‘Lee Miller’

Tate Britain 2 October 2025–15 February 2026

Julian Freeman

The illustrations are of works by Lee Miller (1907–1977)

1 Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London, 1941.
Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025.
All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Tate Britain’s press release declares that its current Lee Miller retrospective is the largest ever staged. One is tempted to enquire why they make the claim, for it isn’t as though the considerable volume of Miller’s extraordinary work has suffered from infrequent exposure. Far from it. Following his chance rediscovery of a very extensive collection of her negatives in the early 1980s, Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, has systematically and successfully worked to re-establish his mother’s posthumous reputation as a major 20th-century artist, and in doing so has ensured that her photographs have been exhibited for audiences around the globe, and have also been presented for an even wider public in book form.

From the start, the extraordinary breadth of Miller’s oeuvre aided Penrose’s commitment to its value as a teaching tool, as outreach, in permutations that were as meaningful and educational as possible: when he first toured a group of works in (mostly) south-east England it was as a compact and carefully selected spread of prints, shown at smaller municipal art galleries, or in exhibition spaces at colleges and universities, where he might also speak about the work. In truth, the size of this show shouldn’t matter, or even its venue, for the V&A (and others) mounted the internationally successful touring show ‘The Art of Lee Miller’ during 2007–2008.^[1] But 17 years is a long time between exhibitions, and there is much in the Tate venture that needs to be brought before a new audience. The exhibition chronology of the Lee Miller Archives is evidence not only of the range of her present audience, but of the inexhaustible value of her subject-matter. Once seen, Miller’s work is rarely forgotten, in its visual and emotional impact, and this is clearly a factor in the initial audience response to the present exhibition.

The overarching fact of Miller’s life and career was that she was a beautiful woman, attractive physically and intellectually, whose no-nonsense approach to life helped to underpin an attitude of mind that, in general, reinforced her self-belief. This display is arranged in a series of rooms of varying greyscale background, which makes some of the less tonal, but important, early photographs hard to ‘read’. It moves quickly through her early childhood to note a brief period studying painting and stage design in New York State – combined with work as a professional model – before her determination to train ‘behind the lens’ led her to Paris in 1929. Her persistence was too much for Man Ray, whose student and intimate she became, and with whom there were no boundaries. The pair presided over the experimental development of the photographic process of solarisation (the halo effect when photographic plates are exposed to light during processing) but the precise nature of their collaboration remains unclear. None the less, the spirit of experimental collaboration and intellectual interchange and proximity between Miller and the surrealist artists whose companionship she so enjoyed marks her work at this time, and the showcased copies of published work by Miller and others, with many other documents, is a useful feature of all the exhibition.

Miller came to play an important and influential role in the evolution and growth of Surrealism, aided to some extent by the opening of her own studio, but the development and expansion of her own visual and technical capabilities are manifest through the works she made during the early 1930s in Paris. Several of these are displayed and are now iconic, especially those using human forms, but her use of non-natural shapes, including structures and decorative features, viewed through the lens in ways that challenged ‘normal’ understanding, also permit an unrestrained range of spontaneous, unfamiliar outcomes (Pl 2, Pl 3).

2 Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa, 1937. Lee Miller Archives.
© Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

3 Untitled, Paris, 1930. Lee Miller Archives. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025.
All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Miller’s work began to be published in Europe, but also in the USA, and in 1932 Julien Levy’s offer of an exhibition of photographs in New York was enough to induce her to return there. Levy’s was the first gallery in America to promote Surrealism, but Miller still needed to support herself, and she opened and ran another studio for two years, where some memorable images were made. As the Depression approached, however, she was forced to economise, and returned to American Vogue as a model, before accepting that a change of direction had become a necessity. Overloaded emotionally and financially, and – by her own later admission – at a creative crossroads with photography, she left her affairs in disarray, married, and travelled to Egypt.

Understandably, this complicated background is largely summarised in the contextual wall panels available for visitors at the Tate although, where it is appropriate, Miller’s own words are used to illustrate her ideas or experiences. But throughout the exhibition there are moments that are pivotal to understand the continuous changes in Miller’s photographic interests during her time in Egypt and in visits made in the same period to the Middle East and the Balkans between 1935 and 1939. More use might have been made in this context of Miller’s own comments: they are usually pithy and engaging, and her own words usually give emphasis to her concerns. More would be helpful to underpin the striking sense of release present in the images that chronicle her gradual adaptation to the light of the Middle East, and her resumption of photography, in new subjects that further refined her pre-existing surrealist visual vocabulary. Another pivotal moment that almost slips past unnoticed is Miller’s meeting with her future husband, Roland Penrose, on a visit to Paris in 1937.

Miller’s network of friends and acquaintances was truly extensive, and their photographic portraiture, made for personal pleasure or on commission, is both plentiful and a significant seam in her work. The exhibition usefully departs from a fairly strict chronology to emphasise this activity, and it is useful to examine and compare the very different approaches she adopted in her portraiture, during the later 1930s, in wartime, and later. The earlier images, often of well-known faces, might be seen in formal, exhibition settings, but also as magazine illustrations, but they could also serve as more speculative experiments in picture-making, as shown in her familiar images of her friend Eileen Agar, and in informal holiday photographs, where her companions are well-known artists such as Max Ernst and Picasso. Tate’s display helpfully blurs the boundaries between peace, war and post-war portraiture by featuring Miller’s wartime work for British Vogue (‘Brogue’) (Pl 1), and that made after 1942, when she became an accredited War Artist.

As this exhibition enters its final phase it covers Miller’s activities during the Second World War and after (Pl 4).

Aside from her earliest experimental works, these photographs are arguably her best known, with good reason, and having been taken for, and usually published by, Vogue, they received a wide contemporary audience, and, for different reasons, remain her most powerful statements. Miller’s photographs are easily the equal of Beaton, Brandt, Capa and Roger and, in their enduring impact, and for the fact that they came into public view via the medium of illustrated magazines, they are likely to have influenced later documentary black-and-white photographers such as McCullin. They are the subject of Antony Penrose’s second book, where they appear accompanied by Miller’s own texts.^[2] Her relationships with Vogue magazine also date from 1939, when she moved to London,^[3] and this display includes several of Miller’s most powerful photographs, taken and annotated for Vogue during the London Blitz. They led to a separate and popular book in 1941, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. After D-Day Miller’s work for Vogue continued at an intense pace: her record of work in casualty clearing stations after D-Day, and at the bombardment of St Malo at the close of the Normandy campaign, remain as disturbingly real today as they did to contemporaries. That jarring note is maintained all the way to the German surrender. The particular effects achieved in these photographs was often due to Miller’s use of a Rolleiflex camera with no close-up lens. In practice it meant that if she wanted a close-up she had to be close to her subject, with all the potential difficulties that might have meant.

With the other claims on Miller’s time, the urgency for publication that her newest photographs in Germany demanded became inseparable from the heavy irony that increasingly laced her comments about the Germans and their awareness of the realities of Nazism. At this exhibition, the two iconic shots by David Scherman of Miller in Hitler’s Munich bathtub act as an overture to an ante-room where the entry wall features warnings about its content: this is a selection of the photographs that Miller took at Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps soon after their respective liberations in April 1945. Miller’s accompanying commentaries remain an arresting amalgam of fury, compassion and pity, as appropriate today as they were when first written.

Lee Miller gradually retired from photography, to live at Farleys Farm (now Farleys House) near Chiddingly in the East Sussex hinterland. In common with many thousands of others, her wartime experiences had a profound and adverse impact. Her last article for Vogue was in 1953, and thereafter she turned her creative activities to cookery, for which she became well known. She lived at Farleys with Roland Penrose until her death in 1977.^[4]

The V&A’s partners were The Philadelphia Museum of Art, SF MoMA, and the Jeu de Paume ↑
Anthony, Penrose, ed, Lee Miller’s War, London 2014, with a foreword by David E Scherman. ↑
See Julie Summers, Dressed for War, London 2020. This lucid and highly readable biography of Audrey Withers, Vogue’s British editor from 1940 to 1960, treats Lee Miller’s friendship with Withers, and her wartime relationship with the magazine, in considerable detail. ↑
See leemiller.co.uk for further information. ↑

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