Overview

Lee Miller (1907-1977) attracts enduring fascination – a female pioneer who is often presented as a singular figure. However, she was also integrated within a creative network of artists that helped change the course of art history in the twentieth century. Miller moved to London in the late 1930s, just as a rich strand of Surrealist practice was burgeoning in Britain. Part of this artistic hub, she captured productive collisions between the artists who found themselves in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s through her photographs. Additionally, she exhibited alongside British Surrealists such as Eileen Agar and Henry Moore in often overlooked London exhibitions, while also dispersing Surrealist imagery into the worlds of fashion, commercial photography and journalism via her interdisciplinary photographic practice. Presenting for the first time Lee Miller’s photographs of, and collaborations with, important Surrealist artists working in Britain (alongside their artworks), this important book tells the story of an exciting cultural moment. Essential for all students and enthusiasts of Surrealism and those enthralled by the striking photography of Lee Miller, this book reveals the social and cultural networks in which she was embedded, offering a holistic view of her work and the life of the Surrealist movement in Britain.

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9781848222724

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Reviews

A new exhibition seeks to reclaim Lee Miller's legacy as an artist in her own right, rather than a muse for others. It does so rather well. --Claudia Pritchard, The New European The show dissects both the trope of Miller-as-muse and the female body-as-object more generally in a series of swift, sharp slices. --Lucy Scholes, NY Books Lee Miller's Nude Bent Forward : phallic curves from a pioneering female surrealist This marble-white, semi-abstract image of the female body plays with Freud's emerging theories of the sexual undercurrents in everyday life. --The Guardian .. . we have an inspired pairing of shows at The Hepworth Wakefield on Lee Miller and Viviane Sassen, two photographers with Surrealist leanings. Their work may be separated by three quarters of a century, but it is united by a desire to unsettle and spook. Since her death in 1977, Miller the muse has rather overshadowed... --Christian House, Telegraph The trouble with this show, however, is that there just aren't enough works by Miller. In a bid to place her in context, the curators overload us with pieces by middling British surrealists who were her peers but not her equals. Of the 140 exhibits, more than half are not by Miller. Which seems a pity, given that her archive extends to more than 60,000 works. This exhibition ends up, in fact, feeling like two distinct shows: one devoted to Miller, and another to mid-20th century surrealism in Britain. The former alone would have been sufficient. --Alistair Smart, Daily Mail

Author Information

Eleanor Clayton is Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, previously Assistant Curator at Tate Liverpool, and has published widely on British modern and contemporary art. She is the Editor of Howard Hodgkin: Painting India (Lund Humphries, 2017); Hilary Floe is Assistant Curator at the Hepworth Wakefield. She recently completed a doctorate in Art History from the University of Oxford; Patricia Allmer is Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of Edinburgh and a leading scholar of surrealism. Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and René Magritte: Beyond Painting (2009).

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