Lee Miller's Works On Display
Lee Miller, who forged an unconventional career going from New York fashion model to Surrealist photographer to war correspondent, is the subject of a new retrospective examining her life and work.
"The Art of Lee Miller," which runs until April 27 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, highlights about 140 photographs spanning from her days modeling for Vogue in the 1920s to her dispatches for Vogue capturing the carnage of World War II. She is believed to be the only female photojournalist working on the front lines during the war.
"The journey from being a model to a wartime correspondent is not the usual career trajectory," said curator Katherine Ware.
Miller (1907-1977) began blazing her path in the 1920s, when the art and journalism worlds both were largely dominated by men. She was an art student and chorus line dancer in New York when Vogue founder Conde Nast spotted the blond-bobbed beauty on a Manhattan street in 1926. She soon became a model and the magazine's personification of the 1920s modern woman.
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Modeling was the means to an end for Miller, who moved to Paris in 1929 in pursuit of a photography career. She returned to New York and established herself as a commercial photographer and an artist, after a tumultuous artistic and romantic relationship with artist Man Ray.
After a brief marriage to an Egyptian businessman, Miller married Surrealist painter Roland Penrose in 1937. The pair moved to London, where her work as a combat photographer for Vogue included the London blitz, the Normandy aftermath, the liberation of Paris and the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.
Her accompanying essays were harshly critical of the complicity of German citizens in Nazi atrocities. A Vogue layout juxtaposed photos of German children at play with piles of burned bones and of "orderly villages" versus "orderly furnaces to burn bodies." Another, titled "Believe It," showed a pile of starved bodies and a man hanging from an iron hook at Buchenwald.
"She's the perfect liaison between the reality of war and the magazine's audience," curator Julia Dolan said. "She's the ideal vehicle to present these images."
The exhibit also includes a picture of Miller taking a bath in Hitler's vacant Munich apartment, her muddy combat boots on the bathroom floor. The mundane decor and furnishings convey a chilling interplay of evil and mediocrity.
In another photo, the beautiful daughter of a Leipzig government official whose family committed suicide by poison after the fall of Germany is radiant, lying on a sofa and uncomfortably reminiscent of a magazine spread.
"During the war, you see her bringing together her different worlds: Surrealism, fashion and documentary," Dolan said.
Miller and Penrose moved after the war to the English countryside, where Miller struggled with alcoholism, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder before dying of cancer in 1977. She had effectively abandoned photography for domesticity by the mid-1950s, hosting Surrealism-inspired dinners of blue spaghetti and cauliflower in pink sauce for Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and other artist friends.
Well-known during her working life, Miller closed the book on her past and became largely forgotten for her achievements. Even her son, Antony Penrose, was unaware of her accomplishments until he found boxes of photographs in the family's attic after her death.
"The woman I had known as a useless drunk became revealed as the one who produced the photos in the show. I had known nothing of her career," he said. "I wished I had known her better and understood her better, then maybe we would not have wasted so much time fighting."
Penrose now maintains the Lee Miller Archives at the family's former home in East Sussex, England, devoted to scholars of her life and work.
"The Art of Lee Miller" began at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to celebrate the centenary of Miller's birth in 1907. After Philadelphia, it will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.