The Lily or the Gild
The previous chapter ended with the following statement:
There is, however, an aspect of Lee Miller that always revolves around the notion that, “but, she was there” be it Paris in the late 1920’s, New York City in the 1930’s or WWII in the 1940’s. For historical purposes, the more significant question should be, what did she achieve while she was “there”? The answer is inevitably the same – not much. It is foolish to pretend otherwise and, characteristically Lee herself never did [Emphasis added].
But, is “historical purpose” a fair or even relevant standard? Lee, like most people, did not live her life and make her choices with the expectation or goal of having them placed in a petri dish for examination a hundred years later. She is only viewed in a historical perspective because she had been cast there by an application of gild to the lily in 1985 and then, en marcha, a parade of false footprints that lead into a vaporous myth designed to obscure reality.
If readers of this forum have been persuaded by the challenges made in the preceding chapters, the inevitable conclusion is that the gild that has been applied to Lee unfairly subjects her to a historical and artistic analysis that she never achieved nor claimed to have achieved during her lifetime. Whether it is Nimet’s suicide, the question of Lee’s bigamy, the Nast/Lepape/supermodel story, the failure of the Lee Miller Studio Inc., Picasso’s femme soldat, WWII front line reporting or the other talking points – none of them stand up to scrutiny.
In Chapter II “The Trauma of Harold Baker” it was noted that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “gild” as an effort “to add unnecessary ornamentation to something beautiful in its own right.” A promise was also made to strip the gild “without damage to the lily, revealing the tragic beauty of the lily in its own right.” This promise has been kept, at least for those who prefer reality over myth.
Was Lee, for example, less beautiful because she was not on the cover of Vogue in March 1927? Are her photos by Man Ray less stunning? Of course not, and the same goes for her photographs and articles that speak for themselves for better or worse, without the false ornamentation that commentators have felt compelled to follow since 1985. That being said, if Lee is looked at without the gild, the narrative into which commentators have been herded often yields a different, but a trustworthy footprint to follow.
Claude Lepape, in the biography of his father, Georges Lepape notes that Georges taught from 1924 – 1938 in Paris at the New York School of Fine & Applied Art from a workbook called “Fashion Drawing”. In an entry dated and signed by Georges Lepape, Paris November 6, 1936, he discusses fashion photographers and refers to, “the fine photos of Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene, Lee Miller” [Emphasis added]. This is at the time when illustrators, championed by Lepape, and photographers, led by Steichen, were struggling for the covers of Vogue and other prior domains of the illustrators. It was a competition eventually won by Steichen and the photographers but in 1936 Lepape names Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene and Lee Miller as the threat. He continues:
Photography is limited in its potential. Following the great Man Ray, painter-illustrators have practised fashion photography. For example,Cecil Beaton, André Durst etc. They unite design and photography: Panels, sketches, montages etc. Yet photographers cannot create fashion, they can only reproduce it. A means for the artist to demonstrate the advantages he has over the photographer.
Conclusion: Demonstration of role of the fashion artist: he may, through his interpretation, impose fashion, making it understood and appreciated by the medium of his Art and personality; or, by creating and inventing, he can force fashion to follow in the furrow ploughed by his own Imagination and Art (1).
Between 1934 and 1939 Lee was in Egypt so the work Lepape is referring to in 1936 is her work under the tutelage of Man Ray and Hoyningen-Huene in Paris (1929-1932) or possibly also in New York (1932-1934) with her commercial Vogue efforts at the Lee Miller Studios, Inc. Lee was not the Vogue March, 1927 Lepape cover girl and Lepape never mentioned her as such. He did however, admire her work on the other side of the camera and referenced her by name to his art students in 1936.
It has been previously been mentioned that if Lee can be said to have had any career, it was the fashion and lifestyle work she did with Vogue primarily between 1940 and 1945. That is quantitatively correct, but it is astonishing to think about the leading illustrator of Vogue naming and including Lee Miller as a threat to illustrators because of her “fine photos” while she is still in her early twenties. More than that, he places her alongside two of the greatest fashion photographers of the day, Steichen and Hoyningen-Huene. That is nothing short of incredible and an example of what lies beneath the gild if one is not diverted by its glitter.
My time on this forum runs short but, if I may, I would like to share another illustrative vignette about perspective. Lee is pushed in the Lives narrative and its prodigy as a Surrealist photographer. For the most part this is unsupported. Turning to her Paris years, however, an examination of her work and influences reveal few Surrealistic examples, but again a different and richer narrative emerges.
Unlike Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, or even a young Henrí Cartier-Bresson, Lee did not interact with the Surrealists other than in her social relationships with Man Ray and a few of his acquaintances such as Max Ernst. Her photos did not appear in the Surrealist periodicals (other than as a model), her work was not exhibited with the Surrealists, she did not sit in their café meetings, play the exquisite cadaver nor practice automatism in her art. She was not solicited by this group and there does not appear to be any evidence that she met André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Louis Aragon or other thinkers and founders of Surrealism in her early years in Paris. She was very much like the Ms. Man Ray before her, Kiki of Montparnasse, a Surrealist’s woman, but not a member of his group. Lee’s photography, like Kiki’s paintings, was de facto separate and distinct from the French Surrealists, albeit an element of her general education and training in photography (e.g. solarization) was with Man Ray.
On the other hand, although Eugène Atget was dead by 1927, his legacy had been picked up by Berenice Abbott and Julien Levy. Atget had obtained a little attention from the Surrealists but his work was essentially street photography with an emphasis on documentation and preservation of Paris scenes (2). Abbott and Levy had salvaged his photographs and Levy, with the help of his employer, the Weyhe Gallery, published a book entitled Atget Photographie de Paris in both Paris and New York in 1930. An exhibition of Atget’s photographs were held simultaneously at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. Abbott had been a student of Man Ray who was infatuated with Atget. It is unimaginable that Man Ray did not have a copy of this book of photographs when Lee was his assistant in 1930 and his personal acquaintance and admiration of Atget would have exposed Lee to Atget’s body of work through his tutelage (3). As such, Lee would have been among the first three American photographers to have been exposed to Atget along with Man Ray and Abbott.
In the meantime, Abbott successfully persuaded Janet Flanner (Paris correspondent for the The New Yorker from 1925-1975) to promote Atget in her “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker magazine which helped propel Atget’s first recognition in the United States where he first enjoyed significant fame. Atget is now considered the grandfather of street photography while Henrí Cartier-Bresson holds the place of the father of modern street photography although Lee and others were out and about documenting the streets before him. In fact, Lee’s solo exhibition at the Levy Gallery pre-dated Cartier-Bresson’s first solo exhibition in September of 1933 by eight months. Cartier-Bresson’s inaugural exhibition was also augmented by a supporting exhibition of Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans and Lee Miller as an introduction to his work (4).
This is the milieu in which Lee circulated. Lee was with Man Ray dead center in the Atget/Abbot/Levy circle. A significant difference between Lee and Man Ray is that, while he tended to work in his studio assembling objects, Lee took to the streets. The same was true of Man Ray’s other students Berenice Abbot, Jacques-André Boiffard (whose street photography can be found in André Breton’s book, Nadja) and Bill Brandt albeit with the exception of bread and butter studio work such as portraits, nudes, advertising and the like (5).
Lee was an early and classic photographic flâneur in the style of Atget and, later Cartier-Bresson. Her street photographs appear as an image taken with the relaxed eye of a flâneur content with what she has come upon, not the contorted uncertain eye of a Surrealist trying to make pieces fit where they don’t. Lee’s Paris street work creates a sensation of not only being at the scene, but walking with her as she ambled about Paris from carousel to marketplace to perfume shop seeking her framing in architecture, mechanical objects or simply places, things and, occasionally, people that she happened upon. There is no need to squint to find Surrealism when Lee fits so naturally into Atget’s world of the street and the documentation of the “real and now” as it was “there and then” for Lee.
Lee’s photographs derive from the work of Atget and as characterized by David Travis, a former curator at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), when discussing what Lee and her contemporaries created;
“What resulted in their work was the creation of an image shaped primarily by time. This is what was advanced step-by-step in photography in Paris in a public way in the late 1920s and 1930s and can now be recognized as one of the crowning glories of the medium. It was pioneered by little-known and underappreciated photographers” (6).
Lee was one of the pioneers in Paris in the 1930’s and that is, on balance, her proper place.
It is not an accident that Levy chose to exhibit Lee’s work in his February 1932 exhibition of “Modern European Photography” with street photographers André Kertész, the Bauhaus photographers László Moholy-Nagy and Hebert Bayer whose work was influenced by Man Ray. For approximately a year between October of 1932 and September of 1933, Lee’s photographs hung on the walls of the Levy Gallery with Lee either as the subject or photographer (7).
The storage of Lee’s photographs for a half a century by Julien Levy provides a unique opportunity to put Lee’s work in context. The photographs that Levy preserved are similar to artifacts at an archaeological dig that reveal not only the photographers among whom he placed Lee, but also the types of genres they worked in which were not cataloged. In 1975 when Julien Levy gifted unsold photos taken by Lee to the Art Institute of Chicago he also gifted unsold photos of Eugene Atget, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Moholy-Nagy and others. At the time, David Travis was assigned by the AIC to organize and prepare the Levy Collection for exhibition and, in doing so, he contacted Lee Miller who was near the end of her life. After learning about her work and relationship to Man Ray and the photography of Paris in the 1920’s / 1930’s he asked her to explore and obtain information that he sought related to his interest in early Paris. She did so with the help of Man Ray but, of course, she had first hand knowledge since she was there in Paris at that time and published in the same periodicals (e.g. V.U., Vogue) and exhibited with the same group of photographers, albeit as a minor figure.
Lee’s Paris work was exhibited in Chicago in 1976 just as it had been at the Levy Gallery in 1932-1933. Travis prepared a book entitled Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection Starting with Atget to accompany the exhibition at the AIC. He also published a book in 2005 entitled Paris Photographers From A Time That Was. In both books one will find the photographs of Lee among her contemporaries and it is immediately apparent that her genre is not tenuously connected to the Surrealists but with the photographers selected by Levy including the street photography of Eugene Atget which influenced Lee before Henrí Cartier-Bresson ever held a Leica.
Lee was by nature a wanderer and a realist and it is very easy to see her artistic efforts as a flâneur documenting the world as it appeared before the lens of her camera. It is more difficult to square the characteristics of Lee with Surrealism. The best, and actually only, way to make a judgment about Lee’s place in photography in her early years is to simply view on-line the several dozen photos or so photographs of the Levy Collection at the Art Museum in Philadelphia or the Art Institute of Chicago that represent essentially all of the photos that are available from Lee’s Paris years. Let the work speak for itself without narrative or labels and it reinforces the conclusion that Lee worked primarily in the orbit of Atget and his disciples, or better put, her colleagues, in the Paris years.
There are a few photographs that could be considered exceptions or crossovers, but on the whole the claim that Lee was a Surrealist photographer is a baffling choice for Paris or any of her other “Lives”. Notwithstanding the white noise, it is disingenuous to see Lee as a “Surrealist photographer” to the exclusion of the labels as documented by simple examination of the variety of her work produced during her vital years between 1930 and 1946 (8). From 1930 to 1932 she interned with Hoyningen-Huene in fashion, 1932-1934 she worked occasionally for Vogue (U.S.) as an independent contractor through the Lee Miller Studio Inc. Then from 1940 to 1946 she was a fashion and lifestyle photographer for Vogue (U.K.) with an assignment of nine months to Europe during the war and then six months post war coverage. Her photography during this short period was split between fashion and lifestyle and as a correspondent/photographer covering the war and its aftermath. In sum, Lee was a Vogue fashion and lifestyle photographer, in one form or another, between 1930-1946 essentially the entirety of her productive sixteen years. Surrealism, like her war years, may have filtered in, as did war photography and other genres, but it is clearly putting the carriage before the horse to say Lee was a Surrealist photographer.
The problem is obvious and so is the solution. The word “Surrealist” is appropriate to attach to a particular photograph, but misleading to attach to a person whose majority of photographs are compositions in an entirely different genre. In any event, it is far-fetched to call Lee a “Surrealist photographer” to the exclusion of her endeavors, particularly, her fashion and lifestyle work for Vogue. This is yet another false footprint to avoid.
The only time Lee herself exhibited any Surrealistic enthusiasm was the faux Surrealism evidenced by Lee in her courtship correspondence with Roland in 1937-1939 and her corresponding affiliation with the Egyptian Surrealists. Even this, however, did not find its way into her Egyptian landscape photography with the exception of “Portrait of Space”.
The one positive thread that ran through Lee’s life between 1930-1946 was her photography. No one (literally no one) enjoyed at that place and time of her training the opportunities Lee had with Man Ray and Hoyningen-Huene but her body of work in any given period never amounted to more than enough to show great potential. Whether her ability to maintain focus was destroyed by childhood sexual abuse or by her other afflictions will never be known. The question remains the same as that posed at the outset of this forum. She had the appearance of an angel, as she told Bridget Keenan, but a demon inside and whether the demon was intrinsic to Lee or driven there by an abuser also remains unknown (9). Certainly, the demon extracted a high price for Lee as well as her family, friends and lovers.
At any rate, whether it be her Paris work or as a WWII correspondent or even modeling, the question always arises “what could she have achieved?” Could she have been a Henri Cartier-Bresson or Margaret Burke-White? Maybe or maybe not but, either way, the Lee Miller story is not what she achieved, but rather what might she have achieved? Time inevitably defeats youth and beauty, but achievement requires time and that is precisely what Lee was unable to dedicate.
It is true that the myth that Lee Miller was particularly or highly successful in any of her ventures dissipates when the gild is stripped, but that does not diminish Lee in the least. The absence of fabled success was the result of a choice or inability to dedicate the time or attention demanded by achievement but that, by analogy, is the difference between dining on a smorgasbord rather than a formal soup to nuts dinner.
As stated earlier, Lee, like most people, did not live her life to meet the expectations of historians. Many of Lee’s colleagues spent decades pursuing their “nine to five” success (such as Marion Morehouse the New York Vogue model), Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Horst P. Horst (who apprenticed with Lee at Vogue), Martha Gellhorn, Bourke-White and so forth. Others prefer the smorgasbord where one can sample, taste and move on. That is the nub of the question in the Lee Miller story. Did she live a life of free will making her choices as she moved forward or was she a slave to addictions and afflictions fostered upon her? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests the latter and that is why at the outset a promise was made to strip the gild without damage to “the beauty of the lily” yet reveal its “…tragic beauty…”
For the next six months I am traveling throughout Europe and eventually back to Egypt to visit family. I may write some vignettes of Lee similar to what is in this forum if time and situation allow. I will check and answer questions that may come up which also allows me to expand on items I came across during research that have not readily fit in the articles that I have posted. When I have the opportunity to see the movie, “Lee” I will certainly share my thoughts. In the meantime, I would like to say thank you for following my journey and particularly to those who have shared their thoughts, questions and comments both on-line and privately with me over this past year. Shukran and Ma’ssalaame!
Footnotes
(1) Lepape, Claude & Defert, Thierey (1984) From the Ballets Russes to Vogue: The Art of Georges Lepape The Vendome Press (pages 42-3)
(2) Travis, David (2005) Paris: Photographs From A Time That Was The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Press (pages 14-15)
(3) Travis, David (2005) Paris: Photographs From A Time That Was The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Press (pages 15-16)
“After Man Ray became infatuated with Atget’s photographs, younger photographers appearing in his studio discovered and were inspired by them.”
(4) Barberie, Peter & Ware, Katharine (2006) Dreaming in Black and White : Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery Yale University Press
(5) Travis, David (2005) Paris: Photographs From A Time That Was The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Press (page 16)
(6) Travis, David (2005) Paris: Photographs From A Time That Was The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University Press (page 14)
(7) Lee appeared at the following exhibitions at the Levy Gallery as photographer or subject:
Modern European Photography (February 20 – March 11)
Including Herbert Bayer, Ilse Bing, Brassaï, André Kertesz, Lee Miller, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Maurice Tabard and others.
Photographs by Man Ray (April 9-30)
Exhibition of Portrait Photography (October 15 – November 5)
Including Berenice Abbott, Arnold Genthe, George Hoyningen-Huene, Jay Leyda, George Platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence White and others.
1932-1933
Lee Miller, Exhibition of Photographs (September 25 – October 16)
Photographs by Henrí Cartier-Bresson and the “Exhibition of Anti-Graphic Photography” with Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Lee Miller, Man Ray and others.
She was also exhibited on May 17, 1932 by Levy’s Film Society as star of the film Blood of the Poet by Jean Cocteau. Interestingly, she was not exhibited at the Levy Gallery with many of her other exhibition colleagues for the January 9-29, 1932 exhibition “Surréalisme” including Atget, Herbert Bayer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and Maurice Tabard.
In January 1933, while Lee’s solo exhibition was at the Levy Gallery, Joella Levy wrote to her mother (and Levy’s agent) Mina Loy to say that neither Julien Levy nor she thought Lee’s photographs were very good.
See: Burke, Carolyn (2005) Lee Miller: A Life. Knopf, New York (pages 364-366)
If true, judging by the frequency of Lee’s appearances at the Levy Gallery it may be that Levy used her beauty first as a marketing tool to support Man Ray sales where she was the subject, and then her photographs for her work after she had become Levy’s lover. Whatever the reason for Levy’s decision, he was determined in his efforts at marketing Lee’s work, although unsuccessful.
(8) Although Lee did some occasional writing and photography for Vogue after 1946 as well as Roland Penrose’s biography on Picasso, her vitality ended with her post war return from Europe and collapse of the Hotel Scribe.
(9) Keenan, Bridget (1977)The Women We Wanted to Look Like St. Martine Press, NY (page 136)