Lee Miller photos at Art Museum (3rd review)

The woman in Hitler's bathtub

ROBERT ZALLER

There have been two major exhibits of 20th-Century female artists at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this season, both by coincidence born in 1907. You’d never know it, though, by the publicity. Frida Kahlo has been ubiquitous, and we have all had opportunity— on billboards, at bus stops, in train stations— to count the hairs in her mustache by now. She is Philadelphia’s own Lady of Sorrows, and, as one approaches the Museum (taking one’s life in one’s hands as a pedestrian, as usual), there’s the bright yellow banner that all but obscures the entrance with its ten upper-case letters: FRIDA KAHLO.

More than enough has been written about Frida, so I’ll say no more. But the other artist, tucked away in the Stieglitz Gallery without so much as a signpost, is no slouch, and her biography is no less compelling. In addition, she was a world-class beauty, a familiar of the great from Pablo Picasso to Charlie Chaplin, and as intrepid as Amelia Earhart.

Lee Miller’s most famous portrait was of herself, having a scrub-down in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub in 1945. She got there on her own, as one of the few accredited women correspondents in World War II. She’d paid her dues in full, too, as one of the earliest photographers to reach Buchenwald and Dachau: quite a trek from the covers of Vogue, where she’d been a fashion model nearly 20 years earlier.

Lee isn’t mugging for her camera in this shot, nor is she looking the least bit triumphal. She’s simply bathing, her beautiful head turned down a bit, with a look that’s simultaneously enigmatic and matter-of-fact on her face. “Yes, I’m here,” she seems to say. “Probably the first girl to visit this place.”

A childhood rape victim

There’s another photo of Hitler’s private rooms, showing a drinking mug he’d made of the face of George VI of England, perhaps in the spirit of the ancient Parthians, who made a cup out of the actual skull of a Roman general, Crassus. “OK, Adolf,” that picture says, “We got here first.”

Lee sent the Buchenwald photos to Vogue, one of bodies stacked like cordwood and another of a man hanged on a hook, his face bashed in. She told her editor she hoped the magazine would publish them, and it did. She commented as well that Germans who said they’d known nothing about the death camps were lying.

Lee Miller was raped by a family member when she was seven, and infected with syphilis. She spent years recovering, but by 18 she had moved to New York and begun a highly successful modeling career. She soon branched out into photography, and took up with Man Ray, with whom she collaborated. Still in her early 20s, she became an accomplished Surrealist, and acted in Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet. By 1933 she had a one-woman show of her work in New York.

An unresolved narcissism

Her major work dates from the ’30s. It features sharp-angled observations of urban life and— later, in Egypt— desert scenes. There are portraits of other women such as Dorothy Hill and Mary Taylor, who look remarkably like Lee herself, and suggest an unresolved narcissism. More disturbingly sexual are photographs of tar, and one simply titled Condom, in which a woman’s hand stretches out the latex band. In a sketch from 1930, Lee shows a woman stretched against a target board, knives outlining her body. Perhaps something of the same trauma is visible in an Egyptian photograph that shows a torn screen, a dark square, and a desert vista.

Lee was also shooting fashion photographs to support herself, but when the war broke out she stayed in London, and with D-Day accompanied the troops to Europe. As always, her eye was searching. Surrealism was in the world around her now, but there’s an unflinching candor in some of her war work that has lost none of its power to disturb today: the daughter of a German mayor, a suicide on her couch; an SS man drowned in a canal.

There were happier moments, such as a reunion in Paris with Picasso, whose affection beams from his face. But there was a price to be paid: an increasing dependence on alcohol after the war, and, finally, an end to the work.

Her son's astonishing discovery

Lee survived Frida, who died in 1954, by 23 years, but her art did not. Her son, Anthony Penrose, was astonished to find a trove of her photographs after her death, and to realize for the first time that his mother had been an important artist. It was he who revived interest in her, and is responsible for the renewed recognition of her work.

If Grace Kelly had been Diane Arbus, too? With a touch of Hemingway the war correspondent thrown in? Lee Miller lived all these lives in one, and lived them with a wound perhaps no less painful than any of Frida Kahlo’s. If there’s a true American heroine of the 20th Century, she’s it in my book. Her show closes on Sunday, April 27. If you’ve missed it, it’s a good way to spend part of your day.



To read a response, click here.
To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.