#‘Surrealist Lee Miller’ exhibition 2023-2024

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Detail of Self portrait with headband, New York Studio, New York, USA c1932 by Lee Miller.

© Lee Miller Archives England 2023

Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt 1937 by Lee Miller.

© Lee Miller Archives England 2023

Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, England 1941 by Lee Miller.

© Lee Miller Archives England 2023

Nude bent forward, Paris, France c1930 by Lee Miller.

© Lee Miller Archives England 2023

A beauty who captured war’s ugliness, Lee Miller’s time is finally here: Surrealist Lee Miller is at Heide Museum of Modern Art from November 4, 2023 to February 25, 2024.

The model, muse, photographer and trailblazer is the subject of a new exhibition - and a film starring Kate Winslet.

The exhibition, Surrealist Lee Miller, at Heide Museum of Modern Art features more than 100 photographs, spanning portrait, fashion and surrealist photography in Paris and New York in the 1920s and ’30s, along with landscape, architecture and World War II.

By Kerrie O'Brien

The Age - October 29, 2023

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Lee Miller

On April 30, 1945, photojournalists David E. Scherman and Lee Miller produced one of the most controversial photographic series of the twentieth century; while documenting Hitler's apartment on the day of his suicide, they photographed each other bathing in the Führer's tub. In Hatje Cantz's new release, Elissa Mailänder writes, "Within Germany, Hitler represented less horror and mass violence than he did rebirth and the ambitious project to Germanize Europe. Miller observed Hitler’s neighbors in Bogenhausen with perplexity: 'The attitude of these Germans was odd. They talked quite normally about... that Hitler was a great man with the right ideas, but he had been badly advised and controlled by gangsters.' Considering the widespread goodwill and profound respect for Hitler, Miller’s and Scherman’s action, as a woman and especially as a Jew, can be interpreted as an act of provocation. It was a (successful) attempt to deconstruct the Führer as a (German) identification figure and hereby to undermine his aura at a time when the war had not officially ended. Although Hitler and his wife had just taken their lives, Germany, which lay in ruins, had not yet capitulated. Embedded in that contemporaneous context, the bathtub photographs sent a clear and defiant message to Germany and international society: The Führer is dead. And now we are here."

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Lee Miller

Hatje Cantz

$45.00

Pbk, 8.25 x 11.5 in. / 160 pgs / 70 color.

Pub Date: 8/25/2015 | Not available

U.S. $45.00 CAD $60.00

ISBN 9783775739559

Edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Walter Moser. Text by Anna Hanreich, Astrid Mahler, Elissa Mailänder, Walter Moser, Ute Wrocklage.

Lee Miller (1907-77) began her artistic career in 1929 as a Surrealist photographer in Paris. She produced images, often in collaboration with Man Ray, in which she isolated motifs by means of tight framing and experimental techniques, and in doing so rendered visible a paradoxical reality.

This publication surveys Miller's best works, including early Surrealist compositions as well as travel photos. At the end of World War II, Miller traveled through Europe as a war reporter, producing harrowing photographs of considerable historical significance. One of her most spectacular pictures originated in late April 1945 in Adolf Hitler's city apartment at Prinzregentenplatz in Munich: Lee had a photo taken of herself sitting naked in the dictator's bathtub--not long after having captured on film the crimes committed in the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald immediately after their liberation by the occupying forces (Miller was one of the first photographers to do so).

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