I’ve found myself with a bit of a problem recently: I just can’t stop thinking about Lee Miller. If you don’t know her by name, you may recognise her mouth from the enormous pair of ruby red lips floating over a forest in Man Ray’s Observatory Time: The Lovers.
Or perhaps you know her unblinking eye, tacked to the pendulum bar of a metronome, swinging to and fro in another of Man Ray’s well known works.
Indestructible Object (or Object to Be Destroyed). Museum: © Man Ray Trust
Miller is known by these body parts in the same way that Elizabeth Sidall’s hair is synonymous with Pre-Raphaelite works by John Everett Millais or Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Or in the way Naomi Campbell is known for her walk. Or Dora Maar is famous for the way Pablo Picasso distorted her face.
Nevertheless, when I want to learn more about these women and the artists they inspired, ‘but also’ is the phrase that follows. Siddal, Maar and Campbell are art’s most famous models and muses, but also artists, pioneers, gamechangers themselves. Lee Miller was a model, a muse, but also an artist. Also a photographer. Also a war correspondent. Also a pioneer. Also a gourmet chef. Miller had so many lives, such a string of high-profile lovers (who never seemed to fall out of love with her), and travelled to such an array of locations, that perhaps somewhat crudely, I have come to think of her as the Forrest Gump of the art world; Someone whose life is a dazzling compilation of improbably interesting things that happened to them. Someone who made things happen and made them look easy, even when they were not.
Lee Miller, Self Portrait. Photograph: © Lee Miller Archives
For instance, Miller may never have lived to become anything if, as the story goes, at the age of 19 a man hadn’t pulled her out of the path of an oncoming car in New York City. That man was publishing magnate Condé Nast, who promptly put Miller on the cover of Vogue magazine. Her striking looks and strong personality quickly set her apart in an era dominated by models with a more demure representation of femininity. However, this dazzling career path came to an abrupt end when - unbeknownst to Miller - her photograph was used to advertise menstrual products. Miller was the first real person used to advertise products of this kind and, this was, it seems, one taboo too far. Her modelling career was ruined.
Another story tells how Miller left New York for Paris, sought out Man Ray in his favourite café, told him she was his new student (Man Ray didn’t take on students) and promptly followed him to Biarritz the following day where she did indeed became his student, assistant, muse and eventually lover.
Man Ray shaving by Lee Miller. Photograph: © Lee Miller Archives
Stories like these have made Miller and her work something of an obsession for me. This period of her life alone is replete with enough big names and astounding accounts to fill books and feature films, the most recent being Lee (2023) starring Kate Winslet. One of my favourite accounts is of Miller and Man Ray inventing the photographic technique of solarisation: she accidentally turned on the dark room light during development because a mouse ran over her foot.
Miller continued to produce her own photography while modelling for Man Ray, and he in turn became the subject of many of her works. Eventually, she left him for Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, who she married and moved to Cairo where she took a series of Surrealist photographs of empty desert landscapes. One such photograph, Portrait of Space, inspired Magritte to paint The Kiss (1938).
Portrait of Space by Lee Miller. Photograph: © Lee Miller Archives
Then, on a solo trip to France, Miller met poet and artist Roland Penrose, with whom she began an affair and eventually married in 1947. In the same year, Picasso painted a portrait of Miller, and Miller photographed Picasso. These stories interest me because I’ve never heard of Man Ray or Picasso described as Miller’s model or muse. And yet from her work, it’s evident they fulfilled this role as much for her as she did for them.
Picasso and Dora Maar by Lee Miller. Photograph: © Lee Miller Archives
Miller’s career took a significant turn during World War II, when she became one of the few female war correspondents accredited by the U.S. Army. Her photojournalistic images of the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau are haunting testaments to the atrocities of the conflict. Miller’s commitment to documenting the war with a Surrealist’s eye framed the incomprehensible enormity of the war into raw vignettes that viewers could comprehend and process. Yet her most famous photojournalistic works are the photos of her with her colleague and lover David E. Scherman taken in 1944, when the pair broke into Adolf Hitler’s abandoned apartment in Munich and took turns posing in his bathtub.
Female war correspondent Lee Miller who covered the U.S. Army in the European Theater during World War II (U.S. Army Center of Military History), 1943.
In true Miller style, the photos are full of deliberate staging and symbolism; she sponges her shoulder beside a carefully placed classical statue perched on the sink. There is a framed photograph of Hitler leaning on the tiles, and her boots have tracked the dirt of liberated concentration camps over the pristine white bath mat. The photos Miller took of Sherman, who was Jewish, are framed differently, consciously including the shower apparatus above the bath to recall the gas chambers used by the Nazis to murder prisoners. Combined, the portraits of Sherman and Miller mark an end to the war that isn’t euphoric or celebratory, but tired, hard-won, and without a clear vision of the future.
Ophelia, 1852, John Everett Millais.
To me, these photographs also call to mind Millais’ Ophelia, painted almost 100 years prior. Over a period of five months, Elizabeth Siddal posed submerged in a bathtub for hours each day while Millais painted. She even contracted pneumonia in the process. While Miller’s stint in Hitler’s bath was brief, she too suffered for her art, struggling with PTSD after the war and self-medicating with alcohol and sleeping tablets. Though she found solace in cooking, creating recipes with names such as ‘Muddles Green Green Chicken’ and ‘Persian Carpet’, her artistry with the camera sadly faded from public perception, until her son, Antony Penrose, recovered boxes of her works from the attic after her death in 1997.
Lee Miller in her Kitchen. Photograph: © Lee Miller Archives
In cases like Miller’s and Siddal’s, and many other models and muses who punctuate art history, it can be difficult to differentiate between the pictured persona and the real person. Even harder to flip the script and talk about their work in the same way we do that of their male contemporaries. Yet I think Lee Miller’s life and work have such a grip on me because once you learn about all the work made by her, you wonder how you could ever have only known the work others made of her. Still, progress in this area is happening; Tate Modern’s 2023 exhibition ‘The Rosettis’ emphatically spotlighted Siddal’s work; the V&A’s ‘Naomi in Fashion’ exhibition (running until April 2025) highlights how Campbell’s modelling career changed how we think about fashion; and a Lee Miller exhibition is slated to open at Tate Britain in 2025. I’m excited to see where it leads…
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