Lee Miller: The Supermodel Surrealist (Part 1)

How did Lee Miller transform herself from Jazz Age beauty to Surrealist photographer in 1930s Paris? And what lay behind her extraordinary capacity for reinvention? Join Alastair and James as they tell the first part of the remarkable story of the American model, artist, photojournalist and celebrity chef Lee Miller. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Lee Miller and David E. Scherman, Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub, 1945 Lee Miller, Charlie Chaplin with Chandelier, 1932 Lee Miller, Untitled (Severed Breast from Radical Surgery), c.1930 Man Ray, Indestructible Object (or Object to Be Destroyed), 1964 (replica of 1923 original), The Museum of Modern Art, New York Lee Miller, Joseph Cornell, c.1933 Lee Miller, From the Top of the Great Pyramid, 1938 Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulyaweb, near Siwa, Egypt, 1937 Lee Miller, Eileen Agar, 1937 Lee Miller, Picnic, Mougins (Nusch and Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin), 1937 Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, 1937, Private Collection/National Galleries of Scotland Recommended Reading: Anthony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller, 1985 Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera, 2006 ————————— Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome to Stories of Art, I'm Alastair Sooke. And I'm James Fox.

• 0:09James Fox?

  A naked woman sits in a bathtub, scrubbing her back with a flannel. It seems like an ordinary domestic snap, the kind taken by annoying husbands in bathrooms all over the world.

• 0:21Alastair Sooke?

  Speak for yourself, James.

• 0:23James Fox?

  But this scene is far from ordinary. Just behind her, perched on the edge of the bath, is a black and white image of the leader of Nazi Germany, the Fuhrer himself. For this is not just any bathroom, it is Adolf Hitler's bathroom on the 1st of May 1945, the day after he died. So who is the woman in the bath and what is she doing there? It's Lee Miller, the American model, muse, artist and photojournalist. What has she been up to over the last couple of days, Alistair?

• 0:57Alastair Sooke?

  Well, the giveaway, James, is in the photograph. Beneath her, just by the bath, on a bath mat, is a big pair of black boots. And they're clearly very muddy and they've soiled the bath mat. And this is a really terribly, terribly sad and tragic story. Because she's come to Munich, to Hitler's apartment, and later in this mini-series about Lee Miller, we'll properly dissect this image. But she's come there straight from one of the liberated concentration camps at Dachau, which is a few miles outside of Munich. And she and her collaborator, another photojournalist who, like her, was a war correspondent man called David E. Sherman,

• 1:41Alastair Sooke?

  with whom she collaborated on this series, in fact, of self-portraits. They staged these images where they're both literally washing off the dirt from Dachau. Although you look at her expression in the most famous, and she hardly looks ecstatic, it's not triumphalist, it doesn't look like someone who's thinking, it's easy to wash such horrendous stains away. And I actually think, looking at this picture, that it's one of the most astonishing photographs created in the 20th century. It's actually quite mind-boggling to get your head around the magnitude of the image. Because, as you pointed out, you've got Hitler's portrait, which they put there, obviously Hitler didn't, even Hitler didn't have a bath with a portrait of Hitler by the bath.

• 2:26Alastair Sooke?

  But they put that there to signal where they are. And if you think about that context of the concentration camps, you can see snaking behind her head the shower hose. Yeah. And what she's just witnessed at Dachau, she already understood the way that some of the Final Solution was implemented in these concentration camps using showers. And it's just a terrifying and almost incomprehensible image, but also it's all about the mundanity of evil, isn't it? Yeah. You know, the simplicity, the strange intimacy of this place where Hitler did bathe.

• 3:04James Fox?

  And let's pause for a moment to just reflect on how extraordinary it is that a photographer, and a female photographer at that, could be taking photographs of the concentration camps as they're being liberated, and then end up, the following day, finding herself almost by chance in Hitler's own apartment. It's extraordinary.

• 3:21Alastair Sooke?

  And that evening, news would filter through of Hitler's death. Yeah. So it brings together this, it encapsulates this ending of the war. The crazy thing is that although it was published in Lee Miller's lifetime, it was only published quite small, in the pages of Vogue. She was a war correspondent for Vogue! I mean, it's so strange, but this is the, one of the kind of great excitements and sort of achievements, I guess, of her career. And it doesn't become very famous until much later, after her death, really. I mentioned this guy Sherman, he was interviewed much later, years later. And he spoke about the fact that Lee Miller had had, what, six, eight, 10 discreet lives, if you like.

• 4:03Alastair Sooke?

  And the thing about her, and I guess the reason why we both really want to do this two-part series about her, is that her biography is so, almost ridiculously riveting.

• 4:13James Fox?

  It's ridiculous, it's ridiculous. And as you say, yes, multiple different lives. She has the life as the supermodel in Jazz Age New York. She has the life as the surrealist artist and muse in 1920s, 30s Paris. She has the life, as we've been describing, of the hard-bitten war correspondent exposing the atrocities of the concentration camps. And she has the life of the kind of semi-professional cook in an English farmhouse.

• 4:36Alastair Sooke?

  She becomes like this badass maverick Mary Berry at the end of her life. She becomes this celebrity chef.

• 4:43James Fox?

  It is extraordinary, and we are going to dive very deep into this truly remarkable life and also truly extraordinary work. So this is the first part in our two-part series on the lives and work of Lee Miller.

• 5:04James Fox?

  Alistair, I think we should begin in New York State, in the Hudson Valley, in the beautifully named town, city of Poughkeepsie.

• 5:13Alastair Sooke?

  Poughkeepsie, is that how you pronounce it?

• 5:14James Fox?

  Yes, that is how you pronounce it. And in fact, Poughkeepsie is very close to my heart. Because do you remember there used to be a television series called Ally McBeal?

• 5:21Alastair Sooke?

  Of course.

• 5:22James Fox?

  Yes, and Ally McBeal, there was a character in Ally McBeal who had a speech impediment. And every time he felt a stutter coming on, he would whisper to himself, "Poughkeepsie." And everyone in the show started whispering "Poughkeepsie", and this really lodged in my head in the 1990s.

• 5:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 5:36James Fox?

  And I became obsessed with Poughkeepsie, so much so that when I became a postdoctoral research associate at Yale University, I think 16 years ago.

• 5:43Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 5:44James Fox?

  One weekend, I rented a car and I made a day trip to Poughkeepsie.

• 5:48Alastair Sooke?

  I know nothing about Poughkeepsie, what did you find?

• 5:50James Fox?

  It's a lovely place, it's a very nice place. And what I discovered there was that Lee Miller, Elizabeth Miller, as she was born, was born in Poughkeepsie in April 1907.

• 6:01Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 6:02James Fox?

  Her father was a mechanical engineer, he actually, I think, oversaw a factory producing dairy farming equipment. Her mother was a nurse, and Lee grew up on this farm, 165-acre farm on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie. She was a real tomboy as a child, I mean, she was playing in the farm, she was building water wheels, building train tracks, playing with potions. She was, she had two brothers, she had an older brother and a younger brother, the younger brother we might mention a little bit later on in this episode.

• 6:28Alastair Sooke?

  And she was quite, she was quite competitive with the older one, wasn't she?

• 6:30James Fox?

  She was very competitive, she was a real, I mean, she was constantly out and about, constantly covered in mud. And it was an amazingly vital, vibrant childhood, but it was marked by very early trauma. So the story that everyone knows about Lee Miller, absolutely awful, is that aged seven, her mother falls ill, and her father sends her to some family friends to look after her in Brooklyn. And they have a son known as Uncle Bob, who's just on leave, I think, from the Navy. And he rapes the seven-year-old Lee Miller. We don't know anything that happens to him afterwards, we know she catches gonorrhea, she ends up going through these very, very awful treatments, both physical and psychological, to get over this.

• 7:13Alastair Sooke?

  We also know that she keeps it secret.

• 7:15James Fox?

  She does. And then there is the very complicated relationship with her father. And I don't really know what to do with this information, Alistair.

• 7:23Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, right, I know where you're going already. Yeah, go on.

• 7:25James Fox?

  Her father Theodore, who's an amateur photographer and has a darkroom under the stairs, he starts taking nude photographs of her.

• 7:33Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's beyond crassly insensitive, it is wildly inappropriate, surely, to be doing that. I mean, it's devastating. I mean, even her son Anthony Penrose, much later, has talked about that being a transgression of a relationship. The thing that's really odd is that it goes on, this photography between amateur father photographer and Lee Miller as model, often naked, right into her adulthood periodically, even to the point where she's eventually getting married in the 1930s. And she has this line, which is, you know, "I was practically born and brought up in a darkroom." This is Lee Miller, the photographer, essentially crediting her dad.

• 8:15Alastair Sooke?

  Lots of people who observe them together take a much less judgmental view of their relationship, don't they?

• 8:23James Fox?

  I mean, she seemed to be very close to her father throughout her life. Very, very strange. As I say, I don't quite know what to do with it, but what we do know is a few years later, there's another trauma that strikes her. So when she's a teenager, she meets a boy, she has a boyfriend, and one summer's day, they go out onto the water, they go boating. And this boy, again, the details are quite murky, but we think he jumps into the water, has a heart attack, and drowns, dies in front of her. So, so many difficult things for this young girl to process. And some listeners may remember that a few months ago, we did an episode about Jean-Michel Basquiat. And we talked about how this trauma, this very early part of his childhood, really sent him off the rails. And he never really fully came back from it as a person.

• 9:06James Fox?

  I think the same to some extent is true of Lee Miller, she ends up, just like Jean-Michel Basquiat, actually gets expelled from schools.

• 9:12Alastair Sooke?

  On the school thing, were you going to tell the story about the diagnostic dye?

• 9:16James Fox?

  You do it, go on.

• 9:17Alastair Sooke?

  It's so funny. So my impression is that she's expelled, she's quite an unruly, difficult adolescent, perhaps for good reason. You know, in a way, she's suffering PTSD following this early trauma in her life. And at one point, she ends up at a Catholic girls' school, and she seems to torment, rib another pupil there by ensuring that this classmate swallows a capsule that contains diagnostic dye. So that, completely unsuspecting, when she eventually urinates, she's wheeing, it's blue, essentially. Which of course, Lee Miller finds totally hilarious. The thing that I love about this is that it is in microcosm, this is before the surrealist movement has been invented or thought of.

• 9:58Alastair Sooke?

  But if you think this is a, it's a kind of anarchic surrealist take on an Enid Blyton story, isn't it? Totally wholesome, but then actually, Lee Miller gives it this quite dark twist, which is somehow very characteristic.

• 10:09James Fox?

  And she gets expelled from the school, and as Anthony Penrose, her son, says, "There were no more schools left for her to go to." Because she'd been expelled from every school in the area. So her parents come up with a plan, 1925, when she's about 18 years old. Her father says, what we'll do is we'll get a tutor, we'll get a chaperone, this elderly Polish woman, we'll get her to take Lee to France, where she can learn French, see the art, go to finishing school.

• 10:34Alastair Sooke?

  It's hardly like going to military school, is it?

• 10:36James Fox?

  No.

• 10:36Alastair Sooke?

  We go to Paris, centre of the avant-garde and libertine behaviour at the time.

• 10:41James Fox?

  So in 1925, they head off to France. It's an inauspicious start, Alastair, because the first hotel they stay in turns out to be a brothel.

• 10:49Alastair Sooke?

  I didn't know that.

• 10:50James Fox?

  Yes, the chaperone is mortified, Lee is delighted, she then escapes her chaperone and voyages into Paris and has an incredible time in Paris, very exciting place to be, as you say, in the 1920s.

• 11:02Alastair Sooke?

  Doesn't she say, one look at Paris and I said, this is mine, this is my home?

• 11:06James Fox?

  Well, and then she made it her home, and in fact, she refused to come home to the States. Her father, in the autumn of 1926, had to travel to France to drag her back. So he drags her back in the autumn of 1926 to the States. She moves to New York. Now, I mean, this is also a very exciting place to be. This is Jazz Age New York. I mean, The Great Gatsby has only been published the year before. She studies performing arts, she does some dancing on the side, she's having a fantastic time.

• 11:34Alastair Sooke?

  The dancing's quite interesting because she's in it, she's in a, it's called George White scandals. So she's, I think, on Broadway and she's in a chorus line.

• 11:41James Fox?

  Yeah, she's a flapper girl.

• 11:42Alastair Sooke?

  Which sounds surprising. I mean, I guess everything that we've said so far about the dad, we haven't spoken about the mum all that much, but they're quite supportive of her boundary provocative transgressions, if you like.

• 11:55James Fox?

  Yes.

• 11:55Alastair Sooke?

  Because she is essentially, you know, on paper, a good, middle-class girl, and suddenly she's now dancing in a chorus line. And I think that year she starts modelling, she becomes a lingerie model.

• 12:04James Fox?

  Yes.

• 12:04Alastair Sooke?

  At a department store, right, in New York.

• 12:07James Fox?

  They are very liberal in many ways, and it's around this time, Alastair, that an incident takes place that will change her life. It's one of the most famous stories of all the many Lee Miller stories. Do you want to tell it?

• 12:19Alastair Sooke?

  Well, it's not, it's not the story, I don't think you have the story in mind of meeting at the Art Students League is Samu Noguchi.

• 12:25James Fox?

  Oh, no.

• 12:26Alastair Sooke?

  That's not what you're referring to, is it? But I couldn't resist because, of course, he has featured prominently.

• 12:29James Fox?

  Yes, Frida Kahlo.

• 12:30Alastair Sooke?

  The scandal of the socks story, which I loved in Frida Kahlo. So she befriends Noguchi, artist, who she meets very young and subsequently portrays him. But of course, what you're driving at is something very different, which is, she's there in New York, she's supposedly wearing, I mean, there are lots of stories told about this, lots of versions, but this is, you know, let's go with this one. She's wearing this beautiful gown, possibly acquired in France when she was in Paris. And New York is a big bustling metropolis. She's stepping out into the street, into the road, some vehicle, maybe a truck, a car's hurtling towards her, and an elderly, well-dressed gentleman scoops her up into his arms and saves her. She starts babbling in French, he looks down, sees that she is head-turningly beautiful.

• 13:14James Fox?

  Yeah, she is very beautiful. We haven't mentioned that, actually, but she's, she's tall, she's athletic, she's blonde.

• 13:19Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, she's known as one of the most beautiful women in the world in her youth. And this man is Conde Nast, the founder of the eponymous publishing empire. And he was supposedly quite obsessed with sex. There may have been, we don't know, I don't have evidence for this, but some sort of casting couch element to the nature of this relationship. That's purely speculation before the Lee Miller archives sue us. But quite soon after this encounter, which is very late 1926 or early 1927, Lee Miller, it's not the first time she appears in Vogue, but she appears on the cover of Vogue, not in

• 14:01Alastair Sooke?

  the form of a photograph, but in those days, it's still quite early in glossy magazines. And there was an artist, quite often you would have drawings that would appear in the magazine alongside photography, and this drawing of her wearing this very sleek, small, I think it's called a cloche hat, bell-shaped hat, appears on the front. And it kickstarts this modelling career.

• 14:21James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Alastair Sooke?

  In the mid to late 1920s, where she suddenly is working as a fashion model for the most celebrated photographers of the time, including the chief photographer at Vogue, Edward Steichen.

• 14:32James Fox?

  Yeah, she's only 19 years old at this time, and Edward Steichen indeed is one of the photographers. He takes some photographs of her, he then ends up, this is a particular, another famous story about Lee Miller, he sells his photographs to an agency. This agency then sells those photographs to a company called Kotex, and they specialise in manufacturing sanitary pads. And they end up in July 1928, putting up an advert in several magazines with a photograph of Lee Miller advertising the sanitary pads. Now, Tony Penrose says that this is one of the first times that a specific photograph had ever been used to advertise these, at that time, quite taboo products.

• 15:11Alastair Sooke?

  I think initially she's outraged by this, and her family are, but they realise that she's signed a release form, this image by Steichen has been licensed, there's nothing they can do about it.

• 15:20James Fox?

  Nothing they can do.

• 15:21Alastair Sooke?

  It appears over several months, but I also get the impression that maybe by the end of that period, she quite relishes the sensation, the outrage that it causes. Because although you might think it would potentially impede her career as a socialite and as a fashionista and as a model, I don't think it really does.

• 15:37James Fox?

  It doesn't really, and one of the curious things about this is that really she's, despite this Kotex ad, and perhaps because of this Kotex ad, she's on the rise. You know, her star is very much rising at this point, and this is the point at which she decides to leave New York.

• 15:52Alastair Sooke?

  What about the name change? Because it's all part of the same, you know, I spoke before about the bell-shaped hat. There's a feeling at this point that she represents for the culture more widely, her look looks emancipated, modern woman. And actually, what seemed to be in Vogue then, which is interesting, because I don't think this is particularly how she looked, but somehow the way she styled herself then with quite short hair, is some people saw this slightly androgynous aspect to her appearance. And I think that was something which struck a chord. There's a very famous photographer called Cecil Beaton, and a rather famous quote, where he referred to this sort of perceived androgyny and said she'd cut short her pale hair and

• 16:31Alastair Sooke?

  looked like a sun-kissed goat boy from the Appian Way, which may say more about his predilections, really, than an objective take on Lee Miller's appearance. Nevertheless, I think this is the moment as well where she changes her name. So you started by saying she was called, of course, Elizabeth, but she chooses, I think she had a childhood nickname of Lee Lee, and she decides she needs to have almost like a brand, would you say? And she goes for this really snappy, very modern, and crucially, given that sort of androgyny context, quite unisex name of Lee, Lee Miller.

• 17:07James Fox?

  And then she heads to Paris. She's obviously been thinking about Paris all this time. In 1929, she decides, I'm going to go back to the city, I'm going to go back to Europe. But now she doesn't want to be a model any longer, she wants to be an artist, she wants to be a photographer. And, I mean, I think we've mentioned this in some detail in previous series, in the Giacometti series. I mean, Paris circa 1929, it's as exciting as it gets culturally.

• 17:31Alastair Sooke?

  I think we need a shorthand for this, James, because by now it's come up so many times, it's just like Paris C, you know, X number of episodes previously. But yes, it is, it is a very exciting, creatively fertile place.

• 17:40James Fox?

  It's a very exciting place, there's so many great artists, many of them American, actually, in Paris at this time, surrealism is the great movement. And there's one particular figure, if you're a photographer, who is very important. This is another American, guy from New York State, called Emmanuel Radnitsky, who is referring to himself, he's also created his name, he's called Man Ray. And Lee Miller decides, Man Ray is the person I'm going to go for, I need to be taught by Man Ray. And so shortly after arriving in Paris in 1929, she locates his apartment, she goes up to the apartment block, she speaks to the concierge and she says, my name's Lee Miller, I'm here to see Man Ray. And the concierge says, boy, I'm so very sorry, he's gone on holiday, you will not see him ever again.

• 18:21James Fox?

  And she is completely crestfallen, she crosses the road, she goes to a bar, she has a perno. And who does she see? But Man Ray, he turns up at the bar, she can't believe it. This is what she says, she says, I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn't take students, and anyway, he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I'm going with you. And I did. We lived together for three years. I was known as Madame Man Ray, because that's how they do things in France. So that was beginning of this extraordinary relationship. She's, what, 22 years old? He's much older, 17 years older than her, so he's almost 40 at this point. And their relationship is pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

• 19:03Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I think there's a few things to sort of untangle from that legendary meeting. One is that it really shines a light on, it possibly is slightly mythologised in retrospect, but her kind of, her chutzpah, right? Her, and also that drive, her ambition. Is it just by chance that she encounters Conde Nast in New York? I wonder. You know, she clearly makes a beeline to go and meet Man Ray. Another thing is, because as you say, it's a very interesting relationship, thinking, and this is slightly, what's the phrase, pop psychology, armchair psychology, but all of that stuff to do with her dad, it is very noticeable through her life, her principal,

• 19:46Alastair Sooke?

  she has many lovers, and one of the big stories of Lee Miller's, Lee Miller's life is simply sex, and she has a lot of it, and that's a very important part of her myth, if you like. And I think she's very proud of that fact. It's quite, she's a very liberated, emancipated, modern woman, and three cheers for that. But the principal romantic relationships, Man Ray, later a man called, an Egyptian businessman called Aziz, and then someone else called Roland Penrose, they're all quite substantially older than her. Is it too trite to see some daddy issues thing going on psychologically?

• 20:19James Fox?

  Totally agree, totally agree. And Aziz, as we'll come to, he's 20 years older than her. I think he's also an engineer, like her father.

• 20:24Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, really? Yes, of course.

• 20:26James Fox?

  It's all very edible. And it's a very complex relationship we ha- she has with Man Ray. Because as you say, she's having a lot of sex. Man Ray is immensely jealous.

• 20:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 20:35James Fox?

  And this causes a lot of tension in the relationship, but it's also a very productive artistic partnership.

• 20:41Alastair Sooke?

  Can I give you a sense of, for me, what crystallizes the tension on the sort of personal romantic level? There's this anecdote where someone who knew them both is walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse, which is where I think they were living, and they see this couple approaching them. Tall woman, Lee Miller's quite tall, and then this other figure, and they're connected by a golden chain.

• 21:03James Fox?

  Oh.

• 21:03Alastair Sooke?

  It's really quite odd. And then as they come closer, this acquaintance realizes that it's the well-known photographer Man Ray and his new assistant. And the quote is, "He more attached to her than to him." And there's a biographer of Lee Miller called Carolyn Burke. It's a wonderful book that she wrote, I think it's published in 2005, where she's quite blunt about this. You know, she points out that Man Ray, for all of his love of sports cars, custom-made suits, the fact that he was much older, very established, major, initially involved with the Dada movement, big surrealist figure, he was also, quote, "short, unattractive, and socially speaking her inferior." And there's a, there's an interesting imbalance, in a way, to the relationship,

• 21:46Alastair Sooke?

  which I think also plays out, as you're driving at, in their artistic collaborations. Because for the next, what is it, two, three years, it almost seems as if you cannot tell who the author is sometimes of particular photographs that they are both producing. There's this intensely close and intensely erotic relationship between them that spills over into their creative partnership. And sometimes that had tensions. There's some story about, I think Man Ray took a picture of Lee Miller's naked torso, and you could see her neck in it. He discards it. Lee Miller retrieves the negative. She enlarges it. She crops the composition. So you just see her neck. Man Ray's quite cross because she's then claiming it as her own.

• 22:31Alastair Sooke?

  She goes out, she comes back, and Man Ray's tacked up this image on the wall. And there's what looks like a slash across the neck and all of this red ink coming down. And I can't help thinking of, this may be a theme of, you know, as we go through this. But when we were talking about Alberto Giacometti, and you pointed out, and I've been thinking about this ever since, because I think you're absolutely right. And I just want to prove to you that I do listen to what you say. But we were talking, yeah, the sculpture, the woman with her throat cut. And you were saying that the surrealists really, there was a misogynistic streak to the way that they thought about women and their relations with women. And although Lee Miller's so strong, you know, she can really hold her own. And clearly, if you think about that Carolyn Burke quote, she, in a sense, she knows she holds many of the cards

• 23:14Alastair Sooke?

  in terms of the relationship with Man Ray. I think that anecdote does speak to that a little bit.

• 23:20James Fox?

  Yeah. So she's now established circa 1930 with Man Ray in Paris. She's doing lots of modeling for him, but increasingly, she's making lots of her own work, lots of her own photographs, and she is really beginning to specialize in surrealist photography and creating these images that are very jarring and unsettling and nonsensical in some ways. And they work very much as collaborators. They even develop particular techniques.

• 23:46Alastair Sooke?

  She comes to Paris, and her ambition is not to be someone's assistant. It is to become a photographer in her own right. She doesn't want to be the person whose face is taken in a picture. She wants to be the one taking the pictures. She has this really curious phrase, doesn't she? Where she refers to going to Paris with the ambition of taking up photography from the back end, which is, in Lee Miller's context, I think, quite suggestive. But she, quite quickly, she's working with Man Ray, she's working for Man Ray. They're collaborating on surrealist images that they're making together. Many of them really tapping into dreams, the unconscious imagery that's irrational, a sense of front and center eroticism, which clearly is, is the big concern of surrealism, one of.

• 24:32Alastair Sooke?

  They're also very interested in aspects of chance, things like that. She separately is taking up some commercial photography. She, even when she's in Paris, establishes her own photography studio, and she starts taking portraits of famous people. A lot of distinguished Americans in Paris come to her studio, one of them being Charlie Chaplin. She makes this incredible portrait of him with seemingly a chandelier sprouting out of his head.

• 24:54James Fox?

  Wonderful.

• 24:55Alastair Sooke?

  And then recalls years later that Charlie seemingly never had such a good time as when he was having his picture taken. So you wonder what happened after the picture. But again, that's horribly prurient speculation. But with Man Ray, one of the things that they work on together is they stumble across, and it is stumbling across because it's by accident, this technique, which is known as solarization, which is quite an important hallmark of photography, modern photography and surrealist photography. And the story is that even though this effect had actually been discovered, if you're a real photography geek, you'd know that it was discovered around about 1860 by, I think, a French zoologist. So, you know, 19th century thing. But Lee Miller's in the darkroom, and Man Ray isn't there at the time.

• 25:39Alastair Sooke?

  And she's working on processing, I think, some negatives of, is it a young singer? Someone called Susie Solidore? And the story goes that a rodent, is it a mouse, a rat? I'm not sure, sort of runs over her foot. And she turns on the light, and then she instantly thinks, ah, what have I done? The, the thing you do not do in a darkroom is clearly turn on the main overhead light. Turns it back off, is very concerned that all of these negatives will have been destroyed. Calls in Man Ray, who's really cross, singer's gone, there's no way that, you know, you could redo that shoot. But they think, hang on, is there anything here? Let's develop them anyway and see what has happened. And here, I am possibly approaching the limits of my photographic technical expertise

• 26:22Alastair Sooke?

  because it is quite a mysterious technique. I can read you what Lee Miller spoke about in terms of the effect that was created by turning on this light. She said that the unexposed parts of the negative, which had been the black background, had been exposed by this sharp light when she turned it on. And they had developed and come right up to the edge of the white nude body. Now, long story short, a solarized photograph often has quite an eerie glowing quality. The blacks and whites in the image might be reversed, and you often have this strong contour line that will go around a figure. And what they both realize is that the effect, if you can learn how to control it to a degree,

• 27:07Alastair Sooke?

  which they did, is magnificent. It looks phenomenal. And so some of the most famous pictures that Man Ray, and indeed Lee Miller, ever create are, quote unquote, "solarized" photographs.

• 27:20James Fox?

  Yes. She's also producing her own intensely surrealist images.

• 27:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 27:24James Fox?

  One of them takes place when she's visiting the Sorbonne Medical School. She's probably there to take photographs for Man Ray, as Man Ray, if you like, as his sort of ghostwriter.

• 27:34Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 27:35James Fox?

  And she witnesses a surgical procedure called a mastectomy, which is the removal of a, of a breast. And at the end of the procedure, she goes down to the operating theater, speaks to the surgeon, says, "Can I just take the severed breast with me?" And he says, "Yeah, of course. Go ahead." I mean, you couldn't do it nowadays, could you? Anyway, she wraps up the breast in a napkin, she carries it across the city, she gets to the studio, and she sets a table, knives and fork, plate, and plonks this severed breast on top of the plate. Now, trigger warning, we will be showing this photograph to those who are watching the podcast. If you don't want to see it, switch off your video.

• 28:13Alastair Sooke?

  Can I, can I just find it in, I brought along the catalog of the recent Lee Miller Tate Britain show, which, you know, by the way, is a sign of how popular she now is because I think that was the most popular show Tate Britain's ever staged for a woman artist. They had two of these photographs in it. I remember reviewing the exhibition, and I was just stopped totally short in my tracks in front of them. They are so brutal and shocking.

• 28:38James Fox?

  Yes.

• 28:38Alastair Sooke?

  And without being horribly, I mean, it's, we've got to be slightly careful about how we talk about stuff like this. But, you know, you have pointed out, there is this white plate. You can see metal cutlery. You can see the napkin underneath. It looks like a place setting, clearly in a bistro in Paris. And there is something on the plate that essentially looks a little bit like.

• 29:00James Fox?

  Duck breast.

• 29:01Alastair Sooke?

  Duck breast or haggis is what I was thinking. And, and in one of the shots, you can see still the skin of the breast and actually part of the nipple. But in the other one, you really see the internal parts of the breast. So it's almost like, I mean, look, it's a bit like the Hitler bathtub photograph. It's incredibly distressing and weird to look at this, particularly given that it's been positioned in this way, in a jokey fashion clearly by Lee Miller. What do you feel that the significance of this is for her? Because it feels like it's got a lot of bite, this.

• 29:36James Fox?

  I'm not a fan of it as a photograph in truth. I feel it's very much on the nose in that sense, but it is also evidence that she is as brave a surrealist in some ways as anyone working in that period. She is really, really working very hard to shock a bourgeois public.

• 29:53Alastair Sooke?

  But do you think there's a specific point there? I'm sorry to be so obvious and simple about it, but when you're looking at the image or images, is there, you know, she is someone who the context for her is she is a beautiful woman who's being objectified in the media and therefore consumed, as it were, by millions of people reading the pages of Vogue every month and other magazines and so on. Is this a comment somehow on that relationship between the media and female beauty?

• 30:21James Fox?

  I think it's an attack on male viewers. It's saying, look, you like breasts, here's one, it's on a plate, take it. And I think she enjoys the horror that that can generate in a male viewer's mind. So it's a very striking, remarkable work. So Alistair, by the sort of early 1930s or so, Lee Miller is a really big deal. She's very well known within Paris. She's very well connected. She stars in a film, a Jean Cocteau film.

• 30:50Alastair Sooke?

  Where she's an armless classical statue. I mean, I have to say, she's so well known, sorry to interrupt, but we've been talking about that severed breast image. One of my favourite little sort of anecdotes about Lee Miller is that in this period, a manufacturer of glass actually designed a champagne glass modelled after, and this is a quote from the biography, not my quote, her shapely breast.

• 31:12James Fox?

  Well, there you go. The breasts are everywhere in this episode. She's also modelling for Schiaparelli, she's modelling for Chanel, she's taking her own photos, as we've said. But I think at this point, 1932, again, she makes a kind of remarkable decision. One of the things that Lee Miller does throughout her life is whenever things start to go well, she moves. Because she is addicted to the next challenge. She is addicted to risk. And so 1932, she could have stayed in Paris and, you know, been a huge success within the avant-garde. It's at that point that she decides to leave Paris and to return to the United States. I think that possibly the relationship with Man Ray was getting her down. He was very controlling. It was probably a very difficult domestic setting.

• 31:55Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, that slashed photograph, that's a bit of a red flag.

• 31:57James Fox?

  Well, exactly right. And the other thing he does, when he hears that she's probably going to return to the United States, he produced this object. It's an object called Object of Destruction. It's one of the most famous surrealist sculptures that has ever been made.

• 32:10Alastair Sooke?

  Is this the metronome?

• 32:11James Fox?

  Yeah, he'd originally made it back in 1923, but he remade it in light of Lee Miller's impending departure. So it's a metronome, one of those wooden style pyramids that pianists have on a piano. And on the pendulum, he had appended a photograph of one of Lee's eyes. And this is what he said, this is what he described in terms of the use of this sculpture. He said, "Cut out the eye from a portrait of one who has been loved but has seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well aimed, try to destroy the hole at a single blow."

• 32:52Alastair Sooke?

  You don't have to be an armchair psychologist to realise the writing is on the wall for that relationship.

• 32:57James Fox?

  Exactly. And despite his best efforts, Man Ray could not keep hold of Lee Miller. In November 1932, she returned to the United States to establish a career in her own right. Will she succeed? Well, join us after the break.

• 33:16Alastair Sooke?

  If you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time.

• 33:23James Fox?

  And a reminder, you can find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.

• 33:40James Fox?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It is the end of 1932 and Lee Miller has just settled in New York, Alistair. Now, she arrives in a city that is very different from the one she has left.

• 33:53Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 33:54James Fox?

  The Jazz Age is over.

• 33:56Alastair Sooke?

  Because we've had the crash.

• 33:57James Fox?

  The Wall Street Crash, 1929. And America at this point is plunged into the Great Depression. A quarter of American adults are unemployed. Businesses are closing, banks are failing. New York City itself is filled with soup kitchens, there are shanty towns, there are empty office buildings. I mean, the Empire State Building has only just gone up. There are no tenants, it's called the Empty State Building. So really not a particularly auspicious environment in which to establish what is effectively a luxury business.

• 34:23Alastair Sooke?

  Because she's setting up her own studio in New York.

• 34:25James Fox?

  She's setting up her own studio. She brings her younger brother Eric in to become a darkroom assistant. And she really struggles in 1932, but because she's very well connected, as 1933 rolls on, she begins to get increasingly good commissions and she's now really photographing. By the end of 1933, she is photographing the great and the good of New York.

• 34:47Alastair Sooke?

  Do you have any sense of why that happened so quickly? I mean, a hallmark clearly of her career that we've already established is that things happen to her very fast. I know that when she gets back to New York, she has her first, and I believe only, solo exhibition in her lifetime.

• 35:03James Fox?

  Julien Levy?

• 35:04Alastair Sooke?

  Julien Levy, who had met her actually over in Paris, and I think they'd had an affair. But he starts showing her photography and that's very well reviewed. So there's a sense of her profile back in New York rising. She's already established as a socialite fashion model before she'd gone to Paris. And now she has what the added glamour of having been, I think she refers to herself as being an advocate of the school of Man Ray, which really pisses Man Ray off.

• 35:31James Fox?

  I think she's also very beautiful and men want to do her favours. I think that's part of it. I mean, you know, that is not taking away her ability. She is incredibly capable, proficient, brilliant photographer in many ways. And we'll see this throughout these episodes. But I think also because she is so beautiful, she is able to ask men for favours.

• 35:50Alastair Sooke?

  I think as well, though, before we completely cancel ourselves, there's an element of she's very good, is my impression, with her sitters. So she can really get, I think she's quite witty. You see that a lot in the photographs and I sense that she uses humour a lot to relax people in the studio to get a really good portrait. I mean, there's a famous one of an artist, experimental artist, Joseph Cornell. He makes those beautiful boxes, strange memory boxes.

• 36:19James Fox?

  Would be a good episode.

• 36:20Alastair Sooke?

  We should definitely do it. And I can't quite remember how it looks, but in it, there's this long mane of white hair that seems to emerge from his head and become part of a boat. It's a classic surreal image. But the thing about Cornell is that my understanding is that he was just immensely shy, but yet somehow she's created by collaborating with him, making him feel at ease, an image which is very acute in terms of insight into his work in practice, whilst retaining her own personality in terms of hers. And it has clearly got him to feel sufficiently relaxed that that thing can exist.

• 36:54James Fox?

  She's intensely charismatic, actually throughout her life.

• 36:57Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, that's what it is.

• 36:58James Fox?

  People want to be with her. She brings out the best in people. But just as her business, we talked about this before, just as her business was about to take off, she did just what she did in Paris, which is she leaves. She decides she wants a new challenge. So in 1934, listeners won't believe what she does next. She marries, I think you mentioned this actually earlier in the episode, she marries a wealthy Egyptian engineer, he's 20 years older than her, called Aziz Elouibé. They honeymoon in the Niagara Falls.

• 37:26Alastair Sooke?

  Do you know how she told her mum about it?

• 37:28James Fox?

  No.

• 37:29Alastair Sooke?

  So she brings Aziz, new man in her life, to visit the parents in Poughkeepsie. And she asks, I think in the course of, let's say, that weekend, her mum Florence, the former nurse, you know, what do you think of this guy? And she says, well, you know, he's acceptable. At which point Lee says, well, that's good because I married him. Already married. You know, this sense of gambling, risk-taking, an element of, the surrealist loved chance and chance encounters. And I forget exactly how Aziz comes into her life. I also, I don't know about you, do you have much of a sense of him as an individual? Because he seems like this incredibly benevolent, saintly, very rich person who swoops in, takes her off to Egypt for a few years, and then when she basically wants to leave and

• 38:14Alastair Sooke?

  get together with someone else, kind of seems to give her his blessing.

• 38:18James Fox?

  Yeah, my impression of Aziz is that he's a lovely man who just allows her to have the freedom that Man Ray didn't want to allow her to have. He's also, we mentioned this first half of the episode. There is something surely Oedipal about this. An older man, a patriarchal figure, an engineer, someone who could look after her like her father. I think that's part of it. There's also the sense that she just loves a new challenge and moving to a new country and marrying this, I supposedly inappropriate person is a very exciting prospect for her. So she marries him and in 1934 they move to Egypt.

• 38:54Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the interesting thing is that they move into this very elite cosmopolitan upper class society in Cairo and often spending time then in the winters in Samaritz. And her artistic career goes on pause for a bit. From what I've read, she feels quite creatively spent by the time she fetches up in Egypt. But it is a new adventure. She doesn't need to work at all now because Aziz can bankroll everything and is phenomenally rich. And for a period, her photography goes into abeyance before coming back in the most magnificent fashion.

• 39:32James Fox?

  Her initial life in Egypt, this is how she describes it. She says, "My time being occupied between studying chemistry, six morning hours a week at the American University and three afternoon hours a week of Arabic. Also a great deal of poker and bridge. It never rains, so there is permanently tennis, golf, swimming, sailing, squash and even cricket, God help us, as well as duck shooting, snipe in winter, fishing in suez and desert expeditions to make. It's an okay, it sounds like a pretty fun expat existence."

• 40:01Alastair Sooke?

  It sounds amazing, but it also sounds, which I think it was for her, unbelievably stifling. Because you get the sense of a very conservative set society. There's an established way of doing things and, you know, Lee Miller is nothing but if not a non-conformist and she just cannot abide by having that, that sense of what order imposed upon her. The one thing in that list that you described that I know she absolutely relishes and loves in Egypt are those expeditions.

• 40:25James Fox?

  Yes.

• 40:25Alastair Sooke?

  Where she goes out, she plans them meticulously and then takes groups of friends out into the desert. And I think this is when she starts to get excited again about photography as a medium.

• 40:36James Fox?

  Definitely, but one expedition doesn't go very well. I found a letter that is so shocking, I don't know if you've encountered this yourself. Okay, this is a letter from one of her expeditions. She says, "I went out to a village to take some pictures. Unfortunately, I ran over a man or something. You see, if you hit someone here in the country, you're expected to beat it. In fact, the consulates always say hit and run and report afterwards, so it spoiled the trip. And Aziz won't let me go again unless I have a sort of guide with me, but the pictures as well." Not really great, Alistair, is it, running over a local?

• 41:09Alastair Sooke?

  No, it isn't great. I mean, it's another one of those examples where her life is sort of like a Hollywood thriller and just event after event after event keeps coming her way.

• 41:18James Fox?

  But anyway, these expeditions produce, as you have suggested, Alistair, some really remarkable, remarkable photographs.

• 41:27Alastair Sooke?

  And perhaps not as well known as they should be, I think, because everyone thinks about the surrealist moments and those collaborations of Man Ray. And then everyone thinks about what will come in the second part when during the Second World War, like the Hitler bathtub image. But this moment in the 30s is creatively pretty white hot for her.

• 41:43James Fox?

  Yeah, there's one that you particularly love, isn't there, which is the, the picture of a pyramid. That's a delightful image. I mean, you know, with that, I think, you know, it's so difficult, isn't it, to take a photograph of a pyramid without falling into a cliche.

• 41:57Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, so she, I mean, in this image, she is taking a picture essentially of the Great Pyramid at Giza, but she's up the pyramid and all you see in the image is the photograph looking down. I think you can see elements of buildings nearby Cairo, but it's dominated by this big triangle of shadow cast by the pyramid. And the reason that I wanted to mention it is purely for the reason that you said, that it's an inventive way to solving, an ingenious way of solving a problem. How can you depict one of the seven wonders of the world in a way that feels fresh? She manages to do that.

• 42:29James Fox?

  She really does. But the photograph I'd like us to focus on just for a few minutes is, for me, just an incredible work. It's called Portrait of Space. She makes it in 1937, so she's been in Egypt for, for two or three years at this point. And it is a photograph taken from the inside. So we know the circumstances surrounding the photograph. She's on one of these famous expeditions. She comes to some kind of structure, a building or a tent. She goes inside it and she looks outside this aperture. And we can see the frames of some kind of window with a mesh or a netting, probably some kind of mosquito net that has been torn open. And above it, there is another frame, another kind of window.

• 43:13James Fox?

  And through this net, this broken net, we can see the landscape of Egypt. I think this is possibly Lee Miller's single greatest photograph, Alistair. It is so visually complex. It's built from this series of overlapping frames, the landscape and its horizon, the window frame, the torn net, the picture frame or whatever it is above. It's a picture composed of so many different pictures, so many different frames within frames. It is wonderful, isn't it?

• 43:41Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it feels almost like it's a metaphor for photography itself. It's like we're inside the camera looking out. This is the aperture of the camera. But it's also very tempting to look at this and, well, it, it feels like there's a longing to it, you know, tempting to ascribe to it some sense of personal biographical meaning. It feels like it's an image about perhaps transcendence, about we're very much in this realm, on this side of the fly screen, the torn mosquito net. But because of that hole, that tear, you can sense this landscape out there, which feels by comparison vast. You know, the claustrophobic world of Egypt in which she found herself versus the excitement and great adventure of the great outdoors beyond.

• 44:25Alastair Sooke?

  I wonder too whether, and this isn't my thought, but this is again, coming back to that famous biography by Carolyn Burke. She didn't apply this to this image, but I wonder if you can. She spoke about the fact that quite often you find in Lee Miller's work, you might have, this is her quote, "enigmatic doorways", right? And she's talking about whether Lee Miller somehow is putting, quote, "outraged emotions" into her pictures. And so the idea is that those doorways might hint at damage to the house of the self and think back to some of the trauma that perhaps she experienced herself when she was a girl. I don't know whether you think there's anything to that.

• 45:07James Fox?

  Well, you know, I'm a meaning skeptic. Remember Al Vamir episode? I don't know. I think it's so easy when you get an image as, as interesting as this to project interpretations onto it. What I think at the very least it does is it shows that she just had an incredible eye. She had this, and we see this throughout her career as a photographer. She had this ability to spot things in the world and to frame them in such a way as to make ordinary banal things seem full of meaning. And that for me is the genius of this picture. Of course, you could interpret it, you could say it's about nature and culture, you could say it's about east and west, you could say it's about femininity because of that torn aperture in the middle of it. You could say it's about exile, you could say it's about longing, but it's a bloody good image, whatever it is.

• 45:51Alastair Sooke?

  And I think it's worth just to sort of build on what you're saying, just dwelling on the fact that there is a significant degree of conscious artistry that goes into creating that. It's not just a snapshot of something. And the telling thing about that is if you look at the particular image that she alighted on and which is now known as Portrait of Space, one of the black strips across the top of the image, that doesn't exist in reality in this place. It's actually probably part of the negative. So she's cropping and arranging the image to enhance that sense of frame and then frames within frames. There's a complex, sophisticated bit of visual game playing that's going on. There's also something, I mean, as you know, I, what's the opposite of a meaning skeptic? I, I'm, I'm pro bullshit.

• 46:36Alastair Sooke?

  I really like to have those sorts of kind of fun ideas to talk about. And there's one little fun detail that I loved. I mean, this is, I say this tongue in cheek, but Lee Miller's granddaughter, Tony Penrose's daughter, who's now co-director of the Lee Miller Archives, she has spoken about in an interview, the fact that when she was growing up, that generation of the family, they knew this image, Portrait of Space, and they were like, well, that's what you see, you look through and you can see it's the moon. There's this sort of lunar landscape. And the thing I love about that is it totally makes sense. Lee Miller had done so much stuff. Clearly it would have been absolutely, totally within reason that she'd been an astronaut before anyone landed on the moon and got the shot. So, yeah.

• 47:15James Fox?

  But you get the sense, despite the fact that she's taking these incredible photographs, that she is getting very bored in Egypt. I think you've suggested this already. In 1937, actually the same year as she makes this photograph, and in fact, a few months before making this photograph, she does get permission from Aziz to leave Egypt to go to Europe for, for a trip. She travels to Paris. And she meets, the first night she's there, an Englishman called Roland Penrose. He'll be a very important character as this series goes on. He's a fascinating man. He's seven years older than her. He's a Quaker. He's a surrealist as well. He's actually been instrumental in bringing surrealism to England in 1936. And they really fall for each other. They spend the night together and they actually spend much of that summer in each other's company.

• 48:00James Fox?

  They go to England, they go to Cornwall. So the Penroses have this house in Cornwall, lovely part of South West England. And the house is called Lamb Creek. I did a bit of a deep dive on this. I found it was on the market last year for £3 million.

• 48:13Alastair Sooke?

  Really?

• 48:13James Fox?

  Beautiful house.

• 48:14Alastair Sooke?

  What's the surrealist premium in that price?

• 48:16James Fox?

  Well, it is indeed mentioned in the advert for the property. But lots of really interesting people go to this property. Paul Eloir, Max Ernst, Dora Carrington, Herb Reid, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar. Lee Miller's there for a month or so. They then go to the south of France to a place called Mujean. I think you've been there, haven't you?

• 48:37Alastair Sooke?

  I was in Mujean quite recently, looking at the hotel called the Hotel Vast Horizon, if that's the French pronunciation, in Mujean where she stayed as part of this big house party, which is such a famous summer holiday. As it happens, at the moment of recording this, I'm off on my summer holidays tomorrow. This particular summer holiday in Mujean, and indeed the one in Cornwall that you mentioned, they are legendary as, they seem to be the sort of like the ultimate summer holiday in terms of just sheer adult pleasure and sexual abandon amongst a group of surrealist friends. So, I mean, first of all, there's the Cornwall one. And as you say, one of the artists there is called Eileen Agar. And her famous quote about it is that she says it was a delightful surrealist house

• 49:21Alastair Sooke?

  party with Roland Penrose taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy. And she remembers, she remembers Lee Miller taking a bubble bath, but supposedly there wasn't quite enough room in the tub for all of us, is what she says.

• 49:34James Fox?

  Right.

• 49:34Alastair Sooke?

  You know, later, and this is skipping about, but a little bit later this year, Lee Miller makes a surrealist collage in which she incorporates images which are inspired by this really famous photograph Miller takes of Agar in Brighton as part of this whole summer. Very amazing picture, which I'm sure you know, where you see the silhouette of Eileen Agar against Brighton Pavilion and Miller's silhouette as well. Do you think there's maybe anything between them?

• 49:56James Fox?

  Oh, possibly. I mean, Eileen Agar, I absolutely love, and I would love to do an episode about Eileen Agar. Anyway, that's fascinating. I did not know about the bubble bath.

• 50:04Alastair Sooke?

  A lot of the members of the group who've been in Cornwall gather again. And they're in Mujean because these two people, Paul and Nouch Eloir, who are friends with Pablo Picasso, they discovered Mujean, this beautiful, then unspoilt hill town above Cannes in the south of France. And this is where Picasso, having created Guernica, you know, huge strain on him, big public anti-war monochrome painting, is essentially decompressing for the summer, whilst still the Spanish Civil War is clearly raging on. And over the course of a few weeks, a number of people gather there, which has been documented by Anna Thomason in this new book, A Vast Horizon. And among them are Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.

• 50:48Alastair Sooke?

  Just a little aside, and I'm sort of conscious that I'm sounding increasingly prurient as this episode is going on, but I couldn't resist imparting this bit of information I came across. According to Peggy Guggenheim, the American heiress and collector, she, in her memoirs, spoke about Penrose's notable eccentricity, and here I quote, "When he slept with women, he tied up their wrists with anything that was handy. It was extremely uncomfortable to spend the night this way, but if you spent it with Penrose, it was the only way."

• 51:17James Fox?

  Wow.

• 51:18Alastair Sooke?

  And partly I mention that because, you know, I was saying before, inspired by you, this whole surrealist slight kinkiness when it came to sex. I mean, explicitly so. A little later, there is a writer called Colin Wilson, who was associated with a bunch of people who were in Roland Penrose's orbit, but much younger. And he said that for his generation, surrealism was claustrophobic and kinky, especially where sex was concerned. And actually, the Mujean thing, I just want to look at this again, because one of the most famous, there were lots of photographers on holiday in Mujean. Lee Miller, Dora Marr, Eileen Agar's taking images, I think, Man Ray, of course, you know, she's there again with Man Ray that summer. And one of the most famous photographs that's taken is of a group of the people who were

• 52:03Alastair Sooke?

  staying in Mujean having an outdoor picnic. And they're in a Sylvan woodland setting. And in the image that I'm looking at here, you can see they're sitting on the floor against big cushions. There's a makeshift table has been brought and it's laden with their picnic. And you can see Paul and Nouch Eloir on the left, and you can see Roland Penrose, Man Ray, and his partner that summer, who was called Adie. Lee Miller is taking the picture. And when you look at it, the men are clothed and the women are topless. And there's a series of pictures. There's another one in which Lee Miller too appears topless. And it's that curious thing of, again, the sexual power dynamic seems a bit off.

• 52:48Alastair Sooke?

  All the men are wearing clothes. It's a bit like that Manet painting, Dejeuner Surlerbe. There's a sort of outdoor picnic with naked women but clothed men. On the other hand, the women, and this I would say runs counter to more recent, you know, what I've just given as the conventional feminist take now on this image. But perhaps there's another feminist reading, which is that the women seem really relaxed, content and in control of their own sexual power, if you like, and agency. And if anything, it's the men, who, some of whom seem quite uncomfortable. So you mentioned that Roland Penrose was a Quaker. You can see him looking like this unbelievably repressed Puritan Englishman, sitting at the edge of this image, not quite involved in the same way plunging into, although I'm sure that he did in person, if we believe Eileen Agar's quote.

• 53:33Alastair Sooke?

  So that's a little snapshot of what life was like there. But in the course of this summer, Lee Miller is possibly introduced for the first time. We don't know if Picasso knew Lee Miller already, earlier on in the 1930s, but they cross paths here in Mujean and Lee Miller becomes this muse, doesn't she, for Pablo Picasso, who creates a series of quite extraordinary portraits of the whole group, but also specifically six of Lee Miller. And there's one that I really wanted just to discuss for a little bit. It's now in National Gallery Scotland, up in Edinburgh. And what you see is an image of a yellow-faced woman with green hair, dangling earrings against pink.

• 54:14Alastair Sooke?

  And in that surrealist, cubist fashion of Picasso's by this point, it's clearly not a realistic likeness of Lee Miller, but all of her features are distorted, fragmented and presented almost at once. So one eye appears sid on, almost as though it's also a cipher for her sex. Another eye is staring out to the left. But on the right, you can see an actually quite immaculately rendered profile of her face, which matches, interestingly, a famous Man Ray portrait of Lee Miller. And the thing that I think is interesting about this, it's very anarchic, it's fun, it's quite comical. It shows Picasso's great wit and originality as well, because everyone associated Lee

• 54:59Alastair Sooke?

  Miller with Renaissance or classical goddesses and saw her as an icon of grace and beauty and purity. But here Picasso's having absolutely none of that whatsoever. He presents her as a sort of woman of arl with these big, quite spiky, club-like hands, which may suggest her ruthlessness, her courage, her sense of being up for a fight. And that massive grin with her mouth open, because Lee Miller was quite gap-toothed. And you see that in this portrait. Picasso has, no goddess really should be presented with a gap-toothed smile, a big grin. It's not very decorous, not very graceful, but Picasso does that, and I love him for it.

• 55:37James Fox?

  I don't like it very much, this painting. I mean, look, I'm an enormous fan of Picasso. We've been talking, haven't we, about whether we should do a really long series about Picasso at some point next year. And 1937 is a great year for Picasso. As you say, it's the year of Guernica, it's the year of the weeping woman, it's the year of the portrait of Dora Marr. But this is a stinker.

• 55:55Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, it's not a stinker. No, no, no, no. That's unfair.

• 55:59James Fox?

  It's like a student has done his own version of a Pablo Picasso.

• 56:03Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 56:04James Fox?

  I don't think it's a great painting. But look, it's just part of this extraordinary story of Lee Miller, the extraordinary circle in which she is moving.

• 56:14Alastair Sooke?

  I just want to finish the story of this portrait, because even though you've rubbished it so ruthlessly in a Lee Miller way with those spiky, club-like verbal hands you have, there's a postscript to the story, because eventually Roland Penrose acquires the particular one I've been describing. And he gives it as a gift to Lee Miller to memorialize this marvelous, dreamlike summer, as he says in a letter, that they've shared together, the beginnings of this whirlwind romance. And it comes to Cairo and Lee Miller unveils it at a cocktail party. And remember, I've described how the eyes are slightly distorted in the picture. So she has this party, 30 of her friends come, it's hidden behind a velvet curtain. And eventually, Lee Miller pulls the curtain and there is, of course, shocked silence. Now, you mentioned before she played a bit of bridge.

• 56:58Alastair Sooke?

  She had a really good friend who was a champion bridge player called Gerty Whisser. And when Lee Miller, you know, conscious that it's not really going down very well, says, "Look, this really does look like me," and probably is pointing out the little profile trick, you know, like the Man Ray photograph, Gerty, quick as a flash, comes back, "Yes, it has a roving eye." So in that sense, maybe bang on, very astute character.

• 57:21James Fox?

  Maybe it is. Well, look, let's bring this episode to an end. Lee Miller's decadent life of garden parties and glamorous holidays would soon itself be coming to an end, because in 1939, two years after Picasso creates that portrait, Europe would be plunged into war. And that war would inspire some of Lee Miller's most striking and shocking works. So join us next time. Goodbye.

• 57:47Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.