PHOTO: Seeing Is Believing-Lee Miller and Friends
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller was an outstanding photographer and a strong, modern woman. Her desire for self-determination is extraordinary even by today’s standards: at Vogue, where she was initially employed as a sought-after model, she moved behind the camera in the 1930s. As a muse she influenced the surrealist Man Ray, before leaving him to pursue her own career. Miller did not bother with conventions, neither privately nor professionally, and went her own way as an artist, portrait photographer, and war reporter.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
When Lee Miller died at the age of 70 in 1977, her name was known to a select few experts in the art world. Her career was not without its milestones: working with American photojournalist David E. Scherman, she took some of the most famous images of World War II–era atrocities, and she posed for Man Ray and Vogue. Still, her reputation lagged behind her art-historical significance. That all changed when Miller’s son, Anthony Penrose, uncovered a vast archive of his late mother’s work in an attic. In 2013, a foundation in Miller’s name was formed in England, and more than 80,000 negatives were given a proper site where experts and institutions could access them. Since then, interest in Miller’s art has grown vastly. The exhibition “Seeing Is Believing-Lee Miller and Friends” centers on the long, fruitful relationship between American photographer Lee Miller and English Surrealist painter, collector, art historian, and Picasso biographer, Roland Penrose (1900–1984). In addition to photographs by Miller and Penrose, it features paintings, sculptures, photographs, and- works on paper by Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Valentine Penrose, and Pablo Picasso—all artists in their extended network. The exhibition also presents letters, albums, and ephemera that trace a history of interconnected lives and relationships. As a model for American Vogue in the 1920s, Miller was photographed by leading fashion and portrait photographers before traveling to Paris to study with Man Ray. She developed a uniquely Surrealist vision of portraiture and captured many arresting images as a correspondent during World War II. Penrose co-organized the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition that introduced the movement to the United Kingdom, cofounded London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1946, and curated important retrospectives of Picasso and Man Ray. Summering in the South of France in the 1930s, moving to London at the outbreak of World War II, traveling in the United States after the war, and relocating to East Sussex in 1949, Miller and Penrose cultivated enduring connections with key artists and writers, playing a vital role in the culture of their era. With an emphasis on Surrealism, Seeing Is Believing paints a picture of the creative life the couple shared with their friends. The exhibition comes at a moment of particular interest in Lee Miller and her circle. :Love Letters Bound in Gold Handcuffs”, a collection of previously unreleased correspondence between Miller and Penrose that reveals the romance and drama of their forty-year relationship, was published in the United Kingdom in July.
Photo: Lee Miller, Picnic, [Nusch Éluard, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Île Saint-Marguerite, Cannes, France, 1937, © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk, Courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England and Gagosian
Info: Curators: Jason Ysenburg and Richard Calvocoressi, Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/11-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
