Who on earth was Lee Miller? A woman with a man’s name, a model with an artist’s soul, a documentarian with a surrealist’s eye—these only begin to scratch the surface of a multifaceted dynamo who left an indelible mark on everything from Dadaist art to fashion photography to war correspondence, sometimes merging them all. It’s no surprise that her son Antony would later publish a biography called The Lives of Lee Miller, because she led many.
Miller’s various existences are the subject of the NSU Art Museum’s astonishing new exhibit, “The Indestructible Lee Miller,” charting the two decades of her comparatively brief artistic prominence, from 1930 to 1950. The show moves chronologically, and it captures her arc of self-actualization, from object to subject to creator. Indeed, considering her early work in front of cameras, one would be hard-pressed to find a more objectified role than her 1930 film appearance in Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of Poet,” in which she plays a statue—as blank as a storefront mannequin, as chiseled as a Greek sculpture.
Man Ray, her early love interest and entrée in the world of surrealism, created the most erotic photographs of Miller’s figure, treating her as something like a goddess—but I don’t see much more in them. More than likely, her own artistry was already being held back; it’s hard not to read symbolism into Miller’s drawing known as “Model With Daggers,” in which a figure not unlike herself is pinned against the wall like a circus entertainer, the knives of an unseen assailant keeping her in place.
The more she drifted from Man Ray romantically, the more her work behind the lens shed his influence and achieved a formal derring-do and perceptual playfulness all her own. This makes for some of the most ingenious work in “The Indestructible Lee Miller,” such as the sick, unforgettable commentary of her photograph of a severed breast—the result of a mastectomy—served on a plate as if for dinner. She broke the mold for portraiture, shooting Tanja Ramm as a disembodied head peeking through a bell jar, and positioning an incongruous model sailboat in front of Joseph Cornell’s profile.
In her Charlie Chaplin image, a hanging chandelier appears to rest atop his head like a lavish hat, and in another unsettling shot, a hand devoid of its accompanying arm grabs the back of a woman’s scalp; it was probably taken at a beauty salon, but by altering our perception and showing us only what she wanted us to see, she embraced the flatness of the 2-D image to her advantage.
Next came her peripatetic period, the result of her marriage to Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey. She photographed sand dunes and the shadow of the pyramid of Giza, shot from its top point, but most of these avant-garde travelogues are frustratingly pocket-sized and straining to the eyes. It wasn’t until 1940, during the outbreak of the Second World War, that Miller’s work took on its greatest significance.
As British Vogue’s fashion photographer, she chose to confront the Nazi atrocities rather than escape them. Her groundbreaking shots broke the mold for couture photography, from models in fire masks emerging from a bomb shelter to a model in an out-of-place Digby Morton suit posing in front of a pile of rubble and a building’s skeletal foundation. These images are unimaginably subversive, and still ahead of their time: Can you imagine one of Anna Wintour’s top photographers shooting the latest fall fashions amid Syrian air strikes?
Miller’s talent and passion led her inevitably to Germany in 1945 as a full-fledged war correspondent, where she penned Vogue’s magazine copy to complement her photos. She was as gifted with a typewriter as she was with a camera: “I saw the war end in a plume of smoke curling up from the remnants of Hitler’s mountain retreat,” begins one story, and it only gets more powerful.
The experience scarred her, and museumgoers today should take heed. There are images of destroyed churches, medics treating wounded children, emaciated bodies piled up on roadsides like so much debris. She captured the body of the daughter of a Nazi vice mayor, presumably still cold, arranged on a couch as if for exhibition. It’s all as nauseating to see as Alain Resnais’ WWII documentary “Night and Fog” is to watch.
Her time spent in the heart of darkness resulted in one of the most iconic photographs ever from this fearless provocateur: a shot of herself in the bathtub of Hitler’s Munich apartment, after it had been requisitioned by the Allies. The power and defiance of this statement—overtaking the most private space of the modern world’s most monstrous killer—in the face of such death and destruction is almost indescribable.
Prepare to be a bit shaken up by this show. Give yourself time to process it on the way out. Like any punch to the gut, it takes your breath away.
“The Indestructible Lee Miller” runs through Feb. 14 at NSU Art Museum, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Admission costs $5-$12. Call 954/525-5500 or visit nsuartmuseum.org.
