Lee Miller, In Front of and Behind the Camera

From the 1920s through the 1950s, she consistently undertook new challenges, carving out a dynamic and mercurial career that spanned fashion modeling, street and studio photography, and wartime journalism. Fearless, the first extensive survey of her photography in the United States in nearly 20 years, shines a spotlight on the intrepid nature of this multifaceted talent.

As a teenager, the restless and adventuresome Miller left the comfort of suburban Poughkeepsie and entered the fledgling glamour industry of New York City. There she modeled for the fast-growing magazine Vogue, a publication at the epicenter of the Roaring Twenties. She soon moved to Paris with the aim of working at Vogue as both a model and a photographer.

Collaborating with her newfound lover, the expatriate American Surrealist artist Man Ray, Miller co-invented darkroom techniques and furthered the playful group dynamics that made Surrealism such an innovative force in European culture between the World Wars. Through her work with Man Ray and similarly free spirits such as model Tanja Ramm, polymath artist Meret Oppenheim, filmmaker and playwright Jean Cocteau, and fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, Miller came into her own in the early 1930s as an artist of sexual daring and genuine creative ambition.

The exhibition showcases Miller’s startlingly original nudes and still lifes as well as works that gained her the most recognition during these years: her portraiture, street photography, and modeling. Photographs of and by Miller appeared in print, at times side by side—a unique accomplishment for a fashion model. She opened a commercial studio in Paris and then another in New York.

In 1934, however, Miller cast aside these multiple achievements along with her fleeting celebrity when she married an Egyptian businessman and relocated to Cairo. Her life became fully international, with solo travels into Egypt’s four deserts as well as parts of Romania and elsewhere. Toward the end of the 1930s, Miller revived her Surrealist friend circles during lively summer vacations spent in the south of France. Seemingly ready for a steadier phase of life, Miller finally “settled down” in 1939 with Sir Roland Penrose, the British artist, and moved to London, where she rejoined Vogue and became a staff photographer at the magazine.

Then came the return of war. Miller and Penrose weathered the frightening Nazi bombardment campaign, which lasted from September 1940 to May 1941, as regular civilians. Miller initially fulfilled a Vogue imperative to produce fashion shoots that boosted wartime morale, including a “stylish” portrait of her future battlefield companion David E. Scherman, a reporter for Life magazine.

But Miller grew determined to do more. She petitioned Vogue to publish images directly reflective of the conflict, such as English sites ruined through bombing. Then, she applied to the United States Army for permission and credentials that would allow her to report from the battlefield. In 1944, after a lengthy wait, Miller at last crossed the English Channel, and over the course of the next two years she published a veritable slew of articles in Vogue on the course of the war and its aftermath.

Two rooms in the exhibition are devoted to Miller’s war reporting, tracing her path from France through Hungary and (back to) Romania. Through rare magazine mock-ups (known as tear sheets) and copies of Vogue, as well as dozens of original photographs, visitors can fully appreciate the scope and quality of Miller’s journalism. Certainly, she brought her artistic eye to bear when she made news photographs; for an article celebrating the August 1944 recapture of St. Malo, a strategic port city in northwest France, Miller redirected her prior interest in windows and pictures within pictures to frame a view onto Allied bombs over the harbor. 

Yet her pursuits in Surrealism, which had left Miller attuned to the irrationality of human behavior, came out in deeper ways that she did not necessarily write or talk about. This is most evident in her coverage of the system of atrocity built in Nazi Germany, which Miller witnessed during a two-month tour of the country in spring 1945.

The final room of Lee Miller: Fearless is devoted to this dark chapter and Miller’s commentary on it. Her talent as a writer is given special prominence here through quotations from drafts for Vogue articles, private letters, and the published versions of these articles. A recorded voice actor recites excerpts from Miller’s writings as well. The courage she showed in confronting German brutality, but also Germans’ widespread, feigned ignorance of Nazi slave labor and genocide, becomes evident in her frankly worded dispatches from the concentration camps in Buchenwald and Dachau and from Hitler’s residences in Munich and the Bavarian countryside. In the unsparing pictures that Miller made in these and other places, she often stood 10 feet or less from her subjects.

Though celebrated for her photographs at the close of World War II, Miller began fading from recognition soon thereafter. In 1972–73, Art Institute photography curator David Travis befriended the art dealer Julien Levy, long since retired from his pioneering Julien Levy Gallery in Manhattan, where Miller had her one and only solo exhibition in 1932. Travis brought the core of Levy’s photography holdings into the Art Institute’s collection, selecting gem after gem by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy. Alongside these established artists, Travis chose no fewer than 12 photographs by Miller. He later wrote to introduce himself to the artist, who by then was herself retired and living with Penrose on a farm estate south of London. Thus a friendship was born between this museum and the Miller-Penrose family, one that yielded Miller’s first retrospective exhibition here in 1990 and, now, this second, revised and updated assessment of Miller’s many talents.

Showcasing Miller’s legacy as a defining voice for youthful glamour, aesthetic and personal liberation, and historical conscience, Lee Miller: Fearless is now open.

—Matthew S. Witkovsky, vice president for strategic art initiatives and Sandor Chair of Photography and Media

Sponsors

Special thanks to the Lee Miller Archives and Farleys House & Gallery Trust for their generous loans to this exhibition.

Lead support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris. 

Major support is provided by Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Suzette and Ally Bulley, Tara Hirshberg, and The Opatrny Family Foundation. 

Additional support is contributed by Anne L. Kaplan. 

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