Lee Miller: Fearless

This memorable phrase is how Lee Miller—by turns a fashion model, magazine photographer, studio operator, Surrealist innovator, international adventurer, and battlefield correspondent—summed up her approach to life and creativity. Lee Miller: Fearless is the first comprehensive survey of her photographs in more than 25 years and gathers together the major episodes of her singular career.

Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Intrepid from the first, she moved to Paris at barely 20 years old, simultaneously seeking work in front of and behind the camera. She pioneered Surrealist techniques and broached daring sexual subjects with a readiness that magnetized experimental artists and fashion editors alike. Miller excelled at portraiture as well and pictured a range of cultural figures in the 1930s, most of them personal friends, from Charlie Chaplin to Pablo Picasso. 

By age 30 Miller had run commercial studios on both sides of the Atlantic; taken a star turn in art cinema and become an haute couture icon; and moving on from Paris to Cairo, influenced Egyptian modern art while reinvigorating her own work through travels in Egypt’s deserts. 

Yet she undertook a challenge of an entirely different order during World War II, especially as a correspondent for Vogue accredited with the United States Army in 1944–45. The inhumanities Lee Miller witnessed in Europe, especially at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, brought out her courage and deeply contradictory emotions; the experience, which she chronicled in extensive written and photographic dispatches from the German front, also left her traumatized for a number of years.

Following the war, Miller remade herself once more, gaining renown in England as a chef and gardener, while quietly continuing to lead an artistic life through her final years. Lee Miller died in 1977 on the East Sussex farm she owned with her husband, artist Roland Penrose.

Lee Miller: Fearless is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with Tate Britain and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. 

The exhibition is curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and vice president for strategic art initiatives, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Hilary Floe, senior curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, with Saskia Flower, assistant curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, and Michal Goldschmidt, former assistant curator, Modern British Art, Tate Britain.

CATALOGUE

An accompanying catalogue offers comprehensive look at the work of the groundbreaking photographer, foregrounding her importance as a surrealist artist. Essays draw on new archival research and explore every aspect of Miller’s career, from her early years in Paris, New York, and Cairo to her wartime journalism and late portraits. Additionally, the British novelist, playwright, and poet Deborah Levy offers a personal reflection on Miller and her art. Learn more.

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.