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<\/p>\nIn art and in life, the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-77) was a free spirit. A key figure in the Surrealist movement, her trailblazing work slipped between art, fashion and reportage. She was the original model-turned-photographer, working for Cond\u00e9 Nast on both sides of the lens, posing regularly for Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene before deciding she \u201cwould rather take a picture than be one\u201d, according to one of the many legends that cling to her memory.<\/p>\n
Miller sought out Man Ray in Paris to be her mentor and they became lovers and collaborators. She was a muse to Pablo Picasso, and appeared in Jean Cocteau\u2019s classic of avant-garde cinema, The Blood of a Poet (1930). She lived in New York, Paris, London and Cairo before putting down roots in East Sussex with her second husband, the artist Roland Penrose. But not before becoming one of the first female war correspondents, capturing the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. At the end of the war in Europe, she famously staged a photograph of herself in Adolf Hitler\u2019s bath.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s 1941 image of model Elizabeth Cowell, set against the backdrop of a bombed-out London \u00a9 Lee Miller Archives<\/p>\n
Colourful bits<\/p>\n
It is therefore impossible to separate Miller\u2019s life from her work, but has her mythology overshadowed her status as an artist? That is one of the key questions that the curator Hilary Floe had at the forefront of her mind when putting together Tate Britain\u2019s survey of the artist, which opens this month. \u201cFor a long, long time, what has been\u00a0picked up on are the most colourful bits: her lovers, being\u00a0painted by Picasso,\u201d Floe says. \u201cHopefully, there is now an appetite for a story that doesn\u2019t get overshadowed by the fact that she was beautiful and very close to very important male artists. Because, as true as that is, it doesn\u2019t matter that much.\u201d<\/p>\n
Floe says that she and the curatorial team did not want to lose the spirit of adventure and self-determination that guided Miller\u2019s art-making. But achieving a balance between her work and her backstory was part of the challenge in presenting the UK\u2019s largest survey of a photographer who has been the subject of a dozen major institutional exhibitions over the past 12 years, not to mention a recent movie (Lee, 2023, starring Kate Winslet).<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to reduce her career to a husk by removing all biography. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re trying to focus on the biography that helps us understand the work, rather than getting into her personal life for no reason,\u201d Floe says. \u201cSo, we asked ourselves, \u2018Is this relevant to the work?\u2019 We chose the most interesting work we could find, rather than choosing work to help illustrate some facet of her life story. It\u2019s just about putting the emphasis on her professional life and how that was driven by this intelligence and determination and bravery, rather than by chance encounters with men.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Lee Miller, Tate Britain, London, 2 October-15 February 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In art and in life, the American photographer Lee Miller (1907-77) was a free spirit. A key figure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,15941,117701,115669,8212,95960],"class_list":{"0":"post-183995","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-exhibitions","16":"tag-female-artists","17":"tag-lee-miller","18":"tag-photography","19":"tag-tate-britain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}