LEE MILLER LANDS AT ANZIO Section curated by
Elisabetta Civitan and Benedetta Ferri
Two exclusive images by Lee Miller are exhibited, for the first time ever, in Anzio at the fifth edition of Shingle22j, the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Anzio and Nettuno, that this year is dedicated to the theme of food. These two works will then be part of the “Surrealist Lee Miller” exhibition that will be held in Mexico and will also be on display in Austria during the summer months. The photographs, which are a great example of surrealist art, reveal how the artist is able to break all barriers, challenging conventions and shattering society’s taboos, something that Lee Miller has always done both in her work and personal life.
All photographs by Arnold Genthe. Lee Miller 1920
About Lee Miller
Astounding beauty, fashion model, Surrealist muse, assistant and model of Man Ray, Vogue photographer, war photographer, bohemian, free spirit, Lady Roland Penrose: this is how Lee Miller is identified, recognized and appreciated worldwide. Her tangled, unbelievably interesting life, full of art and celebrities, famous lovers and fortuitous encounters with the history of her time, provides an occasion to reflect on the importance of women in the contemporary art scenario. But before her life behind the camera as a celebrated photographer in Paris in the early 1930s, Lee Miller had lived another intriguing life as a top model and a Vogue cover girl who was shot by the greatest photographers of her time – Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst. In the Ville Lumière, she will meet famous American photographer Man Ray and will become his model, lover and assistant; through him, she will be introduced to the surrealist world, embracing the movement’s principles in her own way – and developing them with great sensitivity. These principles left their mark on Lee’s style and career as a photographer: she will always see the world with her surrealist eye. Lee Miller’s photographs from her Paris years are her most explicitly surrealist works, which are based on her natural ability to find the extraordinary and the bizarre in the ordinary, transforming simple subjects and everyday objects, apparently void of content, into something new, having new meanings. Her images always contain irony and a remarkable sense of humor, as well as surrealism’s typical element of surprise and innovation, and a desire to upset the viewer. The result is often amusing, sometimes shocking, but humor is a common thread running throughout her work. Apart from being a great photographer, she was also a remarkable war correspondent for Vogue. Accredited in 1942, she captured bombtorn London during the Blitz, the US hospitals near the battle front in Normandy, the liberation of Paris and a great part of Europe, going as far as Nazi Germany, where she shot the horrors and cruelty of the concentration camps. After her death in 1977, her son Antony Penrose and his wife Suzanna found over 60,000 prints and negatives in piles of boxes stacked in the attic of Farley Farm, Antony’s childhood home in Sussex. It’s only thanks to them that we can now admire Lee Miller’s extraordinary work.