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"I was terribly, terribly pretty," Lee Miller once said, looking back on her career as a Vogue cover girl. "I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside." Angelic beauty and fiendish determination: These qualities are the keys to understanding Miller's life on both sides of the camera. She was a model who came to epitomize Jazz Age elegance, an artist and muse among the Surrealists in Paris, and an intrepid front-line photojournalist during World War II.
Miller's work as a photographer only really came to light after her death in 1977, when her son, Antony Penrose, discovered a cache of prints and negatives that she had hidden in the attic of the Sussex farmhouse where she spent the last three decades of her life shell-shocked and depressed. "This gave me a completely different take on the woman I had known as a rather feckless parent and as a pretty serious alcoholic," Penrose has said.
Now an exhibition, The Art of Lee Miller, brings the fullest appraisal of Miller's achievement yet, with 180 images, many of them never before published. Organized by London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the show makes its American debut this January at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father, Theodore, was an engineer, inventor, and avid amateur photographer whose favorite subject was his own ravishing young daughter. He photographed her incessantly, often nude, throughout her childhood and into her early twenties.
Her big break as a professional model came about through a chance encounter—a fitting start for a woman who would soon blossom into a Surrealist. One day in 1927, when Miller was taking drawing classes at Manhattan's Art Students League, she stepped into the path of an oncoming car. The man who yanked her to safety introduced himself as CondéNast, publisher of Vogue, and within months she was on the magazine's cover, immortalized as an Art Deco illustration.
After several years of modeling for the likes of Edward Steichen and Nickolas Muray, Miller decided that she wanted to be a photographer herself, and that Man Ray would be her teacher. With typical élan, she tracked him down in a Paris bar and informed him that she was his new student; in a heartbeat, she became his lover and collaborator. Miller was the It Girl of bohemian Paris: She played an armless statue in Cocteau's film The Blood of a Poet, and one company modeled Champagne glasses on the curve of her breasts.
Her own work from this period mixes glamour with a pungent taste for the bizarre. Among portraits of icons like Mina Loy, Salvador Dalí, and Charlie Chaplin are grisly shots of a severed human breast on a dinner plate. They can now take their place alongside the eyeball-slashing scene in Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou as gross-out masterpieces of the period.
