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Lee Miller photographs at Art Museum (1st review)
How the unhappy muse found her groove
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Lee Miller seemingly had it all. Yes, you know where this one is headed—poor little rich girl, too many men, too much booze, sad life, wasted life. Except that Lee Miller’s wasn’t really a wasted life. Granted, she was no Ansel Adams. But to steal a line from the recruitment ads, she was all that she could be.
First thing’s first—Lee Miller was a beauty. Not just a run-of-the-mill-beauty but also one of those Grace Kelly-Sharon Stone dazzlers who basically define the words “American blonde.” That beauty opened doors for her. But it also caused her to be sexually molested by a family friend at age seven. That’s horrible in and of itself, but to add an extra twist of the knife, she contracted venereal disease as a result, at age seven. The woman who would later confess to having problems with commitment got off to an excellent start in the business of mistrusting the motives of gentlemen friends. Do we really need to wonder any further about the causes for Miller's peripatetic sex-life as an adult?
I don’t want to paint anyone as vital as Lee Miller in the weepy pose of a victim. Yes, Miller had many male friends, but she picked them well. Man Ray (1924 to 1932) introduced her to the surrealist circle in Paris and helped her get started as a professional photographer. Aziz Eloui Bey, to whom Miller was married from 1934 to 1939, got her to Egypt, a land that became her great inspiration. David C. Scherman, a Life magazine photographer whom she met in London during World War II, taught Miller the basics of photojournalism. The artist Roland Penrose, who became her second husband, gave her a son and a safe haven in the English countryside following the hectic war years.
More than a pretty face, but….
But let’s get down to business. “The Art of Lee Miller” isn’t an “Access Hollywood” segment; it’s an exhibition of Miller photographs— most her own works, some photographs of Miller by others. How does Miller measure up as a photographer?
I would place her pretty securely in the second rank. She’s not one of the world’s great photographic artists, but she is an artist capable of producing works of surprising resonance. Miller was definitely more than just a pretty face and an obscure object of desire to the surrealists like Jean Cocteau, who presciently cast her as a Grecian statue in his film Blood of a Poet.
Much of Miller’s work is undifferentiated. Her early 1930s studies of architecture details could be the work of any photographer of the period. In works like Untitled [Stone] (1931) and Nude Bent Forward (1930), she appears to be channeling Edward Weston, a photographer who didn’t necessarily need imitators.
A Howard Hawks woman
When Miller broke with Ray, she left Paris and returned to New York, where she set up a photographic studio with her brother. The catalogue states that she did the electrical work in the studio herself, and looking at the resolute blonde face, I don’t doubt it for a moment. In fact, I can picture Miller in overalls, crawling around the place and cursing like a sailor at any obstructions she encountered. Lee Miller seems to have been the original Howard Hawks woman.
Unfortunately, once the studio was all set up, she seems to have done merely adequate commercial work and the sort of admiring portrait photography that rich people like to have done of themselves. Her formal portrait of Charles Chaplin makes the comic seem like a marcelled character from a Jean Renoir film. Another more adventurous photograph, in which Chaplin appears to have a chandelier growing out of the top of his head, works a bit better as an evocation of a man who was, above all else, a great comic.
Bored by the Big Apple
We are told that Lee Miller was successful but bored in New York, and I believe that. Her marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey, and her subsequent departure to Cairo opened up a new world to her. I suspect that Miller was one of these people who need challenges to bring out the best in them. Surround her with fawning admirers and declare her a muse of surrealism, and you get second-rate stuff. Give her a successful business and a gold-plated clientele, and you get glossy fluff. But put her in an environment totally unlike any she had ever experienced before, and she comes alive.
The landscape studies Miller made in Egypt of immemorially ancient monasteries and desert ruins are fascinating and compelling. You can sense that she took these photographs with her eyes open, not on autopilot or copying something she may have seen in Camera Art.
A typewriter comes to life
Yes, Egypt’s sun and sand was a tonic for a rather burned-out muse, but what really made her came alive was— war! The little things of everyday life bored Lee Miller, but London during the blitz and the liberation of Europe in 1945 offered history that couldn’t get much bigger. Even a work that should evoke groans—a close-up of a smashed typewriter titled Remington Silent— becomes a stinging denunciation of a Nazi system that routinely smashed typewriters, burned books and murdered creative thinkers of every type. Remington Silent also suggests that Miller was more at home photographing objects than people. She seems to have studied this bit of war’s flotsam and figured out how to shoot a typewriter quite as becomingly as if it were a Sutton Place dowager.
Once Miller hit the continent as an accredited war correspondent, she had finally hit her stride. The Parisian muse had metamorphosed into a uniformed Amazon—in a picture taken with Picasso after the liberation of Paris, she towers over the great man—who’d finally found a purpose. In words and pictures alike (for Miller had become a published journalist as well as a photographer), she documented the flaming end of Adolf Hitler’s dream.
A dead Nazi as inanimate object
Almost all of Miller’s wartime photographs in the exhibit bear careful examination. In one, she finally achieves the sublime. After documenting the horrors of Hitler’s extermination camps, Burgomeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, Leipzig, Germany looks like a Bernini sculpture. Miller has finally taken a photograph of a person that’s as compelling as her studies of objects. Death has transformed the young woman stretched back in death, still wearing her party armband, into an object and, as such, a subject worthy of the rapt attention given to a smashed typewriter or a bombed-out building.
After the war, Miller did some nice photojournalistic studies of post-war English life, but her last big series is a rather jokey affair showing weekend houseguests from the artistic community attempting chores on the farm owned by Penrose. Fittingly enough, the final photograph of the series shows our muse, barefoot and middle-aged, sleeping peacefully on a couch. It had been one hell of a ride thus far, and it wasn’t over yet.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Lee Miller seemingly had it all. Yes, you know where this one is headed—poor little rich girl, too many men, too much booze, sad life, wasted life. Except that Lee Miller’s wasn’t really a wasted life. Granted, she was no Ansel Adams. But to steal a line from the recruitment ads, she was all that she could be.
First thing’s first—Lee Miller was a beauty. Not just a run-of-the-mill-beauty but also one of those Grace Kelly-Sharon Stone dazzlers who basically define the words “American blonde.” That beauty opened doors for her. But it also caused her to be sexually molested by a family friend at age seven. That’s horrible in and of itself, but to add an extra twist of the knife, she contracted venereal disease as a result, at age seven. The woman who would later confess to having problems with commitment got off to an excellent start in the business of mistrusting the motives of gentlemen friends. Do we really need to wonder any further about the causes for Miller's peripatetic sex-life as an adult?
I don’t want to paint anyone as vital as Lee Miller in the weepy pose of a victim. Yes, Miller had many male friends, but she picked them well. Man Ray (1924 to 1932) introduced her to the surrealist circle in Paris and helped her get started as a professional photographer. Aziz Eloui Bey, to whom Miller was married from 1934 to 1939, got her to Egypt, a land that became her great inspiration. David C. Scherman, a Life magazine photographer whom she met in London during World War II, taught Miller the basics of photojournalism. The artist Roland Penrose, who became her second husband, gave her a son and a safe haven in the English countryside following the hectic war years.
More than a pretty face, but….
But let’s get down to business. “The Art of Lee Miller” isn’t an “Access Hollywood” segment; it’s an exhibition of Miller photographs— most her own works, some photographs of Miller by others. How does Miller measure up as a photographer?
I would place her pretty securely in the second rank. She’s not one of the world’s great photographic artists, but she is an artist capable of producing works of surprising resonance. Miller was definitely more than just a pretty face and an obscure object of desire to the surrealists like Jean Cocteau, who presciently cast her as a Grecian statue in his film Blood of a Poet.
Much of Miller’s work is undifferentiated. Her early 1930s studies of architecture details could be the work of any photographer of the period. In works like Untitled [Stone] (1931) and Nude Bent Forward (1930), she appears to be channeling Edward Weston, a photographer who didn’t necessarily need imitators.
A Howard Hawks woman
When Miller broke with Ray, she left Paris and returned to New York, where she set up a photographic studio with her brother. The catalogue states that she did the electrical work in the studio herself, and looking at the resolute blonde face, I don’t doubt it for a moment. In fact, I can picture Miller in overalls, crawling around the place and cursing like a sailor at any obstructions she encountered. Lee Miller seems to have been the original Howard Hawks woman.
Unfortunately, once the studio was all set up, she seems to have done merely adequate commercial work and the sort of admiring portrait photography that rich people like to have done of themselves. Her formal portrait of Charles Chaplin makes the comic seem like a marcelled character from a Jean Renoir film. Another more adventurous photograph, in which Chaplin appears to have a chandelier growing out of the top of his head, works a bit better as an evocation of a man who was, above all else, a great comic.
Bored by the Big Apple
We are told that Lee Miller was successful but bored in New York, and I believe that. Her marriage to Aziz Eloui Bey, and her subsequent departure to Cairo opened up a new world to her. I suspect that Miller was one of these people who need challenges to bring out the best in them. Surround her with fawning admirers and declare her a muse of surrealism, and you get second-rate stuff. Give her a successful business and a gold-plated clientele, and you get glossy fluff. But put her in an environment totally unlike any she had ever experienced before, and she comes alive.
The landscape studies Miller made in Egypt of immemorially ancient monasteries and desert ruins are fascinating and compelling. You can sense that she took these photographs with her eyes open, not on autopilot or copying something she may have seen in Camera Art.
A typewriter comes to life
Yes, Egypt’s sun and sand was a tonic for a rather burned-out muse, but what really made her came alive was— war! The little things of everyday life bored Lee Miller, but London during the blitz and the liberation of Europe in 1945 offered history that couldn’t get much bigger. Even a work that should evoke groans—a close-up of a smashed typewriter titled Remington Silent— becomes a stinging denunciation of a Nazi system that routinely smashed typewriters, burned books and murdered creative thinkers of every type. Remington Silent also suggests that Miller was more at home photographing objects than people. She seems to have studied this bit of war’s flotsam and figured out how to shoot a typewriter quite as becomingly as if it were a Sutton Place dowager.
Once Miller hit the continent as an accredited war correspondent, she had finally hit her stride. The Parisian muse had metamorphosed into a uniformed Amazon—in a picture taken with Picasso after the liberation of Paris, she towers over the great man—who’d finally found a purpose. In words and pictures alike (for Miller had become a published journalist as well as a photographer), she documented the flaming end of Adolf Hitler’s dream.
A dead Nazi as inanimate object
Almost all of Miller’s wartime photographs in the exhibit bear careful examination. In one, she finally achieves the sublime. After documenting the horrors of Hitler’s extermination camps, Burgomeister of Leipzig’s Daughter Suicided, Leipzig, Germany looks like a Bernini sculpture. Miller has finally taken a photograph of a person that’s as compelling as her studies of objects. Death has transformed the young woman stretched back in death, still wearing her party armband, into an object and, as such, a subject worthy of the rapt attention given to a smashed typewriter or a bombed-out building.
After the war, Miller did some nice photojournalistic studies of post-war English life, but her last big series is a rather jokey affair showing weekend houseguests from the artistic community attempting chores on the farm owned by Penrose. Fittingly enough, the final photograph of the series shows our muse, barefoot and middle-aged, sleeping peacefully on a couch. It had been one hell of a ride thus far, and it wasn’t over yet.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
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