Exhibit of the week: Man Ray/Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism

Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Through Oct. 14

“They are perhaps the most famous lips in the history of art”—the scarlet lips of Lee Miller suspended in an azure sky, said Karen D’Souza in the San Jose Mercury News. Painted by Man Ray in 1932, the year his tempestuous four-year affair with his protégé Miller was ending, Observatory Time—The Lovers is a cornerstone of surrealism. It’s also a work of longing, one of many in the show “Partners in Surrealism” that were born of the volatile relationship between the legendary artist and the model turned photographer. “A tug of war between art and life, sex and power courses through the show.” For Ray, Miller’s body was an objet d’art. Miller, sick of being dissected and objectified, increasingly rebelled—never more strongly than in a “grisly” 1930 collection of photos she created that showed an amputated breast on a dinner plate.

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The pair’s tempestuous relationship fueled creativity, said Lauren Gallagher in the San Francisco Examiner. In a “particularly notorious incident,” Miller rescued a discarded Ray negative that featured her head and neck and printed the image as her own work. Infuriated, Ray responded by slashing the print and adding red ink. A version of the pristine image, Neck (1930), attributed to him, appears here. As her later work shows, Miller became “just as talented a photographer” as Ray, “in some ways more so.” Photos she took of Paris, for example, are “framed with an inventive eye that captures reality, as opposed to Ray’s fuzzy, fantastical distortions.” Once she broke away, Miller came into her own, covering World War II for Vogue. Her combat photographs, including a 1945 photo of a dead SS officer “floating under shimmering water,” are among the show’s most powerful images.

Miller seems to have gotten the better of the partnership, said Jonathon Keats in Forbes.com. The exhibition “demolishes the popular notion” that she was merely Ray’s passive muse. Some of the best works here are collaborative, while Miller’s solo work as a photojournalist “established her as one of the century’s great photographers, reflecting the irrationality of war in tableaux more surreal than the most surrealist paintings of Ray or anybody else.” For his part, Ray appears to have fallen apart after their breakup. Devastated, he allegedly spent years painting and repainting his image of Miller’s lips. “Overloaded with surrealist bathos,” The Lovers, in my opinion, is “one of the worst works of his career.” As for what came next, it’s not much better. The student, by then, had surpassed the master.