Lee Miller photos at Art Museum (2nd review)

Surrealist queen with camera

ANNE R. FABBRI

Lee Miller (1907–1977) had an artist’s eye for composition, pattern and design, and this combination determined her career as one of the 20th Century’s foremost photographers. The Art Museum’s current exhibition of more than 140 black and white photographs, drawings and printed matter of, by and about this American artist reveals her genius in the context of that turbulent period as well as her life as an expatriate.

It’s an exciting homecoming for one of the few Americans who actively participated in the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920s, a movement then alien to Americans who, at that time, were excited about regional artists, especially including the Ashcan School of urban scenes. Surrealism was a new language, both visually and verbally, and Miller got it immediately. Miller’s photographs, taken while working with the American artist Man Ray as his apprentice/assistant, captured the essence of an object seen in a new way. Just as Dali and Magritte painted body parts dissociated from a living, sentient being, Miller photographed from a similar viewpoint.

Untitled (Rat Tails), c. 1930, is a rear view of four white rats perched on a wooden sill, their tails dangling in the ambient light. Since this is Surrealism, we know nothing about the circumstances and we’re not supposed to inquire; this is about composition, pattern and design and has nothing to do with the animals per se.

Grasping the oozy essence of tar

In Paris from 1928 to 1932, Miller’s photo of a chair, as well as one of the wire saber guard with photographic equipment, portray banal objects from daily life abstracted into works of art, pure form and shadows. You can immerse yourself in her photograph of tar: It oozes into every crevice, capturing an insect in its sticky clutches. Here she grasps the essence of molten tar while going beyond that to reveal the swirling beauty of the substance. A breast removed by radical surgery is photographed carefully set on a dinner plate with placemat and flatware, available to any voyeur or connoisseur of form.

My favorite photo from this period was Miller’s unique view of the Eiffel Tower, c. 1930. Too original to be content with the soaring spire against the sky, Miller concentrated on its massive machinery, revealing its structure as abstracted images of beauty. This was Miller’s interpretation of the Surrealist movement.

On both sides of the camera

Moving through periods in the artist’s life, the exhibit shows Miller from both sides of the camera. Incredibly beautiful herself, she began her photographic career as a model, and several of these illustrations are included in the exhibition. In these she is the object to be viewed and remarked upon. Eventually Miller even turned her own profile image, taken by Man Ray, into an abstracted reality of an anonymous form with an elongated neck.

Another section of photographs is devoted to Miller’s commercial portrait studio in New York City following her stay in Paris. The experience was the same as painting portraits on commission– boring to any artist, especially one with Miller’s technical expertise. One either regards it as a challenge or an ordeal. The result for Miller was almost predictable: In the mid-’30s she married a genial Egyptian and moved to Cairo.

The banality of her existence

Miller’s photos from this period reveal the mind-numbing banality of her existence. She photographed desert scenes of searing sunlight with stark contrasts of forms and shadows, such as the striking image, From the Top of the Great Pyramid, with the perfect form of the pyramid casting its shadow on the city before ending in unlimited space. Another study of infinity is her Portrait of Space (1937). Her view of nothing, seen through a torn window screen (deliberately left like that so the shutters could be closed) has become Miller’s link to Abstraction. For human interest, look at Untitled (The Black Satin and Pearls Set), c.1935-39. Here are two soignée women smoking in a Cairo café, their shallow lives defined by boredom. This couldn’t have been a satisfying existence for any intelligent, creative person. No wonder she fled.

Proof that Miller was still part of the inner circle of Parisian artists lies in her lighthearted photographic takeoff on Manet’s 1863 painting Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe. Her photograph Picnic: Nusch and Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Ile Sainte-Marguerite, Cannes, France (1937, above) portrays a similar outdoor social event. The bare-breasted women cloaked with towels around their hips and clothed male artists relax around a low table in the dappled sunlight. It’s time for fun and frivolity in the vocabulary of the French Impressionists.

Startling war images

Having met and later married the English painter Roland Penrose, Miller then became one of the six accredited women photographers permitted in the combat zones of World War II. Here she reached her apotheosis. The startling images in this section of the exhibition are seared in my brain. Miller photographed the London blitz and its combatants, battles in France, Paris freed from occupation and the daily victims of war. Many of her photos were published in Vogue magazine, both the London and American editions, along with her descriptive comments. Several copies of these magazines are on view in cases in this section.

Miller was the first woman photographer to visit Normandy and brought back pictures of the medical staff behind the lines, treating the wounded and dying. No one can forget her photographs of the Buchenwald concentration camp published in Vogue in June 1945. Miller contrasted the horrific views of a pile of starved bodies or of a prisoner hanged on an iron hook, his face disfigured from violence, with scenes of German children playing in the sunlight, bucolic villages and the orderly ovens for burning bodies in the camps. Her photograph Dead SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, 1945, seems to capture the moment of transition from corporeal life back to its primal elements of water and other matter. These are photographs of unfortunate reality become Surreal, employing its vocabulary for a purpose that André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, could never have imagined.

Past her prime

The show’s final section is devoted to Miller’s photographs of her famous houseguests at her farm in East Sussex, England, plus charming shots of her young son alone and with Pablo Picasso. But by then her career as a cutting-edge photographer was over. Fortunately, Miller saved boxes of negatives, prints and clippings in her attic, now the basis of the Lee Miller Archives under the care of her son, Antony Penrose.

This show was organized by Professor Mark Haworth-Booth of the University of the Arts, London, for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in commemoration of the centennial of Miller’s birth last year. The Art Museum is the show’s first American venue; from here it will travel to the San Francisco MOMA and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The excellent catalogue, written by Haworth-Booth and published by Yale University Press, documents the life and work of this fine American artist. It’s a perfect addition to any library of 20th-Century art and history.



To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.