It captured, her son Antony Penrose tells me, an extraordinary moment after years of hardship and separation. “Lee found her way to Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, hammered on the door. He opened it and almost fell backwards. And he hugged her and kissed her and hugged her, and finally, when he stood back, he looked at her and said, “It’s incredible. The first allied soldier I have to see is a woman. This is you.” She was photographed in Hitler’s bathtub the day he died – and later joked about how sticky his part was Miller and Picasso formally met in 1937, on a beach holiday in the south of France, although they may have crossed paths earlier that decade when she was working with Man Ray and discovered the suntanning process that he would come to, no she. is credited. A deep friendship between their two families followed: Miller was married to the British artist, poet and historian Roland Penrose, Picasso was with Dora Maar and then Françoise Gilot and they holidayed together, often at the Spaniards’ various homes. Antony, who was born in 1947, remembers many children and animals: Picasso allowed a goat called Esmerelda to sleep outside his room and called out to her because she was afraid of the dark. There would be long lunches, with the kind of exotic food that was rare in post-war Britain, as well as practical jokes. Miller enjoyed placing ice cubes containing frozen flies in drinks. Photo of Miller from a picnic with Nusch, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2013. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk Penrose remembers being asked at school what he had done during the holidays and surprising his classmates with his answer. “I said quite casually, ‘Oh, we were visiting Picasso.’ I had no idea that this was something extraordinary, because my parents approached it with such incredible modesty. They never said, “Look, this guy is the greatest living contemporary artist in the world.” He was just a person who was treated with great respect and reverence.” Picasso respected Miller as an artist, Penrose says, long before anyone else. “Of course, she was very beautiful. But the fact that she was very smart and knew how to do things was important to him. He knew she was a good photographer. He knew his way around photographers because he was with Dora Maar for six years.” Miller’s beauty and background as a model led to her own considerable talents being overlooked, a situation not helped by the fact that Picasso painted her six times and there had long been a preoccupation with his ‘muses’. This became a problem when Penrose began trying to organize exhibitions of his mother’s work. “In the first place, when I approached people who should know better, I would have to explain that Lee Miller was a woman. Then they’d take it and say, “Oh yeah, she was Man Ray’s muse.” And then I would have to disabuse them of that idea.” Things began to change in the 1980s, when feminists began to reexamine the lives of women artists, particularly the Surrealists. As with other models-turned-artists, Miller’s work made her curious about image-making. “When she was younger,” says Penrose, “she was photographed by the key photographers of the time: Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, people like that. Talking to some of them later in life, they said it was like he thought of it as a tutorial. He would constantly ask questions.” A famous family friend … a young Antony Penrose with Picasso in 1950. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk © Succession Picasso/DACS 2022 This meant that when Miller’s modeling career came to an abrupt end—she was blacklisted after modeling for Kotex, there was a stigma around period goods—she was able to move from New York to Paris and reinvent herself as a photographer and later as a war correspondent for Vogue, first covering the blitz and then the liberation of Europe. The image of her in Hitler’s bathtub, taken by fellow photographer David E Sherman as the Führer’s death was announced, shows her disdain: she used to make fun of how sticky his apartment was, Penrose says. The boots in front of the bathhouse are still covered in mud from the death camps. Miller’s 1945 images of the liberation of Dachau – some of which appear in the exhibition – are, Penrose explains, exercises in controlled rage. As a seven-year-old, Miller was rushed. It was this, as well as seeing the boy she was in love with die in an accident when they were teenagers, that shaped not only her worldview but also her work. Trauma, Penrose says, often causes a sense of disconnection. “If we look at Lee through that lens, we see that she was able to become emotionally detached at one point. So we have her look at the faces of the dead in concentration camps and photograph them up close. When I interviewed Scherman, I said, “How does she do it? How is he standing there taking these pictures?’ And he said he was in a frozen rage.” Her experiences during the war contributed to what Penrose believes was PTSD. He says Miller wasn’t much of a mother. Prone to alcohol abuse, like many injured people, he could fly into a rage, and there was a distance between them. Miller had seen babies die in the Vienna hospital because of a lack of drugs sold on the black market – and she kept her son at arm’s length, even though she was very worried about his safety. I have a feeling it must have hurt deeply, especially since Miller could be so warm to others. However, Penrose is magnanimous, having devoted much of his life to establishing her legacy as an artist and acting as director of the Lee Miller Archives and Penrose Collection, at his parents’ former home, Farley House in Sussex, where Picasso stayed in his second visit. In the UK in 1950. They have also hosted, over the years, Man Ray, Miró, Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. There is a wonderful photo in the show of the young Penrose sitting on Picasso’s knee, a look of happy complicity between them. It was on this visit that Picasso took a shine to the couple’s Ayrshire bull, William, inspiring the 1950 Grasshopper Bulls prints, which had never been shown in the UK. “I know there were implications that there was a sexual aspect to his relationship with her,” says Maya Binkin, artistic director at Newlands House. “But I don’t think it matters. He respected her greatly, enjoyed her company and valued her friendship.” When I ask how she feels about female artists constantly being treated in terms of their relationship to men, she’s candid about using Miller’s friendship with Picasso as a way to bring new audiences to her work – but also says you can hardly separate them . Miller took nearly 1,000 photographs of the artist over 40 years. Inspiration… Picasso’s Grasshopper Bulls were created after taking a shine to Miller and Penrose’s Ayrshire bull, William. Photo: © Lee Miller Archives, England 2022. All rights reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk © Succession Picasso/DACS 2022 “Their relationship was great,” adds Binkin. “He captures some wonderful images of Picasso at work and at play, but also at home and at leisure, which in his later years was more difficult because he was very, very camera-conscious. He knew the importance of having his picture taken. He has access to Picasso when he’s not acting on camera.” The #MeToo movement, Binkin notes, was not kind to Picasso. “I personally don’t think we can judge him as harshly as some have,” he says. Penrose agrees. Although she sees feminist criticism as justified in its own way, she points out that the man Picasso was a complex character. “Of course, there were times when maybe he didn’t treat women well. But I don’t think it’s right to judge at this point. It’s so easy to get caught up in all the bad things he did and forget that he had this incredible humanity and kindness. It’s very convenient for some people to forget that because they think it weakens their case to make him a monster.” As for his mother, he adds: “It was a deep love. He always said that things were much better when Lee was there. He seemed to cherish her. And he would be calmer when he was around.” Miller would later call herself, perhaps sardonically, “Picasso’s widow.” She had to fight all her life to carve out a space for herself. “At first in Paris,” says Penrose, “she was only too happy to allow her photographs to be published under Man Ray’s name. She said, “We were so close, it was like we were the same person, so it didn’t matter.” That’s when it started to matter.” But when it came time for Picasso, Miller was anything but bitter, and her work now speaks for itself. Getting to this place, says Penrose, “was uphill all the way. But in the end we won.”
