Ten years ago I visited Farley House in East Sussex, the home of artist and curator Roland Penrose and his wife Lee Miller (and their various lovers) for over 28 years.
I met their son Anthony Penrose, who still lives in the house. At that time, it must be said, there was much less interest in Miller. Like many women, her achievements were partially overshadowed by the men in her life – and there were many of them – despite her career as a model and photographer.
There was Roland Penrose himself, frankly a rather mediocre artist, but one of the few British surrealists, better known today as a curator and biographer of Picasso and Miro. Then there was Picasso, who painted it six times, but of course he was always the center of attention. She was also supposedly the “muse” of her lover Man Ray, who “invented” the solarization process in 1929 while she was his assistant. The story goes that she briefly turned on the light as a mouse ran across her leg, creating these images, part positive, part negative, as if lit from behind. Man Ray and Miller collaborated so closely with each other that apparently some of the work she created is still attributed to him.
Miller was one of the first female photographers to relentlessly document the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps.
But among Miller’s most striking works was when Fashion assigned her to work as a photojournalist during World War II in partnership with a male photographer, David Sherman. She was one of the first female photographers to relentlessly document the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. He and Sherman visited Hitler’s home in Munich, where he took the famous photograph of Miller bathing in Hitler’s bath, the bath mat stained with Dachau mud from her boots. On the same day, April 30, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in their Berlin bunker.
Love letters and ephemera
This year I returned to the Farley House to find that the focus was now on Miller. The tour explores her legacy as Anthony Penrose works through the vast archive: 60,000 negatives, photographs, love letters and ephemera discovered in chests in the attic. And, of course, interest in the film increased. Leewhich has just been released, starring Kate Winslet and inspired by Anthony’s book. The Life of Lee Miller (1985).
Miller is now receiving both institutional and commercial accolades. In November, the Heide Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia presents a major exploration of her work (4 November – 25 February 2024), curated by Anthony Penrose. And in New York Gagosian shows Seeing is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends (November 11-December 22). It will feature photographs by Miller and Roland Penrose, as well as works on paper by a variety of artists they knew, lived with, and loved: Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Valentine Penrose, and Picasso.
As you might expect, Larry Gagosian is tight-lipped about prices, so I don’t know how much he’s asking for her work. But its prices in other places are still far from the prices of its contemporaries. Christie’s is offering a gelatin silver print of her portrait of Man Ray, dated 1931. It is estimated at $6,000-$8,000. But at the same sale, Man Ray’s gelatin silver portrait of Miller, dated around 1930 and almost the same size, has a higher estimate: $20,000-$30,000.
However, today Miller’s modern edition Women firefighters (1941), depicting masked wardens in London, costs around £20,000. In 2007, a reproduction of the same subject sold at Christie’s for just £1,500, which would be £2,400 today. Your time has come, Lee!
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