Lee Miller, From Vogue Model To War Photographer: A Captivating Exhibition At Paris Musée D’Art Moderne

David E. Scherman, dressed for war, a portrait by artist, fashion model, war photographerLee Miller

Dressed For War, by Lee Miller: A portrait of David E. Scherman, photographer and war correspondent for Time Magazine. Scherman, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose remained friends until the end of their lives.

Lee Miller Archives, England 2013.

From the glamorous worlds of New York, London and Paris fashion to the battlefields of World War II Europe, American photographer Lee Miller lived one of the most extraordinary artistic lives of the 20th century.

Now the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MaM) is retracing that remarkable journey in Lee Miller, a major retrospective spanning her career from 1929 to 1955. The exhibition — the largest devoted to Miller in France in more than two decades — presents nearly 250 photographs, including iconic images and previously unseen works and is one of the artistic events of the season..

Miller constantly reinvented herself and this retrospective celebrates her many lives from fashion model and muse to surrealist artist, fashion photographer, portraitist and pioneering war reporter and photographer.

Accredited by the U.S. army during World War II, she became one of the few female photographers to document the liberation of Europe, including the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with Tate Britain and the Art Institute of Chicago, follows Miller’s career from her beginnings in New York to her years in Paris with Man Ray, her time in Egypt, the Blitz in London, her historic wartime reporting across Europe and her final years in London.

ForbesMatisse 1941-1954: A Dazzling Exhibition Of Late Genius Worth A Trip To ParisBy Cecilia Rodriguez

Born Elizabeth Miller in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, her start was as precocious as it was violent: “Raped at seven by a family friend, she posed nude for her father Theodore, an engineer and amateur photographer whose stereoscopic visions embraced the nascent curves of her adolescent body,” writes Virginie Huet for the exhibition’s catalogue.

Lee Miller, Sought-After Fashion Model

Lee Miller, wearing a black evening dress, photographed by Edward Steichen for Vogue in 1928 at Conde Nast’s apartment.

Conde Nast via Getty Images

Miller first rose to fame after Condé Nast placed her on the cover of Vogue in 1927, launching a successful international modeling career working in New York, London and Paris.

Lee Miller wearing straw hat designed by Lanvin, photographed by Edward Steichen for Vogue in 1928.

Conde Nast via Getty Images

Organized in six sections, combining both chronological and thematic approaches, the exhibition opens with a group of portraits of Lee Miller taken by some of the greatest photographers and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s – Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton and George Hoyningen-Huene among them.

Becoming one of the most sought-after fashion models for magazines, embodying the archetypical modern, emancipated, androgynous and active woman, she emerges as a prominent figure in late-1920s New York.

A large reproduction of US artist and photographer Man Ray’s “Solarised Portrait of Lee Miller”

AFP via Getty ImagesAll Begins With Beauty

“It all begins with beauty,” Le Figaro declared.

She was tall and blonde, with big, languid blue eyes, “like the ancient statue that drives the poet mad in Jean Cocteau’s 1930 experimental film, ‘The Blood of the Poet.’’ In the film, Lee Miller has one of the leading roles, “lending her perfect features to this inanimate statue that comes to life as a femme fatale who plays cards and drives a player to suicide. Then it becomes a statue again before ending up broken like a beautiful relic.”

As a model for Patou, Chanel and Schiaparelli, Lee Miller moved to Paris where, thanks to a recommendation from the renowned photographer Edward Steichen, she met the famous American visual artist Man Ray, for whom, from 1929 onward, she served as lover, muse, model and assistant.

Together they develop experimental solarization and overexposure photographic techniques.

Lee Miller experimenting with solarization and overexposure in 1942, in a fashion shoot for underwear at British Vogue Studio in London.

During her time in Paris, she became involved in the surrealist movement, started contributing as a photographer for Vogue, opened her own studio and made a name for herself with her surrealistic and mysterious images. Her photographs, distinctive in their taste for oblique angles and unexpected juxtapositions, were exhibited in Paris galleries alongside the major photographers of the time.

In 1932, she left Paris and returned to New York where she opened a new studio. Her activity as a portraitist, the subject of one section of the exhibition, flourished and would continue throughout her long life, reflecting her numerous ties to artistic and literary circles.

Lee Miller: Model with Lightbulb

In 1934, Lee Miller married the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved with him to Cairo. In Egypt she found a new lease on life, far from mundane and commercial obligations.

The photographs from this period are striking for the strength of the motifs, textures and framing in unusual camera angles.

While passing through Paris in 1937, Miller fell under the spell of the British painter and poet Roland Penrose and began spending more time in Europe in the company of her surrealist friends..

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Miller and Penrose left for London and although she didn’t have a work permit, with her Rolleflex in hand she chronicled the Blitz, a bombing campaign by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy against the United Kingdom.

The enigmatic ‘Portrait of Space’ first published in the London bulletin in June 1940. Taken during a desert excursion, it’s one of Lee Miller’s most celebrated works from her Egyptian period.

Model [Elizabeth Cowell] wearing a Digby Morton Suit, in front of a bombarded London street after the Blitz attack.

At the same time, she became increasingly involved in the British edition of Vogue as a fashion photographer. This section in the exhibit shows how she incorporated the ruins and bombings of London into her images. She also contributed to the publication of Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire in May 1941, which documented daily life during the Blitz, blending patriotic celebration with dark humor.

In the winter of 1942, Miller became one the few women photographers to receive accreditation as a war correspondent from the United States Army.

From then on, she covered the conflict directly and devoted numerous features to the women involved in the war: nurses, members of the anti-aircraft defense and aviators, which were published in both the British and American editions of Vogue.

The Remington Silent: the bombs had silenced this typewriter. Published in ‘Grim Glory – Pictures of Britain under fire'”

Lee MillerConcentration Camps, Hitler And The Allies

One of the highlights of the exhibition are Miller’s war photographs, particularly those of the concentration camps and Hitler’s apartment.

Several weeks after the D-Day landings in June 1944, she traveled across the English Channel to follow the advance of Allied troops and found herself on the front lines, notably during the liberation of Saint-Malo. Her photographs and articles exposing the violence of the conflict set her apart from conventional war reporting. Her eye and sensibility focused more on meaningful details than the broader theater of military operations.

In April 1945, alongside Life photographer David E. Scherman, Lee Miller traveled to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps after the liberation. Accompanied by an article (“Believe it — June 1945″), some of her shots published in Vogue were among the first to reveal the Nazi program of mass extermination.

Untitled, (man and tar), one of Lee Miller’s street scenes known as “found images,” akin to the use of found objects by her fellow surrealists artists

Lee Miller ArchivesLee Miller In Hitler’s Bathtub

After documenting the horror of Dachau on April 30, 1945, Miller and Sherman set off to Munich and managed to get inside Adolf Hitler’s apartment. She posed in the dictator’s bathtub. The image is now considered one of the most iconic photographs marking the end of the world conflict.

She continued photographing Europe and the Liberation until January 1946, reflecting pain and deprivation but also those left behind, such as women and children.

In the following years, Miller struggled to recover from her experience of the war.

Lee Miller, Cook And Portraitist

In the biography The Lives of Lee Miller by her son Antony Penrose, he writes that those who had known her or seen photos of Lee Miller at the top of her beauty “were stunned to find themselves face to face with a haggard figure with red eyes, lips covered in blisters and gums that bled constantly…. Her complexion was sallow, her hair straight and dull and her hands trembled with exhaustion when she tried to do anything complicated.”

American photographer Lee Miller with her husband Roland Penrose (1900 – 1984), co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). October 1954

Getty Images

The last section of the exhibition focuses on the period when she settled down in the countryside at Farleys Farm House (Sussex) with Penrose and their son, born in 1947 two years after she had returned from the war in Europe. She was suffering from depression and alcohol abuse.

Gradually she stopped doing commercial work except for some fashion commissions and making portraits of her family and her friends including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Joan Miró.

The Miller-Penrose house became an important meeting place for artistic exchange, where Miller devoted herself to culinary experiments that paid tribute to the inventiveness of her friends. Her interest in cooking was a way to her self-recovery from alcoholism.

She died in 1977 at Farleys of pancreatic cancer.

The exhibition, Lee Miller, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris runs until August 2. Then it will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from August 29 to December 7.

Tags: