ARTS . Arts Picks

Lee Miller

Jan. 26 to April 27, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and Ben Franklin Parkway, philamuseum.org.


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Published: Jan 23, 2008

photography

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The many lives of Lee Miller would make great surrealist, I'm Not There-style biopic. Poughkeepsie-born and nomadic otherwise, Miller spent her life as both a muse and the amused; she modeled for big names in the pages of Vogue, then stepped behind the lens to apply Dadaist techniques in the studio and discover an exploratory eye while traveling. Both of the latter came into play in some of the most brutal yet most gorgeous World War II photographs you'll ever see. The Art of Lee Miller, opening this weekend at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, takes something from each of these chapters in its 140 images on exhibit through April. We see Miller the model — those piercing eyes, that sharp chin, the supple lips and wavy hair that Man Ray and Edward Steichen could not resist. We then see Miller asserting herself as a fashion photographer in 1930s Paris, all the while experimenting with abstract, figurative compositions; a diptych from this era shows a tidy place setting, a tablecloth, a fork, and a plate containing a severed breast from a radical mastectomy. It looks like burnt cherry pie. Subsequent wanderings in Egypt convey a tremendous sense of isolation and solitude; the dynamic Portrait of Space gazes through the deep black lines of a ripped screen window out into a desert abyss. But most powerful is her work from the Second World War. Miller was the first woman to photograph the conflict, and while her takes on the Normandy beach and death camp at Buchenwald are done in a drab, rushed photojournalistic style, she is much more patient in capturing the war's aftermath. A dead SS guard submerged in a canal is tightly composed in a square format, the water rippling across his face and only a bullet hole in his jacket breaching the surface. Another portrait shows the mayor of Leipzig's daughter, on a frayed leather chair, wearing a trenchcoat and medic armband, lying in repose. She committed suicide during the allied raid. Discovered with sunlight shining across her restful face and lithe blond hair, the girl is depicted with the delicacy and poise that Miller herself knew from the fashion world, a lifetime away.

Jan. 26 to April 27, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and Ben Franklin Parkway, philamuseum.org.