‘The Surrealist and the Photographer’

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2001.

Until recently, Lee Miller was more or less exclusively commemorated by the male gaze, not for her own photographs, but for her Ingriste beauty in the celebrated, solarised portraits by Man Ray; works for which she was both his model and darkroom assistant. An additional reason for Miller’s comparative invisibility as a photographer, is that her only venture in commercial self-promotion – before she finally returned to Europe – was an early exhibition in New York to launch a career as an American society photographer. The 20th century outlet for Miller’s photographs was not the specialist periodical or the gallery, but the quickly-forgotten genre of print journalism during the Second World War – decades before contemporary photography was investable as fine art, and a whole half-century before the magazine photograph crossed over the river to find a place on the walls of Tate Modern.

Lee Miller as Man Ray’s muse is a myth that has endured for as long as surrealism’s legacy has lasted. After Miller abandoned him in 1932 she was left, with surrealist political incorrectness, as Man Ray’s ‘Object to be Destroyed’, the iconic metronome with Miller’s eye clicking backwards and forwards in near perpetuity. The readymade was destroyed in 1957 by a group of early neo-Dadaists who took Man Ray at his word. With the insurance money Man Ray bought an entire edition of metronomes which further transmuted the once unique object of desire into the renamed, multiple ‘Indestructible Object’. Miller’s metamorphosis into indestructible multiple is not only a metaphor for photography, her chosen medium, but for her eventual emergence as an artist in her own right; an identity which avantgarde association has previously denied her. The recent wonderful exhibition of her photographs in Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – based on an archive of some 40,000 negatives, and complemented by an exhibition in the Dean Gallery devoted to the collections of her partner the surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose – not only demonstrated for the first time the full range of her achievement, but also revealed how the suppression of her talent came about.

The future photographer and journalist Lee Miller (1907–1977) had a privileged American upbringing but a traumatic childhood. By the late 1920s she was a model in New York, working for Vogue and sitting for Edward Steichen. Between 1929 and 1932 she lived in Paris as Man Ray’s collaborator and lover; together they developed the solarisation printing process also used in the 30s by Miller’s American Vogue contemporary Oscar Blumenfeld. After interludes in America and Egypt, and a brief marriage, Miller met Roland Penrose in 1937, and married him a decade later. Through Penrose, who was for Breton ‘surréaliste dans l’amitié’, she came to know and photograph their friends the surrealist painters and poets, including Ernst, Eluard, as well as Picasso who painted her portrait, and whose first visitor she was on the liberation of Paris in 1944. After the war her camera recorded a new generation of artists, including those associated with the ICA, who visited the Penrose home at Farley Farm.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 Miller had joined Vogue, recording the London Blitz in a series of extraordinary photographs, such as ‘Remington Silent’ and ‘Piano by Broadwood’ which were published in the wartime Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire, 1941. These images of muted mechanical objects speak more eloquently of wartime conditions than a dozen photographs of smiling cockney survivors in Picture Post. Their poetic bleakness of expression depends on the surrealist-inspired study of the relationship of the machine to the contemporary art of Duchamp, Picabia and others, which was published in the London Bulletin edited by Humphrey Jennings; and in particular the issue devoted to the exhibition ‘The Impact of Machines’ which was shown at the London Gallery in 1938. Before this there was Penrose’s involvement in the organisation of the London surrealist exhibition of 1936, and his fast growing collection of surrealist masterpieces which provided a rich source of ideas for Miller’s fertile photographic vision. From 1942 Miller was an accredited US War photojournalist, contributing photographs of the war and its aftermath in France, Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as filing her own copy of these dramatic events which included Munich and the concentration camps in 1945. Eye-witness accounts of Miller and photographs of her in American uniform during these years, suggest that in order to function effectively as a war correspondent and to survive such horrors she was obliged to assume a hard-living, hard-drinking, Hemingwayesque persona; in one jerrycan she was said to carry petrol, in the other strong liquor. The gender division in Miller’s work was symbolically re-enacted by the Edinburgh exhibition. On entry the visitor was confronted by her spotlit army jeep and wartime equipment, including typewriter, cameras, light meter, rations and associated mechanical paraphernalia; and from this central gallery the exhibition divided bilaterally along pre-and post-war lines.

The gender transpositions suggested by Miller’s photographs were clearly already affected by her experience of working in Paris between 1929 and 1932 with Man Ray, whose subjects closely resemble her own (or his hers?) during these years. In Miller’s subsequent New York photographs of 1932–34 the language of fashion photography is similarly objectified by techniques of cropping and framing common to fine art, and the surrealist imagery then current. Miller’s 1933 portrait of Mary Taylor’s ‘Floating Head’ is as disembodied as a Brancusi, while Abstraction-Création sculpture such as Arp’s in France and Hepworth’s and Moore’s in England, as well as Brassai’s photographs of the body, parallel Miller’s ‘Nude Bending Forward’. The nine glass ‘Scent Bottles’ of 1933, with their symmetrical reflections on a glass table, echo the nine bachelors Duchamp called the ‘malic moulds’ in the lower half of his ‘Large Glass’. Joseph Cornell’s profile portrait photograph was superimposed with his own surrealist imagery in 1933, an occasion on which Miller presented Cornell with photographs of herself as the classically draped white statue in Cocteau’s 1930 film ‘Le Sang du poète’. Cornell later returned the compliment by incorporating an early portrait of Miller into one of his collages.

After 1937 Lee Miller’s association with Penrose encouraged further relationships between her photography and surrealism. The ‘Portrait of Space’, 1937, an Egyptian landscape of sand framed by the mesh of a mosquito net reprises similar themes in Magritte; while other Egyptian subjects, ‘Dead Snails’ and ‘Sacks of Cotton’ suggest associations with Ernst’s surface textures and Paul Nash’s close-up focus on his nature subjects. In their turn Miller’s photographs probably had an effect on Penrose’s painting. As the accompanying exhibition of his own art showed, Penrose was heavily influenced by Ernst’s grattage and decalcomania techniques and by the subjects of Magritte’s pictorial illusionism. His adoption in 1938 of tourist picture postcards, fanned out in multiples to create coloured forms for his collages – which appear independent of the conventions of drawing and colour – was sufficient to persuade Magritte and Paul Nougé to write an article for the London Bulletin in 1939 in support of their originality. But the use of the mass-produced photographic postcard as a pictorial readymade suggests an idea much closer to home.

According to Roland Penrose’s Scrapbook 1900–1981,1981, Lee Miller’s photographs were products of a ‘keen searching eye’ and ‘good judgement’ in choice of subject. When asked how she achieved her results she would reply ‘Just aim and press the button’. On discovering that an amateur had forgotten to load any film, Lee is supposed to have remarked ‘Doesn’t matter, it’s the intention that counts, not the result’. So disingenuous an account sounds like an accidental recipe for conceptual art ‘avant la lettre’, which of course it is anything but. Nevertheless, it has taken decades for Lee Miller to become recognised as one of the last century’s most distinguished photojournalists. Her repositioning as an artist, and the availability of her work through the activities of the Lee Miller Archive, as well as that devoted to Roland Penrose, not only establishes a new status for her work, but raises new and interesting questions about the place of photography and journalism in relation to the visual culture of the 1930s and 1940s.

For more information on Lee Miller, please go to: www.leemiller.co.uk
www.rolandpenrose.co.uk

Robin Spencer