Favorite tool: the blender. Favorite little dishes: guacamole and spinach rolls. In a portrait dedicated to him Vogue in 1965, Lee Miller, 58, shared a few recipes and posed in an impeccable white apron, blow-drying to match, salad bowl in hand, a model housewife who loved nothing more than spending hours in the kitchen. And to rave about this blender, thanks to which, “even in an evening dress, while waiting for the taxi” she can “make chocolate mousse for ten people”.
Where did she go, the Lee Miller icon of surrealism, to you and to you with the troublemakers Man Ray or Paul Éluard? The daredevil war photographer Lee Miller who documented the fall of Nazi Germany like no other? The Lee Miller so bohemian, so liberated, so adventurous that Hollywood has concocted the most anticipated biopic about her – Lee Millerwith Kate Winslet in the title role, which is finally released in Belgium this Wednesday October 9, 2024? Has she stepped aside in favor of this chic and good housewife in all respects? Not so fast. “When she cooked, it was art, performance,” corrects her son Antony Penrose. I remember his blue spaghetti, his green chicken, or that pair of breasts made of cauliflower, topped with pink mayonnaise, with cherry tomatoes for nipples. »
The Thousand Lives of Lee Miller
Cordon-bleu, perhaps, but still surreal! In his kitchen, the guests who get their hands dirty while sipping wine and whiskey in high doses are called Max Ernst, Elsa Triolet or this Pablo Picasso “who smelled so good: a mixture of Gauloises smoke and ‘eau de Cologne,’ recalls Antony Penrose. The Lee of the 50s and 60s, however, says nothing about her previous life: how these VIPs became her relatives, how she made a name for herself, is a mystery. “In my entire life, I must have heard him talk twice about the war,” the son continues. And this in a very impersonal way, as if she had not experienced it. Undoubtedly, she was suffering from post-traumatic stress, although at the time there was no word for it. »
Cooking, domestic life, a sedentary lifestyle, alcohol too, as bulwarks against the indescribable images of the Landing or Dachau which had been engraved in her. “Miller sweeps the entire spectrum of the feminine,” analyzes Judith Perrignon, journalist and novelist who devoted a fascinating series to the photographer on France Culture. Lee is beauty, talent, strength, freedom, but also the wounds she carries and childhood dramas: her early exposure to danger, horror, perhaps explains, later , his hotheaded temperament. »
For me, Lee Miller is a living force more than an object of desire holding the attention of famous men.
The horror experienced so early was this rape, at age 7, by a “family friend”, which, in addition to breaking her for life, transmitted gonorrhea, an STD which, at the start of the 20th century , is poorly cared for. The horror is also this first boyfriend who drowns before her eyes while she canoes in a boat with him. There is also this troubled-eyed father, Theodore Miller, an engineer and amateur photographer, who poses Lee naked while she is still a teenager, and takes disturbing photos as possible. Striking a pose, however, is how she will first earn her living.
When she leaves Poughkeepsie, her small hometown in the Hudson Valley, for New York, a stroke of romantic chance places her on the path of businessman Condé Nast, founder of the press group that bears his name: Lee almost finds herself knocked down by a car, Condé, who was passing by, stops her, the blondeness and the appearance of this 20 year old girl captivate him. Here she is a few months later on the cover of Vogue, of which he is the owner. Her short, very boyish cut will flourish under the lens of the great photographers of the moment and make her a leading model of the 1920s, but this livelihood quickly bores her.
Get behind the lens
She, who has notions of photography in spite of herself, paternally obliged, feels that she has more to say behind than in front of the lens. So she flew to Paris with the firm intention of making Man Ray, the pope of surrealism in photography, her teacher. She introduces herself to him like this, straight away, with an confidence that hits the mark: “Lee Miller, I am your new student. » Student, yes, then quickly assistant, lover, model that he shot from every angle, also collaborator who created four-handed works with him even if the history of art has long confined her to the role of muse.
“This word irritates me to no end, because it was too frequently used to define who she was based on her looks alone,” writes star actress Kate Winslet in the foreword to Lee Miller, Photographs ( Ed. Delpire & Co.), the work on Lee Miller that Antony Penrose is publishing these days. For me, Lee Miller is a living force (…) more than an object of desire holding the attention of famous men. » Because in these Parisian years, when Man Ray but also Jean Cocteau made her a work of art, she already produced singular clichés that looked like macabre pranks under her own name: a breast on a plate lying in the manner of a ‘a steak, a frail woman’s hand which seems to break a window…
“I prefer to take a photo than to be one,” she said to her master-lover when she left him in 1932. She was only 25 years old at the time, but she had a distinct style. her and a well-filled address book that she returned to New York to found a photo studio: Vogue, as charmed by her eye as earlier by her blondeness, bought her portraits and fashion series.
Weary! The one who never settles anywhere, a thousand miles from the well-ordered life she pretends to lead after the war, plants all her New York activities there to live in Cairo with Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman whose she fell in love. Obviously, in the strict world of expats, she stands out, this Lee who runs the desert to photograph its minerality, this Lee who advocates free love and who goes back and forth from Cairo to Paris to jam with her gang – the couple Nusch and Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, the painter Leonora Carrington…
She will also tire of Egypt and Aziz. Because it is now towards Roland Penrose, a figure of British surrealism, that her heart swings and it is with him that she settles, in London, when the Second World War breaks out.
Acidic view of the war and provocation of Adolf Hitler
What is striking is the constant shift, sometimes on the verge of discomfort, with which she embraces this dark period: in the rubble of the post-Blitz English capital, she shoots a charming fashion series; of a street blocked off due to an unexploded bomb, she made a funny photo entitled “You will not have lunch in Charlotte Street today”. On the one hand, an almost comical distance, on the other, a desire to see the war ever more closely.
Accredited as a reporter by the US Army which arrived in France – correspondent for Vogue again, she produced texts and photos – she told the command: “Treat me like your guys. » So she sees everything, field hospitals, pitched battles, survivors and corpses from the death camps, and in close-up.
The most famous image of her is this Hitler’s bathroom in Munich in which, naked, she portrays herself, a moment immortalized by her colleague and lover – free love, even there – David E. Scherman, Life correspondent.
Beyond the black humor, historian Sylvie Zaidman, director of the Musée de la Libération de Paris, curator last year of the Women War Photographers exhibition, underlines the political significance of Miller’s photos: ” Take this image she took in the ruins of Cologne, where two young women, as if nothing had happened, smoke cigarettes. This ties in with the texts that Lee Miller wrote: she pointed out, with all her anger, the denial in which German civilians locked themselves. »
When Miller married Penrose and then gave birth to Antony in 1947, she was still in shock from these chilling visions. She impresses in the kitchen, shines at the table with her group of drunken friends, but in private, she is an overwhelmed mother, stunned by her demons. “Mother, it was a job she couldn’t take on,” Antony recalls. So she recruited a wonderful nanny, Patsy, who gave me all the love Lee [il ne dit jamais Mum ni même my mother, ndlr] didn’t give me. From then on, I viewed Lee as a hostile being that I preferred to avoid. »
Between mother and son, relations have always been stormy and it was only after Lee’s death, thanks to a chance find, that Antony conceived the beginnings of filial love for her: a One day, Suzanna, Antony’s wife, discovers the attic of Farleys Farm, the Penroses’ country house in Sussex. [aujourd’hui transformée en musée : Farleys House & Gallery, Home of the Surrealists, ndlr]a manuscript recounting the American assault on Saint-Malo occupied by the Germans: the draft of a report by Lee for Vogue.
And then, under layers of dust, scattered in boxes, negatives and prints by the tens of thousands. “This Lee who overplayed the housewife had hidden her entire past there, organizing her own oblivion,” admires Judith Perrignon. Antony Penrose, examining these invaluable documents, “completely reevaluates this woman whose [il avait] such a low opinion. If only I had known all this when she was alive, perhaps I would have understood her better and helped her better…”
He wrote a first biography on his mother, 1985, The Lives of Lee Miller (Ed. Thames & Hudson), translated into French in 2021 – “flooding my keyboard with tears” –, inventoried her work, went from museum to museum, from curator to curator, to rehabilitate it. Since then, he has dedicated his life to this single task: to make known an artist and a woman who, from his son as from the world, has always shied away.
Lee by Ellen Kuras, with Kate Winslet, Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Marion Cotillard, Noémie Merlant…
Source : Marie Claire France.
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