THere is a picture of American photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller Pablo PicassoI took it after the liberation of Paris in 1944. They stare into each other’s eyes with such intimacy that you feel like you’re intruding on something very personal. Not exactly romantic - although the way his hand touches the back of her neck is definitely intimate - but very loving, perhaps. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that the image was chosen to promote a new exhibition centered on Miller’s extraordinary life and the relationship between these two artists, which opens this week at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex.
Her son, Anthony Penrose, told me she captured an extraordinary moment after years of hardship and separation. Lee found her way to Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, a knock on the door. He opened it and almost fell backwards. He hugged her and kissed her and hugged her, and then at last, when he stopped, he looked at her and said, ‘It’s unbelievable. The first Allied soldier must To see him is a woman. It is you.”
Miller and Picasso met properly in 1937, on a beach vacation in southern France, although they had interrupted earlier that decade when she was working with Man Ray and discovering the process of insolation would end up with him and not her. restricts. A deep friendship arose between their family: Miller was married to the British artist, poet and historian Roland Penrose, Picasso was with Dora Maar, and then Françoise Gilot, and they vacationed together, often in the different homes of the Spaniard. Anthony, born in 1947, remembers a lot of children and animals: Picasso let a goat named Esmerelda sleep outside his room and was calling her because she was afraid of the dark. There will be long lunches, featuring a kind of exotic food that was rare in post-war Britain, and practical jokes too. Miller enjoyed putting ice cubes containing frozen flies into drinks.
Penrose remembers being asked at school what he did during the holidays, and he surprised his classmates with his response. “I said casually, ‘Oh, we’ve been visiting Picasso. I had no idea that this was such an extraordinary thing to do, because my parents approached him with such incredible humility. They never said, ‘Look, this man is the greatest contemporary artist in the world.’ He was just someone they treated with a great deal of respect and reverence. “.
Picasso respected Miller as an artist, Penrose says, long before anyone else did. “Of course, she was very beautiful. But the fact that she was so smart, and knew how to do things, was important to him. He knew she was a good photographer. He knew his way around the paparazzi because he had been with Dora Marr for six years.”
Miller’s beauty and modeling background led her to overlook her considerable talents, a situation not helped by the fact that Picasso painted her six times and there had long been a preoccupation with his “ideas”. This became a problem when Penrose began trying to set up exhibitions of his mother’s works. “First of all, as I get close to people who should have known better, I had to explain that Lee Miller was a woman. Then they get her and say, ‘Oh yeah, she inspired Man Ray.’ And then I have to get rid of them.” of this idea.
Things began to change in the 1980s, though, when feminists began re-examining the lives of female artists, especially surrealists. As was the case with other models turned artists, Miller’s work made her curious about the image industry. “When she was younger, the major photographers at the time took pictures of her: Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, people love it. Talking to some of them later in life, they said it was like she considered it an educational program. She was constantly asking questions.”
This means that when Miller’s modeling career ended abruptly - she was blacklisted after modeling at Kotex, where there was such a stigma surrounding period products - she was able to skip from New York to Paris and reinvent herself as a photographer and later war correspondent for Vogue, She first documented the blitzkrieg, which was followed by the liberation of Europe. Her picture in Hitler’s bathtub, taken by fellow photographer David E. Sherman while announcing the Führer’s death, shows her defiance: She used to make fun of how thin his apartment was, says Penrose. The shoes in front of the pigeons are still covered in mud from the death camps.
Penrose explains that Miller’s 1945 photographs of the liberation of Dachau - some of which appear in the exhibition - are exercises in controlled rage. When he was a seven-year-old child, Miller was raped. It was this, as well as seeing the boy she loved die in an accident when they were both teenagers, that shaped not only her worldview but also her work. Penrose says trauma often creates a sense of detachment. “If we look at Lee through this post, we see that she was able to emotionally distance herself to a point. So we make her stare at the faces of the dead in concentration camps, and photograph them up close. When I interviewed Sherman, I said, ‘How do you do that?’” How do you stand there and take these pictures? He said she was in a state of extreme anger.”
Her wartime experiences compounded what Penrose believed to be PTSD. He says Miller wasn’t much of a mom. Vulnerable to alcohol abuse, like many traumatized people, she could fly in a rage, and there was a distance between them. Miller saw children dying in a Vienna hospital due to a shortage of black-market drugs - and kept her son away, despite great concern for his safety.
I have a feeling he must have been hit hard, especially since Miller can be so warm towards others. However magnanimous, Penrose has devoted a large part of his life to establishing her legacy as an artist and acting as a director of Archives of Lee Miller and The Penrose Collection, in his parents’ former home, Farley House in Sussex, where Picasso resided on his second visit to the UK in 1950. They have also hosted, over the years, Man Ray, Miro, Max Ernst, Eileen Aggar, Eduardo Polozzi and Richard Hamilton. There is a remarkable image in showing young Penrose sitting on Picasso’s knee, a look of blissful complicity between them. On this visit, Picasso starred with the Ayrshire couple’s bull, William, who inspired the 1950’s print Grasshopper Bulls, never before shown in the UK.
“I know there have been implications for having a sexual aspect in his relationship with her,” says Maya Benkin, Artistic Director at Newlands House. “But I don’t think it matters. He had great respect for her, enjoyed her company and valued her friendship.” When I ask her how she feels about female artists who are consistently viewed in terms of their relationship to men, she’s outspoken in using Miller’s friendship with Picasso as a way to attract new audiences to her work — but she also says you can’t separate the two. . Miller took nearly 1,000 portraits of the artist over the course of 40 years.
“Their relationship was extraordinary,” adds Bankin. “She takes some great pictures of Picasso at work and play, but also at home and at leisure, which in his later years was even more difficult because he was very familiar with the camera. He knew the importance of taking his picture. She can reach Picasso in the moments when he’s not playing in front of him. Camera “.
Behnken notes that the #MeToo movement has not been kind to Picasso. “Personally, I don’t think we can judge him as harshly as some have,” she says. Penrose agrees. Although he sees feminist criticism as justified, he does suggest that the man Picasso was a complex figure. “Of course, there were times when he might not have treated women well. But I don’t think it’s right to judge us at this point. It’s so easy to get rid of all the bad things he did, to forget that he had such great humanity and kindness. It is very comforting that some people forget it because they feel it weakens their cause of turning him into a monster.” As for his mother, he adds, “It was a deep love. He would always say things were so much better when I was there. He seems to have had a special affection for her. And he’d be so much softer when she was around.”
Later, Miller called herself, perhaps ironically, “Picasso’s widow.” She had to fight all her life to make space for herself. “First of all in Paris, she was very happy to let her pictures be published under the name Man Ray,” Penrose says. “We were so close, it was like we were the same person, so it didn’t matter,” Penrose says. “And then it started to matter.” But when it came to Picasso, Miller wasn’t too bitter, and her work now speaks for itself. “Getting this place was hard all the way,” says Penrose. “But we won in the end.”