Lee Miller: la vita, che opera d'arte

Is the life or the art of Lee Miller more fascinating? Her career as a model, lover of more or less illustrious men, vital and life-embracing seductress, journalist as well as photographer, muse and at the same time museum of outstanding artists, tireless traveler, war photographer at the collapse of the Third Reich - the right woman in the right place at the right time? Or her portraits: advertisements, nudes, snapshots taken on the fly, the Egyptian desert, bombed London, the pages of Vogue, deportees and dead Germans, and the stories of the postwar period? There is no answer, because one is inseparable from the other. Or more simply: both.

The exhibition that opened in Venice at Palazzo Franchetti, Lee Miller–Man Ray. Fashion, Love, War (curated by Victoria Noel-Johnson, catalogue Skira), on view until April 10, 2023, displays her photographs alongside his images. Together they are among the most beautiful and captivating shots of the twentieth century, because they contain, in potential, everything that was and everything that would be, beginning in the interwar period - an unrepeatable moment for European culture, French culture in particular.

There is the relationship between her and her mentor, a lifelong love that the restless girl born in Poughkeepsie, New York, managed to prolong precisely by abruptly interrupting it, thus transforming his passion into art. It all begins with the sexual abuse she suffered at the age of seven, with a venereal disease to be treated, and the tragic death of a young admirer at thirteen before her eyes -events that led her parents to care for her obsessively, spoiling her shamelessly and sharpening her manipulative abilities. Expelled from school, she was sent to Paris in 1925, sealing her destiny. But that was not all. There was also her beauty, combined with a “bold and luminous” aura that made her a potential vamp.

Chance intervened: she carelessly crossed a street in New York and was nearly run over. She was pulled back by Condé Nast, the king of illustrated magazines. She stammered something in French and fell into his arms. The result was a series of shots by Edward Steichen that turned her into a diva of fashion magazines. It might all have ended there, had Lee not been a particular kind of woman: determined, intellectually agile, ambitious, with an excessive appetite for novelty. She embodied the feminine type of the era—blonde, mysterious, elegant, a union of angel and demon. She knew it, and she used it. Proof of her singular nature is her biography, the most detailed account of her life, written by her son, Antony Penrose, The Many Lives of Lee Miller (Italian trans. V. De Rossi and M. Baiocchi, Contrasto), which recounts her loves, affairs, impulsive acts, highs and lows, casting a brief and often fierce beam of light into the corners of her life, as if written by a stranger.

The deity that seems to have presided over her existence can be summed up in the Greek word Kairos: the opportune moment, the supreme instant - Opportunity itself - which Lee knew how to seize perfectly, guided by a higher force. She decided to become a photographer - “I'd rather take a photograph than be one” she said - and in 1929, in Paris, she knocked on the door of Man Ray, the most Surrealist of photographers, and not only that. He was away on vacation. She stepped into a nearby café and he suddenly appeared at the top of a staircase. She told him she wanted to be his pupil; he replied that he did not take pupils and was about to leave. “I know,” she answered, “I’m coming too.” They lived together for three years.

The photographs Man Ray took of her are unforgettable: the aesthetics of fashion, but overturned. Since Greek statuary, the body- especially the female body- had never been shown like this: from marble to fluid. Yet she was not merely a muse, as many have claimed. She was an artist. With Kairos always at her side - things had to happen “now” - she was in the darkroom when she felt something brush her feet. She abruptly switched on the light and discovered solarization, a technique forgotten since the days of the daguerreotypists. It would become the hallmark of both Man Ray’s photography and her own. She opened her own studio and lived with him: they loved each other, but it was not easy. Continuing her modeling career, she had other partners and Man Ray went mad with jealousy. In 1932 she left for New York and opened another studio. It was a success. The portraits she shot—even of animals—were dazzling: apparitions on the verge of disappearance. Vanity Fair included her among the seven most famous photographers. Even this was not enough. In 1934 she married a wealthy Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, with whom she had been having an affair, and moved to Egypt. His wife, one of the five most beautiful women in the world, committed suicide. The marriage lasted three years. The photographs she took in the African country are astonishing and anticipate the style that would define her vision of war. She made use of everything she had learned from the Surrealists without ever fully being one: the objet trouvétransformed into landscape.

She traveled incessantly through the deserts in the company of men in love with her. Adventure ran in her blood, unstoppable. She had also begun a relationship with Roland Penrose, artist, friend of the Surrealists, and critic. She would follow him to London, separating from Aziz. She returned to where she had begun, but now as a photographer: the British edition of Vogue. She also began to write: she had her own voice. She left as a war correspondent following the troops that landed in Normandy. This is perhaps the best-known part of her career, because it includes her visit to Hitler’s house in Munich- photographed by David E. Scherman, her traveling companion - showing her in Hitler’s bathtub, washing, her combat boots in the foreground and the Führer’s portrait to the side. She was then in Dachau, bearing witness to the horror of the Nazi camps.

What did her talent consist of? In the union of Surrealism and glamour, of the avant-garde and fashion. In her shots there is always something artificial, staged -as in the famous portrait of the mayor of Leipzig’s daughter who committed suicide, laid out on a Chesterfield sofa. And at the same time something true: life -or death-constructed so well as to be true. Just like her. After this journey into the shattered entrails of the Reich, she fell into depression, and again after the birth of her son. She abandoned photography and reinvented herself as a superb cook. Beauty and erotic passion left her.

The most effective description of her character came from her doctor, to whom she had confessed her depression: “There is nothing wrong with you, nor can we keep the world in a permanent state of war to provide the excitement you need.” The energy that drove her was precisely that excitement and she knew how to measure it with the talent of her gaze and her senses.