Photographer, model for Vogue, muse of many artists, witness to the atrocities of Second World War, the American Elisabeth Lee Miller (1907 – 1977) is a true icon of the Roaring Twenties, first in New York City, then in Paris, and was immortalized in unforgettable photos like The drivers by George Hoyningen-Huené. She is now the protagonist of an exhibition which focuses on her relationship with Man Ray (1890 – 1976) who—with Marcel Duchamp—followed and influenced Dadaism, first in New York City and then in Paris, as well.

Ray and Miller were together from 1929 to 1932, as master and apprentice in the beginning, then as lovers, and eventually as close friends. In this exhibition—through photographies, objects, and documents—the visitor can look into the two artists’ lives, which are weaved together with those of many other protagonists of the rich cultural scene of those days. Man Ray’s portraits of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalì are exhibited together with the Surrealist pictures of Lee, who suggested to Ray the cutting edge technique of the pseudo-solarization that made him famous.

In 1932, however, Lee Miller returned to New York and opened a photographic studio, the first one founded and run by a woman. A few years later, in 1937, she shoot the famous “surrealist holidays” among friends like Picasso, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, and Roland Penrose, the English surrealist who will become her second husband.

One section of the exhibit is dedicated to Egypt, where Miller went with her first husband—businessman Aziz Eloui Bey—and got charmed by the desert, the villages, the great civilizations of the past, which inspired some photographs like Portrait of a Space, which in turn inspired Magritte’s painting Le Basier.

Finally, Lee Miller witnessed some significant events of the Second World War that she immortalized for Vogue and as a correspondent for the American Army, such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald.
After the end of the conflict, she kept working for the famous fashion magazine also in England, always using the stylistic code of surrealist cuts that recall her relationship with Man Ray, who remained close to her even after her retirement, when she suffered from depression, linked also to a post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the horrors of war she had witnessed.

We owe to her daughter-in-law—the wife of her son Anthony Penrose—the discovery of 60,000 photographs, negatives, documents, magazines, correspondences and memorabilia, in the family house in Sussex: a discovery that documents the richness of Lee Miller’s legacy to the art of photography and her many extraordinary lives.

I would rather take a photograph than be one.—Lee Miller

Lee Miller – Man Ray. Fashion, Love, War
Palazzo Franchetti – San Marco 2847, campo Santo Stefano
From November 5 to April 10 2023
Open daily from 10am to 6pm. Closed on Tuesday.
www.leemillermanray.it