A surrealist novel

Lee Miller is an amazing woman. She started her career in fashion – she was that gorgeous – and with her immense talent and determination, she worked in all avenues in the industry, both on stage and behind the scenes. As a photographer, she developed solarization, the technique that granted Man Ray his fame. Lee Miller – Man Ray. Fashion, Love, War, curated by Victoria Noel-Johnson with support from Lee Miller Archives and Fondazione Marconi, will be open at Palazzo Franchetti until April 10, 2023. It includes 140 photographs, art objects, videos to create an iconic, beautiful journey between the 1920s and 1940s.

The exhibition opens with a celebration of Miller’s modelling career in the 1920s, when Conde Nast hired her for Vogue. In those years, she worked in Paris with fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, who authored some of her most famous portraits, explicitly referring to contemporary avant-gardes. This element is the base for the next, the real focus of the exhibition, the unique avantgarde milieu that saw Lee Miller become the friend and muse of Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Jean Cocteau.
The latter involved her in his surrealist film Le sang d’un poète, which in turn contributed to her budding relationship with Man Ray. Short-lived (1929 to 1932) though strong, the romance will tie the two for life. The exhibition includes Lee Miller’s surrealist creations and pictures of her famous ‘surrealist holidays’ in Cornwall and southern France. Lastly, a section on her work for British Vogue and her Second World War features, when she was an accredited photographer for the American Army: the London Blitz, the Liberation of Paris, Buchenwald, Dachau, and an unusual portrait of Hitler.