of a seemingly remote cabin.
The image would inspire a painting by René Magritte, La Baiser (The Kiss), in 1938.
Miller’s first marriage would not survive the decade for various reasons, including the many restrictions placed upon women in Egypt. She traveled to Europe often and on one such excursion met and fell in love with English painter and curator Roland Penrose.
In 1939, she moved to London to live with Penrose, ignoring warnings from American diplomatic officials and friends to flee the impending war and return home.
While working as a contributing fashion photographer for British Vogue, she spent much of her personal time documenting the German air raids of London through her lens. The introduction of wartime objects and activities into the classic city provided an ideal juxtaposition for Miller’s surrealist sensibility.
Although Americans were largely insulated from the deteriorating situation in Europe at the time, her efforts to push for publication of war-related photos in Vogue helped raise the consciousness of Americans to the conflict.
After earning accreditation as a correspondent, she followed the Allied troops onto the continent within days of the landing at Normandy. She photographed powerful scenes of the war, such as surgeons operating on casualties in field hospitals and the wounded being loaded onto evacuation aircraft.
She delivered photo essays from the liberated Paris in 1944 and, the following year, from the death camps established by the Nazis about the German countryside.
"What’s incredible is that they had the courage to insert these (photos) in a fashion magazine," Ware said.
Miller was the woman famously photographed by Life magazine’s David E. Scherman bathing in the bathtub of Hitler’s Munich apartment in March 1945.
The war experiences took a toll on Miller, as they did with many who witnessed the brutality firsthand. She divorced Bey, returned to England and married Penrose in 1947. Antony Penrose was born later that year.
Miller never returned to professional photography, preferring instead to develop her cooking expertise and entertain guests at their bucolic estate. She continued taking pictures of family and friends in this setting.
Upon Miller’s death in 1977, her son discovered a treasure trove of photos and journals in the attic of the Sussex home.
"I knew nothing of her career," Antony Penrose said. "I was amazed when we went up into the attic and found all of these boxes."
Through those archives, Penrose says he has gained a deep understanding of his mother that he never had during her lifetime. Those who see The Art of Lee Miller will surely do the same. ••
For information about the exhibition, call 215-763-8100 or visit www.philamuseum.org
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com