Lee Miller and Friends at Pallant House Gallery
The American photographer Lee Miller counted amongst her friends, artists from Pablo Picasso to Eileen Agar - many of them the subjects of her penetrating photographic portraits. But was she a secret Communist sympathiser?
It has just been revealed that MI5 opened a file on the photographer after a tip-off that she was a ‘communist sympathiser’. The investigation concluded that although she was never a formal member of the Communist Party, Lee Miller and husband Roland Penrose were known to regularly associate with ‘left-wing artists’ and to be in receipt of ‘a large amount of communist Literature’.
Miller is currently the subject of an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, which sees her iconic images placed alongside the extraordinary artistic gifts she received from those who reciprocated the compliment of her portrait by giving her one of their works.
An American from Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller was schooled in performing for the camera by her father - a keen amateur photographer with a questionable penchant for snapping his blossoming daughter in the nude. At 21, these talents were refined when the Vogue magnate, Condé Nast, rescued her from the path of a car and immediately signed her up as a model.
An overnight sensation, she became one of the most successful fashion models in New York, before a decision to pose for an advert for Kotex Sanitary napkins so shocked American audiences that it abruptly ended her career.
Having left America for Paris, Miller first began to display her capabilities on the other side of the lens, when she became Man Ray’s pupil and lover. Effortlessly exchanging her life as a model for a career as a photographer, she helped develop the Surrealist technique of Solarisation, briefly set up a successful studio in New York City, and eventually returned to Vogue as a freelance photographer, becoming war correspondent in 1942 and establishing herself as an uncompromising photographer of international repute.
Alongside her development as an artist in her own right, Miller continued to inspire, not least as Surrealist muse to her husband, the artist Roland Penrose, and Pablo Picasso. This exhibition focuses on the extraordinary range of artists that claimed a special intimacy with Miller - many of whom were photographed at her Sussex home, Farley Farm.
Lee Miller and Friends is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 29th March 2009.
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Image: David E. Scherman. Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath, Hitler’s Apartment, Munich, Germany 1945. © Lee Miller Archives, England. All rights reserved