Lee Miller

by Miller, Lee; Calvocoressi, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780500542606
• ISBN10: 0500542600
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Summary

The remarkable and unconventional Lee Miller was one of the twentieth century's most accomplished photographers. At the age of twenty, she was discovered on a New York street by Conde Nast, who instantly decided to put her face on the cover of Vogue. Two years later she left America for Paris to become a photographer herself. There she became the disciple and lover of Man Ray and an intimate of the Paris art world. World War II saw her as Vogue's war correspondent, present at the liberation of Paris and when the Dachau concentration camp was first entered. Her later years were spent in London and at her home on the Sussex downs, where she kept up the many friendships she had made. Miller came into contact with a wide range of people: painters, sculptors, actors, novelists, poets, journalists, musicians, dancers, and leaders in the field of fashion. She photographed them all, and many became close friends. In Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life, the finest of these photographs are shown together for the first time. They include not only perceptive and sympathetic portraits of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Dora Maar, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, Yehudi Menuhin, Dylan Thomas, Colette, and a host of others but also pictures of Londoners in the Blitz, of Parisians celebrating their liberation, and of the aftermath of the Third Reich. An exhibition based on this show will be held at the Getty in 2003. 135 duotone photographs.

Author Biography

Richard Calvocoressi has been Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh since 1987, and was formerly a curator at the Tate Gallery.

Table of Contents

An Unflinching Eye	6	(10)
The Portraits
The Surrealist Decade	16	(36)
The War at Home	52	(38)
The War in Europe	90	(36)
Postwar: Artists and Writers	126	(22)
Picasso and other Friends	148	(26)
Notes	174	(1)
Bibliography and Acknowledgments	175	(1)
Index	176