Exhibition of the week Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain
The Hepworth Wakefield (01924-247360, hepworthwakefield.org). Until 7 October
The photographer Lee Miller (1907-77) was an extraordinary figure who “thrived in adversity”, said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. Born in New York, she started as a fashion model before deciding that she would rather be behind the lens herself. In the late 1920s, she moved to Paris and soon became a “fixture” of the avantgarde set, working as an apprentice to the surrealist Man Ray (later her lover) while also developing her own, unique artistic style. She later worked as a fashion photographer and a war correspondent, eventually settling in Sussex with Roland Penrose, the English surrealist. As this “spirited” exhibition makes clear, Miller became a central force of surrealism in this country, her home a hotspot for its exponents. The show, which presents a large number of Miller’s pictures alongside work by the likes of Miró, Magritte, Dalí and their British contemporaries, underlines her crucial but underappreciated role in modern art history. It’s a fascinating look at a brilliant photographer who deserves more recognition. “What a woman. What great work.”
The show concentrates on photographs taken by Miller during her years in Britain before the Second World War, said Alastair Smart in the Daily Mail. Some – like a nurse in Oxford “drying a month’s worth of sterilised rubber gloves” – capture the spirit of the times; others – like the artist Eileen Agar framed in shadow by Brighton Pavilion – record members of her own surrealist milieu. But more impressive in many ways are the photos she took as war correspondent for Vogue. One extraordinary photo taken in 1945 – “as surreal an image as there’s ever been” – shows her in the bathtub of Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment.
But the sad thing is there just “aren’t enough” of Miller’s own pictures in the show: in an attempt to “place her in context”, the curators have included too many works by “middling” British surrealists who were “her peers but not her equals”. More tiresome still, said Rachel Campbell-johnston in The Times, is the selection of “holiday snap-style photographs” of Miller and Penrose’s domestic life. The show does, however, draw attention to how remarkable Miller was, and how she differed from her fellow surrealists. They were “obsessed with the female form”, but tended to depict it as an expression of their “fetishistic fantasies”. Miller was having none of it. In one early image, she captures a breast removed in a mastectomy placed on top of a dinner plate – a pointed riposte to the “objectification of women” indulged in by her male contemporaries.