Content Warning: This article touches on the topic of sexual assault which may be triggering for some readers.
At first glance, the photograph is unremarkable: A woman is taking a bath. But unsettling details start to emerge – a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler sits on the bath’s edge; muddy combat boots lie on a soiled bath mat.
Taken in Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment, David Scherman’s 1945 shot of fellow war photographer Lee Miller is one of WWII’s most intriguing images.
Just hours before, those boots had walked through the horrors of Dachau concentration camp; by the evening, the Nazi dictator would be dead.
Restless, beautiful and brilliantly creative, Lee Miller is best known as the lover and muse of surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray.
But she was more than that – a Vogue model and celebrated photographer, Lee was an integral part of the surrealist art movement.
Eclipsed by the giants of art who surrounded her, including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, Lee’s significance and achievements would have been forgotten had it not been for a chance discovery by her son, Antony Penrose.
Antony was searching for old family photographs in the attic of the family’s farm in East Sussex, England, when he found thousands of negatives, catalogues, letters and magazine clippings relating to his mother.
Estranged from her most of his life due to her struggles with alcoholism and mental illness, Antony had no idea Lee had been a professional photographer until after her death in 1977.
She’d dismiss questions about her past and played down her significance.
“Shortly before her death I asked if any of her work remained and if I could help her catalogue it,” Antony writes in his book, Surrealist Lee Miller.
“She refused, saying everything had been destroyed.”
But her work hadn’t been lost, and here in these boxes was the mother Antony never knew: A free spirit who was fiercely independent and incredibly brave.
Elizabeth Miller was born in 1907 into a middle class family in Poughkeepsie, upstate New York.
Her father, Theodore, an engineer, and her mother, Florence, a nurse, also had two sons, John and Erik.
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Photography was a constant in Lee’s life, as Theodore was a passionate amateur with his own dark room. He often used Lee as a model and encouraged her interest in photography.
Then, when Lee was just seven years old, she was raped, and her childhood brutally and abruptly ended. The assault would define her world view, and her work.
Desperate to help her recover from this trauma, Lee’s parents sought psychiatric treatment for her.
Increasingly headstrong, by the time she was 18 Lee had been expelled from several schools.
Exposure to art and culture, her despairing parents believed, might have a soothing effect on their daughter. Lee was packed off to Paris, in the charge of two elderly chaperones, and enrolled in finishing school.
Post-war Paris in 1925 was alive with modern art, jazz and avant-garde theatre. The surrealist movement was in full swing.
Lee, says Antony, was drawn to their desire to smash social conventions, “their new ways of seeing the world and of exploring the subconscious and the language of dreams.
“When Lee arrived in Paris her immediate reaction was ‘Baby – I’m HOME’,” he writes.
Ditching her chaperones, Lee convinced her parents to let her study theatre design and immersed herself in Parisian life. A year later, when she showed no intention of returning to the US, Theordore went to France to bring his strong-willed daughter home.
Returning to Poughkeepsie, Lee enrolled in a local college, but almost immediately escaped to Manhattan and art school. Then, in 1928, aged 20, she was crossing a busy New York street when a stranger saved her from being run over.
Lee’s rescuer turned out to be Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair. Struck by her beauty, Condé asked Lee if she wanted to model. That year, her face graced the cover of Vogue, and she became chief photographer Edward Steichen’s favourite model.
A lifelong friendship between them was born.
Ironically, it was one of Edward’s photographs that ended her modelling career in America.
When Kotex used a shot of Lee to advertise sanitary pads it was the first time a real woman had been used in this way, and it caused a scandal.
Afterwards, no couture house wanted the ‘Kotex girl’ modelling their fashions.
When Lee quipped she’d “rather take a photograph than be one”, Edward introduced her to the work of surrealist Man Ray. Enthralled, Lee travelled to Paris hoping to make him her creative mentor.
“I thought the best way was to start out studying with one of the great masters in the field,” she said years later.
A few weeks after arriving in Paris, Lee found Man Ray in a bar. “My name is Lee Miller,” she introduced herself, “and I’m your new student.”
Man Ray replied he wasn’t interested in a student and was leaving for Biarritz the following day. “So am I,” she replied.
Man Ray was captivated by this bold, beautiful young woman. She became his student, and over the next three years, also his model, muse and lover. Their relationship was a collaboration, and an exchange of inspiration and ideas.
With her, Man Ray would produce some of his most significant work.
One of Lee’s most famous contributions came about by accident. After a rat scuttled over her foot in the darkroom, Lee snapped on the light, but quickly turned it off as she knew the exposure would ruin the images.
Attempting to save them, Man Ray threw the images into fixer solution, but the accidental exposure had reversed the dark and light tones, giving both negative and positive in the same image. It was a truly surreal effect, and Man Ray was delighted.
He called the technique “solarisation”, and it became the hallmark of his and Lee’s
artistic collaboration.
“They worked so closely together, she’d said they were almost like one person,” says Kendrah Morgan, head curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria, which is bringing the Surrealist Lee Miller exhibition to Australia.
“But that meant some of her work was misattributed.”
Not content to remain in Man Ray’s shadow, Lee set up a studio of her own. Her clients included perfumer Jean Patou, and designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel. She also appeared in Jean Cocteau’s surrealist film, The Blood of a Poet.
Lee moved effortlessly into the surrealist clique but found their attitudes to women galling. Espousing “free love” and rejecting marriage and monogamy, the surrealists believed they should be able to love whomever they pleased. But these ideals didn’t apply to their women.
Contemptuous of this double standard, Lee told Man Ray she’d also take as many lovers as she pleased. Consumed with jealousy, Man Ray tried to control Lee, even proposing marriage, but she rejected his pleas, and, feeling constrained by his possessiveness, ended the relationship.
“The end of the affair came when Lee left Paris in October 1932 and returned to New York,” writes Antony. “On the night of her departure Man Ray stood in the pouring rain, howling his grief under the window of Lee’s former studio.”
The New York Lee returned to was in the grip of the Depression. Using her connections to Condé Nast and the fashion world, she set up the Lee Miller Studio.
At the same time, her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York was a huge success, and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet opened on Fifth Avenue to rave reviews.
Riding high on the wave of publicity, Lee was a sensation, the darling of New York society, and her dramatic portraits were much sought by actors desperate to impress Hollywood casting agencies.
Lee’s star was burning brightly and in 1934 Vanity Fair crowned her as one of the most “distinguished living photographers”.
Then, just as her career was taking off, Lee married Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman she’d met in Paris, and abruptly left New York to live in Cairo. At first, Lee was captivated by ancient Egypt, and marriage to a rich man.
She photographed the pyramids and dunes and lived a privileged life. But her restless heart became bored, and, feeling trapped after three years in Egypt, convinced Aziz to let her take a trip to Paris.
On her first night in Paris she met surrealist artist and poet, Roland Penrose. They became lovers, and travelled to the south of France, where Man Ray, Picasso and their partners were also holidaying.
As Lee was leaving for Egypt, Roland gave her a portrait Picasso had painted of her as a parting gift.
Lee’s return to Cairo and Aziz was brief. By 1938, she was living in London with Roland. A significant cultural figure and art collector, he established London’s Institute of Contemporary Art and wrote the first biography of Picasso.
Together, Lee and Roland were London’s premier avant-garde couple, their home a magnet for artists.
Lee began working for British Vogue in 1940 as a documentary, portrait and fashion photographer.
But, when war broke out, she found it hard to focus solely on fashion, and turned her ‘surrealists’ eye’ to the chaos of blitzed London.
“She was one of the first photographers to use that trope of glamorous women in beautiful clothes walking through the rubble of the blitz,” says Kendrah Morgan. “That contrast of beauty and destruction – which is quite common now in fashion shoots – she was the forerunner.”
The invasion of France was imminent, and the prospect of “being left out of the biggest story of the decade,” David Scherman said, “almost drove poor Lee Miller mad.”
At David’s suggestion Lee applied for military accreditation with the US Army. Six weeks after D-Day, Lee flew to France for her first assignment for Vogue, the evacuation of the hospital at Bricqueville. Her images of nurses and injured and dying soldiers are confronting and beautiful.
“Unexpectedly, among the reportage, the mud, the bullets, we find photographs where the unreality of war assumes an almost lyrical beauty,” Antony Penrose writes.
A few weeks later Lee was at the siege of St Malo. After an horrific infantry assault she took shelter in a German dugout.
“My heel ground into a dead, detached hand and I cursed the Germans for the sordid, ugly destruction they had conjured up in this once beautiful town,” she wrote. “I ran back the way
I’d come, slipping in blood. Christ it was awful.”
As the Allied forces advanced into Germany, Lee and David Scherman were among the first to report on the Nazi atrocities at Buchenwald and Dachau. Lee’s photographs of the German concentration camps are some of her most powerful, and the horrors she witnessed affected her profoundly.
By chance, Lee and David were in Munich when they found Hitler’s apartment. It’s the famous image of Lee in the bath which led surrealist painter Eileen Agar to describe her as “a remarkable woman, completely unsentimental, and sometimes ruthless”.
After the war, Lee travelled through Europe, photographing hospitals filled with injured children and endless lines of refugees and displaced persons. She photographed the execution of László Bárdossy, the fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary.
“Not even witnessing the killing of fascists alleviated the pain Lee was feeling,” writes Antony. “She began drifting and became ill.”
At David Scherman’s insistence she returned to England and Roland. In London Lee tried to resume her old life, and Antony was born in 1947, but the war had left her with PTSD for which at that time there was no treatment.
Lee self-medicated with alcohol and struggled with depression. Parenting was difficult, and Antony was largely raised by the housekeeper, Patsy.
Lee eventually got her alcoholism and mental illness under control and, in later life, became a cordon bleu cook. Her surrealist dinner parties, featuring blue spaghetti and breast-shaped cauliflower, were legendary.
Yet when she passed away, aged 70, her incredible achievements were still unrecognised.
In 2006, Antony established Farleys House & Gallery in honour of Lee’s extraordinary legacy.
“Antony has made it his life’s work to bring her the recognition that she deserves as a significant figure in surrealism and photojournalism,” says Kendrah, who worked closely with Antony to bring the Lee Miller exhibition to Australia. “It’s a very personal journey for him.”
Today, says Kendrah, Lee’s work is more relevant than ever.
“We’re living in such a surreal age, with Trumpian politics, the pandemic, the rise of AI and wars in the Ukraine and Gaza. Lee was so fearless to speak her truth, and that really resonates. I’m really pleased to bring her to Australian audiences.”
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is always available. Call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit their website.
