EXHIBITION
PALAZZO FRANCHETTI, VENICE > 5.11.2022 – 10.4.2023
“I’d rather take a picture than be one”
(Lee Miller)
Model, photographer, muse, war correspondent, twentieth-century icon. Lee Miller was all this and much more, in a thousand lives lived with passion and resourcefulness. The exhibition intends to do justice to this woman as beautiful as she was clever and talented, to her love and professional relationship with Man Ray, it is often forgotten that it was she who discovered and passed on to him the photographic technique of solarization that Man Ray adopted as an artistic signature for which he distinguished himself.
The exhibition, curated by Victoria Noel-Johnson, presents approximately 140 photographs by Lee Miller and Man Ray, some art objects and video documents, in the prestigious venue of Palazzo Franchetti in Venice where visitors will enjoy a journey that unravels in a story that starts from the human and artistic story of Lee Miller, as a model and muse in the twenties when she meets the famous publisher Conde Nast who makes her a model of Vogue, to the Parisian years in which she works with the famous fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene making some of his shots immortal, to reach the heart of the exhibition and the relationship with Man Ray in that unrepeatable avant-garde atmosphere with friends Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau who involved her in his surrealist film Le sang d’un poète, in which she plays a modern, classically inspired goddess.
The exhibition also examines the period after her love story with Man Ray, when Miller returned to New York in 1932 and opened a successful photographer’s studio, at the time when Man Ray, blinded by the pain of being separated from Lee, in 1933 chose to replace the eye on the arm of his famous Perpetual Motif metronome with that of his lost lover.
Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, Near Siwa, Egypt 1937 by Lee Miller (E1905)
© Lee Miller Archives England 2022. All Rights Reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk
Man Ray, Lee Miller, 1930 ca, © Man Ray 2015 Trust / ADAGP – SIAE – 2022; images : Telimage, Paris
A section then highlights Lee Miller’s surrealist creations up to the well-known 1937 summer shots of ‘Surrealists on Holiday’, taken in Cornwall and the South of France with Max Ernst, E.L.T. Mesens, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington, as well as Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar and Eileen Agar, and with the man who would become her second husband, the British surrealist artist Roland Penrose.
There is also Lee’s Egyptian period, where she creates some of her most fascinating and poetic shots including the famous Portrait of Space with the curtain or mosquito net torn from a window towards infinity that inspired René Magritte to paint Le baiser (The kiss).
And finally, her move to London, where she worked as a photographer for ‘Vogue’ (UK), to then become a war correspondent and photo reporter during the Second World War for the American Army. From the images taken during the London Blitz, to the liberation of Paris and the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, until the iconic shot of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub at his home in Munich, ideally to try to wash away all the dirt of Dachau.
An exhibition that traces the life of Lee Miller in relation to Man Ray, a journey between the twenties and the forties of the last century between unique emotions and artistic atmospheres.
“I keep repeating to everyone: ‘I haven’t wasted a minute in my whole life’ – but now I know that if I repeated it I would be even freer with my ideas, with my body and my love.”
(Lee Miller)
- LEE MILLER - MAN RAY • FASHION • LOVE • WAR > 5.11.2022 - 10.4.2023 // PALAZZO FRANCHETTI, VENICE
- LEE MILLER - MAN RAY • FASHION • LOVE • WAR > 5.11.2022 - 10.4.2023 // PALAZZO FRANCHETTI, VENICE
