Lee Miller: Coinage of the Mind
13 September – 2 November 2008
Nourishment from Heaven by Roland Penrose (1937) Self Portrait with sphinxes by Lee Miller (1940)
© Roland Penrose Estate, England 2008. All rights reserved. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. All rights reserved.
The extraordinarily complex life of the photographer, Lee Miller (1907-1977), will be examined in Lee Miller, Coinage of the Mind, at the Sussex Barn Gallery, West Dean College from 13 September - 2 November 2008. Here the roles she played - a legendary beautiful model, an artist’s muse and an acclaimed artist in her own right - will all be explored.
For many years Lee Miller was primarily known as a renowned beauty, model and muse to a number of artists including Man Ray, Picasso and Roland Penrose, the latter to whom she was also married. The work these men created with Lee typifies the idea of feminine beauty within a society dominated by the conventions of the male-defined sensual nude. However, over the past twenty years more has become known of the incredible archive of photographs taken by Lee and it is thought that her strongest and most provocative and narratively seductive work commenced when she moved to the other side of the camera – from ‘the object of the gaze’ to ‘the subject who commands the medium.’
The early images taken in the 20s and 30s offer a surrealist look at people and objects. As the mood around the world turned darker in the late 30s and 40s so did Lee’s work, and it is as a war correspondent for Vogue that she left an indelible mark.
Looking at the tensions created in her work in front of and behind the camera, the exhibition will explore the impact of what she saw through her lens and how this affected her own relationship with her family and how this in turn has inspired her son, Antony and his children Eliza Penrose and Ami Bouhassane.
The exhibition will feature little-seen works from Lee Miller’s and Roland Penrose’s archives, as well as works by Antony Penrose, and his daughters Eliza Penrose and Ami Bouhassane which demonstrates the ongoing legacy her work has on her descendents.
Antony Penrose, Eliza Penrose and Ami Bouhassane (who will be playing her grandmother Lee Miller in the one-off performance of The Angel and the Fiend) are both available for interview, as is the Gallery’s Curator Sharon-Michi Kusunoki.
LECTURE
Curating the Art of Lee Miller
Sunday 21 September, 7pm
Antony Penrose and Mark Haworth-Booth will be talking on how they researched and mounted last year’s extraordinary Lee Miller centenary exhibition and celebrations which presented a profile of Lee Miller, told through the art works of those who were inspired by her and through the medium of her own photograph and words.
Antony Penrose: author and son of Lee Miller and director of the Lee Miller Archive.
Mark Haworth-Booth: Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum and author of The Art of Lee Miller, V&A, 2007.
This lecture will commence at 7pm on Sunday 21 September. Seating is limited. Tickets are £10 per person.
Venue: The Old Library, West Dean College.
For tickets and further information please contact the Admissions Office on 0844 4994408 or (0)1243 811314 if calling from abroad To book, please download the booking form and send it to Admissions Office, West Dean College, West Dean, Chichester, West Sussex PO18 0QZ
Background on Lee Miller by Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, Curator, Sussex Barn Gallery
Lee first came to the public’s attention in 1927 through Condé Nast who, after pulling her out of the path of a speeding car, signed her on as a model for two of his magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair. Her modeling career, although highly successful, ended abruptly the following year after she appeared in an advertisement for Kotex sanitary napkins, something that the American public felt only an ‘utterly debased’ woman would allow.
This puritanical judgment gave Lee the impetus to move to Paris where she met and formed a partnership with Man Ray - acting as his model, protégée and lover. One of their most well-known achievements was the development of the ‘solarization’ technique of photography involving the secondary exposure of developing film to light. Through Man Ray, Lee was introduced to French society and to the avant-garde of the European art world.
Lee’s strongest and most provocative work commenced when she moved to the other side of the camera - from ‘the object of the gaze’ to ‘the subject who commands the medium’. Although she worked freelance for Vogue from 1939, Lee quickly became bored with ‘frock and handbag’ assignments. Armed with a typewriter, camera and her eye for the surreal, she captured the devastation resulting from the Wehrmacht’s blitz which was aimed at demoralising and destroying the civilian populations of major British cities. In 1942, Lee became War Correspondent to the U.S. Armed Forces and her resulting photographs - inquisitive, inherently intrusive and confrontational - challenge the spectator’s right to view and negotiates between feelings of outrage, empathy, captivation and fascination.
Susan Sontag, in On Photography, states that photographs ‘alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.’ In Lee’s life and work she forces us to confront this issue.