Lee Miller: Venus in war

Lee Miller — charming and high-spirited, restless and rebellious, glamorous and romantic — was perhaps the most brilliant female photographer of the 20th century.  Candice Bergen played a minor role as the photographer Margaret Bourke-White in the film Gandhi (1982).  The current movie Lee, starring Kate Winslet and released in September 2023, focuses entirely on Miller’s career, from Vogue model through photographer in World War Two.  To mark this important occasion Thames & Hudson has reprinted The Lives of Lee Miller (1985) by her son Antony Penrose, with 116 excellent photos on glossy paper at the low price of £20, and has published his handsome large-format companion volume with 122 mostly different images in Lee Miller’s Photographs (£30).

Penrose makes some strange comments in the Introduction to his new book.  Her father’s photos of Lee were not “dull”, but striking and sensational.  Condé Nast’s dubious “meet-cute” encounter was certainly invented by a publicist: “As she crossed a New York street, the owner of Vogue magazine yanked her from the path of an oncoming car.  Lee fainted in his arms, introducing him to the face he had been searching for.”

Penrose repeatedly stresses Lee’s surrealism, though her best photos were taken during and soon after the war: “First and foremost she was a surrealist. . . . The realms of the unconscious were, to her, synonymous with the power of the mind to imagine.”  Her best early photo portrays rodents that live in slimy sewers and carry deadly plague.  Four rats, standing shoulder to shoulder and seen from the rear, clutch a piece of wood vaguely suspended in the air.  Their humped furry backs contrast to the bare flesh of their long tails, which resemble dangling spears or hanging icicles.

Miller (1907-77) was born in Poughkeepsie, 80 miles north of Manhattan, and suffered four irreparable traumas in her youth.  As a vulnerable seven-year-old she was left with “family friends” in Brooklyn and raped by their son.  The rapist gave her gonorrhea, which recurred throughout her childhood, and required a long series of painful and shameful treatments.  Miller was again victimised by her prurient and predatory father, who had failed to protect her.  With astonishing insensitivity, he removed her clothes, took naked photos of her “shivering in the snow” and incestuously possessed her with his camera.  In her teens, while rowing on a lake, she helplessly watched her first love fall into the water and drown.  Another lover died when crashing his biplane.

In a later nude photo taken by her father when she was 21, she has the face of Botticelli’s Primavera and the body of the Venus de Milo.  She has short blond hair and is seated with her arms folded behind her.  Her body faces the camera, her head in profile turns shyly to the left and she looks modestly down.  Her perfect cantilevered breasts have bulbous nipples and her pubic hair shows between closed legs, cut off below the knees.

In 1929 Miller turned up unannounced at the Paris studio of the American surrealist Man Ray and offered herself as his photography student and potential lover.  But she insisted on sexual freedom, both in and out of marriage, and was often involved with several men at the same time.  She kept sexual liaisons separate from personal feelings, and was unable to form stable and satisfying relations with either lovers or husbands.  Still, Man Ray and many others who courted her were glad to have a time-share.  In 1930 she appeared as a gorgeous living statue in Jean Cocteau’s avant-garde film The Blood of a Poet.

Man Ray introduced her to Picasso, who became a close friend.  In August 1937, during the dark days of the Spanish Civil War, the friends of Picasso and his lover Dora Maar, who freely shared their wives and lovers among themselves, gathered for a holiday at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon at Mougins in the hills above Cannes.  In Miller’s idyllic photo, a déjeuner sur l’herbe, five friends sit on the ground in front of a sunny wood and next to a low table with the remains of their luncheon. The two attractive, nicely tanned women have bare breasts.  On the left, the French poet Paul Eluard leans over, with his hand on the yielding body of his wife Nusch, and kisses her.  On the right her future husband Roland Penrose, always the English gentleman, gazes discreetly away while the sun illuminates his distinguished face.  By contrast, and next to Penrose, Man Ray and his Guadeloupean lover Ady Fidelin stare at the Eluards.  Ray, wearing a flat white cap, touches his fingers to his chin and has a sly grin and pop eyes.  The sensual Ady, leaning back on her hands, has a gleaming white smile and clearly enjoys the spectacle.

In Miller’s photo Picasso, aged 56, appears on the balcony of the hotel that summer, sitting sideways, framed by ferns and flowers, and turning his head toward the camera.  A white umbrella is placed upside-down next to him and a door is open behind his head.  Under a loose dark sweater he wears a distinctive black-and-white polka-dotted shirt.  Though she’s almost cut out of the picture, Dora Maar wears a matching shirt.  It appears on her right shoulder to subtly link her to Picasso, who extends his arm toward her.  His grey hair is slicked over his bald head, his forehead and face are deeply grooved.  Anxious about the impending European war, his expression is wary and severe.

Antony Penrose describes Picasso’s 1937 portrait of Lee: “On a bright pink background Lee appeared in profile, her face a brilliant yellow like the sun with no modelling.  Two smiling eyes and a green mouth were placed on the same side of the face and her breasts seemed like the sails of ships filled with a joyous breeze.”  Her upper lip, exposing six gravestone teeth, curls upward toward her dripping egg-shaped left eye.  This eye is encased by horizontal lines, the right eye by two vertical oval circles.  A girlish red bow separates her high parted green hair, blue and white earrings dangle and her hands with triangular fingers are spread along her thighs.  The weirdly coloured portrait captures her dynamism and joie de vivre.  That year Roland Penrose, the infatuated biographer of Picasso, offered up his future wife as a tribute.  Delighted by the generous gift, Picasso slept with Miller, who inspired several other portraits.

Miller maintained her friendship with Picasso for many years.  When she entered liberated Paris as a war correspondent in August 1944 she went straight to Picasso’s studio.  She towered over him, they embraced and he exclaimed, “This is the first allied soldier I have seen, and it’s you!”  Miller later published two articles about Picasso.  When he visited her in England in 1950, she wrote that he appreciated the experience and mentioned the giant white chalk figure on a nearby hill: “At our farm in Sussex, Picasso found the world was very English; the landscape of Downs with Constable clouds, the prudish Long Man of Wilmington, left-handed driving, red and white Ayrshire [cows], open log fires, whiskey and soda nightcap, hot water bottles, cooked breakfast and tea.”  At the 1960 exhibition of Picasso’s works organised by Roland Penrose, she emphasised his animal magnetism: “His flashing black eyes have fascinated everyone who has only seen Picasso, but those who meet him feel thrown into an exciting new equilibrium by the personality of this small, warm, friendly man whose name means modern painting.”

In an exotic escape from her life among the artists in Europe, in 1934 the restless Miller shocked her friends by marrying Aziz Eloui Bey.  The handsome, wealthy and well-connected Egyptian, nearly twenty years older, was a high official at the Ministry of Railways.  They lived splendidly in Cairo, and she took many dramatic photos of the ruins and oases of the Egyptian desert.  Despite these expeditions, Miller soon became bored with the vacuous social life of expatriates and upper-class Egyptians in Cairo: the opera, theater, races, nightclubs and charity balls, the drinks in Shepheard’s Hotel, sweetmeats in Groppi’s café, tennis and golf at the Gezira Sporting Club.

When she left her husband and returned to Paris, she condemned herself as an unfaithful and worthless wife.  Penrose notes that the tolerant “kind, gentle and affectionate Aziz welcomed her back although it was obvious by now that there could be no hope of salvaging the marriage. . . . He was still deeply in love with her but far too realistic to imagine that he could ever make her happy.”  Their marriage ended in 1939.

After the war broke out, Miller knew that photographers, unlike journalists, had to be at the front to capture the action, and she was incongruously hired as a war photographer and reporter by the fashion-conscious Vogue magazine.  She craved excitement, saw combat, was fearless under fire and one of the very few women correspondents at the front in World War Two.  She flew from America to France in July 1944, photographed and wrote about the battles in Saint-Malo, the field hospitals in Normandy, the liberation of Paris and the extermination camps.

Her photo of the double column of faceless American infantrymen trudging through the snow to fight in Alsace recalls Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.  The booted soldiers wear white-hooded camouflage suits, have rifles slung from their shoulders and ammunition on their heavy belts.  In the left foreground a helmeted soldier (perhaps a priest) with bowed head and clasped hands, stands inside a freshly dug grave that has pierced the frozen snow. An unobtrusive corpse lies next to him, covered by a rubber cloth and with a tiny twig cross at his head, waiting to be buried.

In London in 1943 Miller met the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and took a well-lit and carefully posed photo that shows her—curious and attentive, with an alert and intense expression—as an author at work.  With her back to the camera, Gellhorn looks into a mirror as her reflected image stares back at Miller.  Dressed in a sweater and belted trousers, with a straight back, narrow waist and curly blond hair, Gellhorn is seated on a padded stool next to her dressing table.  It serves as her desk and combines vanity with vocation.  She holds a cigarette next to her wedding ring in her raised left hand, a pen in her right hand, and writes on a pad of paper.  The window curtains, on the left and above her head, frame the photo and are drawn open to show the dark night outside.  Though Gellhorn’s marriage was breaking up, Miller placed—for iconic effect—three photos of her husband, Ernest Hemingway, onto the triptych mirror.  It looks as if Gellhorn, in front of a religious altar, is worshipping the dashing and handsome man she soon began to hate.

In Munich, Miller slept in Eva Braun’s bed and blissfully soaked in Hitler’s bathtub.  Facing the camera of her colleague David Scherman, Miller is delightfully weird as she takes a longed-for bath.  Shown from the shoulders up, she rubs her back with a cloth in her right hand.  Her discarded military uniform and filthy combat boots on a dirty rug provide a striking contrast to the sanitary setting.  A framed photo of Hitler appears on the left, next to soap dishes and a hanging shower hose; a naked, Nazi-art statue, with raised right hand echoing Miller’s, stands on a table on the right.

Miller also witnessed the human damage in postwar Europe.  Penrose gives a morbid description of the medical conditions in Vienna: “drugs were available only to the military, and the glossy well-equipped civilian hospitals were crammed with patients who had little hope of survival.”  Miller mentions “drug running, abandoning pregnant girlfriends, black-marketeering, stealing penicillin supplies.”

The hospital scene in Graham Greene’s script for Carol Reed’s superb film The Third Man (1949) dramatises the horrific effects of penicillin, then a newly-discovered antibiotic in short supply, that was stolen and adulterated by the merciless Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles.  Miller’s tragic photo portrayed one of these hopeless starved and dying children.  Half-buried by sheets in a three-sided, cage-like chipped metal bed, the tiny boy has a quiff of wispy hair, oversized head, bony chest, sticklike outspread arms and ghastly expression in his turned-down mouth.  Miller recalls: “For an hour I watched a baby die. . . . He gasped and fought and struggled for life. . . . Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death.”

Her postwar photos revealed that the horrors continued and showed the daring side of her character.  In the spring of 1945 Miller was one of the first reporters to describe the extermination camps in Germany.  At Buchenwald, where the crematoriums had run out of fuel, the evidence of mass starvations and executions was clear.  Her most ghastly photo shows ten ragged, naked, emaciated corpses with long skeletal legs and pathetic toes, piled upside down on top of each other in six layers and thrown into mass burial pits.  The men have bloodied heads and agonized expressions, the women’s heads are hidden.  The photo reveals one limp circumcised penis and a bit of brown cloth pushed between a woman’s legs, looking like a bulging sexual organ, which once gave pleasure and created life.  These corpses look like adult versions of the dying child, and it’s hard to remember they once had been living human beings.

The 26 just liberated and barely surviving prisoners are packed three to a bunk in three tiers, and look out from their openings as if they were riding a crowded railroad car to long-awaited freedom.  Well-lit or in shadows, wearing the wide-striped prison uniforms, they stare at the camera with gaunt faces and grim expressions to confirm that they are still alive.

Two concentration camp guards, from Dachau and Buchenwald, reflect the sudden loss of their cruel power after the Nazis were defeated.  A waist-high close-up of the guard who failed to escape shows him beaten by his former captives, with a bloodied face and flattened broken nose.  Wide-eyed with fear, he’s still shocked by what has suddenly happened to him.  The other, perhaps more fortunate, guard escaped torture but was killed in the battle for the camp.  Still wearing his leather military coat, he floats sideways in a canal, his face in profile against the dark rippling water that carries him out of God’s earshot.

László Bardossy, the fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary, helped to round up and murder the Jews.  Miller wrote that he wore an odd costume to his execution: “the same plus-fours tweed suit, ankle-high shoes with white socks turned over the edges as when he’d been arrested.”  His last high-pitched rasp was “God save Hungary from all these bandits.”  In front of a brick wall and boarded window sandbags are piled up behind him to prevent the ricochet of bullets.  He stands at attention, chin raised, hands at his sides, without a blindfold.  After giving the last rites the priest in a white surplice and long cassock folds his hands into his sleeves.  Behind the priest on the left a packed and curious group of about 25 men stare curiously at the death scene.

Miller’s four Romanian gypsies are filthy and impoverished, but impressive.  The patriarch in the centre has long hair hanging beneath his round hat bound with a striped ribbon, shaded eyes, strong nose, dark skin and scraggly beard.  He wears a dirty smock, has a knife tied to his belt and tenderly holds a small, curly-haired, barefoot child with a long tattered dress, open at the back to show a white undershirt.  On his right a woman with long hair under another round hat partly covers her face with a black scarf.  She’s probably the mother of the small child and is pregnant again.  On the left a young man, with long hair touching his shoulders, has shaded eyes, broad nose, open lips and strong white teeth.  He wears a long V-necked, once-white robe, folds his arms across his belly and seems ready to continue their traditional, roaming, independent life.

In Miller’s compassionate photo, two very pretty homeless Hungarian girls of about twelve and ten face the camera.  They stand ragged and barefoot before a cracked wall plastered with a political poster that proclaims in Hungarian: “Vote Democratic.”  The older girl, with tilted head and slightly forced smile, clasps her hands in front of her; the younger one leans her head on her sister’s shoulder.  The black open-mouthed drainpipe on the right and the poster of an old woman behind them suggest their tragic fate.  Without adult protection they will probably be raped and forced into prostitution.

Two photos of Miller show her willingness to test herself in danger.  In Egypt a snake charmer scooped up a large black cobra and twisted it around her neck.  The photo shows her seated on a rough rock, wearing a colored headscarf, short-sleeved white blouse and tan trousers.  With her mouth anxiously open, she looks up at the half-hidden barefoot black-robed musician.  He also provided the white snake wrapped around her wrist and held in her right hand.

Miller felt the only way to cure her painful back was to be trampled on by a tame Romanian dancing bear.  Performing properly, the bear walked up and down on her back as if she were stepping on eggs, then sat her warm bottom on Miller’s neck and shuffled down to her knees.  In the photo of this weird treatment, Miller wears a puffy jacket and lies flat on a carpet, smoothed on the frozen ground, with the 300-pound brown bear sitting on her back.  The bleak rural landscape has a thatched peasant hut in the background.  The bear-master, wearing a heavy overcoat and pointed astrakhan hat, faces the thick-furred bear and holds her by a loose chain.  The obliging animal has her back to the camera and points her snout to the right.  Miller clasps her hands and grimaces during this rough physical therapy.  The pyramidal composition of flat Miller, sitting bear and standing man echoes the triangular shape of the animal.

Roland Penrose, Miller’s handsome second husband from 1947 to her death in 1977, was a wealthy English artist, collector, critic and founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.  Their son Antony, whose book appeared before Carolyn Burke’s revelations in her 2006 biography of Miller, doesn’t mention that her father took nude photos when she was a child or that while having sex Roland oppressed and degraded Miller, the very symbol of the liberated woman, by tying her up with leather straps.

After her lacerating wartime experience the once-stunning Miller, still tormented by her childhood traumas, became an alcoholic, put on weight, neglected her appearance and became almost unrecognisable.  She gave up photography and writing, became quarrelsome and venomous.  She attacked her husband, who took lovers when Miller lost interest in sex and straps, and fought with her son, who in this book both praised her achievements and retaliated by describing her decline.  She bitterly said she would have killed herself if she hadn’t known that Roland and Antony would be so happy without her.  The gods gave Miller every gift they could bestow—exceptional beauty, artistic talent and personal courage—but later punished this tragic heroine.  As Yeats warned about potential dangers in “A Prayer for My Daughter”: “May she be granted beauty and yet not / Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught.”

Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in August or September, both with Louisiana State University Press.

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