Curated most commonly in chronological order, the exhibition steers audience thru a chain of gallery areas each and every documenting a key technology in Miller’s multi-faceted occupation, from Fashion style to surrealist muse, style photographer to conflict correspondent, and after all to hostess and sous-chef cook dinner.
Miller in 1943.
Pictorial Press / Alamy
Tate’s exhibition is on no account the primary UK retrospective of Miller’s paintings, however it’s arguably essentially the most large-scale display since The Artwork of Lee Miller on the V&A in 2007. This new exhibition tells Miller’s advanced tale thru roughly 250 fashionable and antique prints, movie and decided on unique publications.
Starting on the peak of the jazz age in trendy New York, we first come upon a hanging photomaton self-portrait of Miller taken round 1927. Right here, at 19, she become some of the first supermodels, posing for the likes of celebrated style photographers Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.
With a letter of advent from Steichen, she entered the thrilling and hedonistic international of Nineteen Twenties Paris. Right here she apprenticed herself to surrealist artist Guy Ray and rubbed ingenious shoulders with artists, writers and intellectuals, lots of whom seem within the exhibition in portraits taken through Miller.
A screening of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 movie The Blood of the Poet (Le sang d’un poète) presentations Miller in her best movie position as a statue that involves existence, striking her immediately throughout the Parisian avant garde.
In any other brief, newly restored and seldom observed experimental movie, Miller and Guy Ray are observed filming each and every different with a hand held digital camera revealing a playful intimacy of their courting as Guy Ray blows bubbles from a clay pipe whilst Miller giggles as she caresses a phallic sculpture through Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi.
Many pictures on this exhibition are very acquainted having been extensively reproduced – from the torn curtain exposing a wilderness panorama (Portrait of House, Al Bulyaweb, close to Siwa, Egypt, 1937), to the portrait of Miller defiantly washing off the filth from Dachau in Hitler’s tub, to the surreal and infrequently funny portraits of a devastated London captured all over the blitz.
On the other hand, there are a number of up to now unseen pictures revealed from Miller’s unique negatives or borrowed from the archives of different creatives. Two examples come with a portrait of Miller’s pal and fellow artist Eileen Agar with considered one of her sculptures (Eileen Agar, London, 1937), and the splendidly disorientating shot of the Helwan Cement Manufacturing facility taken in Cairo in 1936, demonstrating Miller’s leading edge modernist sensibility.
Miller’s conflict pictures are, through their very nature, tough viewing. Sensitively curated through Hilary Floe in session with Dr Andy Pearce on the UCL Centre for Holocaust Training, scenes from the focus camps are a dramatic trade in tone from the humour and pun of her Egyptian and blitz photographs.
In razor-sharp distinction, Miller’s pictures from Buchenwald and Dachau are like a sucker punch to the tummy – hard-hitting and painful to take in. There used to be a noticeable silence within the gallery as cameras and telephones had been reduced, Miller’s pictures inviting us to replicate and query our personal humanity.
“I usually don’t take pictures of horrors,” Miller wrote to Audrey Withers, editor of British Fashion. “But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel that they can publish these pictures.” A lot of them had been revealed, reworking the rage and way of life mag into crucial platform for reporting the conflict in Europe – specifically to the mag’s American readership.
Miller mixed her enjoy of the rage international along with her conflict pictures, later persuading Fashion to submit harrowing pictures she had taken in focus camps.
Lee Miller Archives
Miller’s pictures of refugees and youngsters within the rapid aftermath of the conflict are a few of her extra poignant photographs: the haunting gaze of 2 kids looking forward to gruel soup; opera singer Irmgard Seefried making a song an aria from Madam Butterfly a number of the ruins of the Vienna Opera Space; and an previous lady scavenging for scraps within the “Field of Blood” park in Vérmezõ, Budapest.
The general gallery area concludes the exhibition with a variety portraits of Miller’s buddies, many taken for her ultimate Fashion photo-essay Running Visitors (1953), transporting us from the devastation of post-war Europe to the extra non violent surroundings of Farley Farm in East Sussex (now house to the Lee Miller Archives).
Right here, Miller lived along with her 2nd husband Roland Penrose, whom she married in 1946, and her son Antony, born in 1947. Affected by what would lately be identified as PTSD, and suffering with serious bouts of melancholy and alcoholism, Miller took on her ultimate position. Changing the darkroom with the kitchen she become a hostess and a longtime cook dinner – a extra atypical finish to an bizarre existence.
Lee Miller is appearing at Tate Britain in London until 15 February 2026.
On the lookout for one thing excellent? Reduce in the course of the noise with a sparsely curated collection of the most recent releases, are living occasions and exhibitions, instantly in your inbox each fortnight, on Fridays. Join right here.
