Review of reviews: Art

The Art of Lee Miller

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through April 27

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Lee Miller is one of those rare figures whose “life story has become inextricable from her art,” said Katherine Stephen in The Christian Science Monitor. Beautiful, brilliant, and brave, Miller began her career as a model but gained fame as a photographer. “It is difficult to think of a single other female photographer who started her career in front of the camera but chose to adopt a life behind one.” But, then, Miller always was exceptional. In the Paris of the 1920s, she studied (and slept) with pioneer surrealist Man Ray. Later she worked as one of six women accredited as photographers during World War II. Miller brought a whiff of glamour to every setting, but earned a place as a pioneer female artist by “rejecting style in factor of substance” and turning her surrealist eye toward everyday life.

The influence of surrealism is obvious in works such as Portrait of Space, which shows the Egyptian desert through the frame of a torn window screen, said Edward Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. But in fact the lessons she learned from Man Ray crept into all of her work. “Even during the war, surrealism never entirely disappeared from her works, as evidenced by a picture of two women wearing fire masks and goggles that make them look sinister.” Unlike Man Ray, Miller didn’t synthetically compose surrealistic images in her studio or darkroom. Instead, “she observed slight distortions of reality and magnified their oddness in the way she framed them in her camera.” It doesn’t get more surrealistic than Miller’s image of “two surgically severed breasts—the aftermath of a mastectomy.” You can hardly believe the image is real—but it is.