Man Ray's Muse
CliffB
For years, Lee Miller was Man Ray's lover and muse. But what happened when
she decided to become a photographer herself? By Francine Prose
Friday September 19, 2003
The Guardian
As far as we know, the Greek muses never changed their looks or their minds
or reinvented themselves. Clio never switched from history to science, nor
did Melpomene abandon tragedy for something more upbeat. But as the notion
of the muse was displaced from the divine to the human, and as, over
centuries, women incrementally broadened their range, the lives of artists'
muses were also transformed, until it began to seem possible that a muse
could outgrow her sacred obligation to further the work of her artist and go
on to lead a more independent life. No longer were muses merely inspiring,
but inspired.
No one made this transition as dazzlingly as Lee Miller, the classic
American beauty who served as model and muse for a series of photographers,
beginning with her father and culminating with her lover of three years, Man
Ray.
She became one of the few muses to produce a body of first-rate work. Miller
not only succeeded as an art photographer and studio portraitist, but she
used her trained surrealist's eye in her work as a courageous second world
war photojournalist, reporting on the Normandy invasion, the brutal Alsace
campaign, and the liberation of Buchenwald. To track Miller's coverage of
the war is to watch a muse discover her muse in the violence and horror of
genocide and battle - and take an astonishing number of brilliant and
lamentably undervalued photographs, underrated in part because her beauty
and her legend competed with, and detracted from, the seriousness of her
accomplishment. What appears to have kept Miller from settling for a career
as a serial muse was a com- bination of personality - curiosity, a
near-pathological allergy to boredom and a lively sense of humour - and
talent.
Miller's career began with a fortuitous meeting in New York. Miller was
almost struck by a car while crossing Fifth Avenue, but was rescued at the
last moment by a quick-thinking gentleman who, as luck would have it, turned
out to be Condé Nast. Miller's potential was instantly obvious to the
magazine publisher, and she was soon employed at Vogue, modelling for Edward
Steichen and Arnold Genthe, who made her the icon of the moment, the perfect
New Woman. Steichen took the bold step of using her photo in an
advertisement for Kotex - the first such ad to employ the image of an actual
human being. Steichen and his employers turned out to have overestimated the
permissiveness of the times, and the ad caused a scandal, embarrassing even
the liberated Miller.
Miller's first meeting with Man Ray was far less a matter of coincidence. In
1929, she had shown up at Man Ray's favourite cafe in Paris, Le Bateau Ivre,
and announced she was his new student - so determined was she to apprentice
herself to the premier surrealist photographer. Man Ray's interest in Miller
was intense, bordering on an obsession with his model and muse that had
never been equalled in Miller's life - except by her father.
An engineer from Poughkeepsie, New York, Theodore Miller's passion was
photography, which he approached from a scientist's perspective. Early on,
he decided that his daughter was the perfect model, and he photographed her
often. At some point he began - and continued for years - taking
stereoscopic pictures of her, nude. Apparently, the only time she objected
was when Theodore proposed that her friends might want to join their
experiments.
The process by which the muse passed from father to lover was documented by
Man Ray himself in a series of dual portraits. In one of the best-known
photographs of Miller and her father, Man Ray's beautiful muse shuts her
luminous eyes and inclines her swan neck (two of many features that his
images of her would immortalise), curls up in Theodore Miller's lap and
pretends to snooze against his shoulder. Meanwhile, Lee was learning - not
only about sitting for photos, but about taking them. A committed
proselytiser for the religion of science, Theodore was only too glad to
instruct her in the technical aspects of their studio sessions. Miller
charmed Steichen and Genthe into disclosing the tricks of the trade.
By the time she apprenticed herself to Man Ray, Miller already knew so much
and proved such a quick study that she was soon promoted from student to
colleague. The couple collaborated on an elegant brochure for the Paris
electric company and on stylish society portraits, and advanced Man Ray's
efforts to shift photography from the realm of reportage to that of art.
Like many modern muses, Miller took control of her artist's diet - Lou
Andreas-Salome had Rilke dining on groats, Yoko Ono introduced John Lennon
to the joys of a strict macrobiotic regimen - prescribing a strict regime
advised by a Dr Hay, which prohibited the consumption of potatoes or starch
on the same day on which one ate fruit, or fruit on the same day one ate
meat.
During their three years together, Miller and Man Ray worked side by side in
the studio and the darkroom, and took extraordinary portraits of each other.
In Miller's 1929 Man Ray Shaving, the miracle of soap turns her lover's
profile into pure surrealism, a mystery and a joke. His hair, his eyes and
forehead are dark, while the lower half of his face is slathered in
mime-white shaving cream, transforming him into a high-contrast study in
black and white.
Man Ray's unquenchable aesthetic interest in his lover's body, the sheer
number and variety of his photos of her and the renown they rapidly achieved
led Time magazine to say that Miller "was widely celebrated for having the
most beautiful navel in Paris". Perhaps intuiting that navel was something
of a euphemism for other parts of his daughter's anatomy - in one famous Man
Ray photograph a bubble lightly brushes her nipple and a champagne glass
based on the shape of her breast had already been designed - Miller's father
wrote an angry letter to, and extracted an apology from, the editors of
Time.
In a 1975 interview with art historian and critic Mario Amaya, Miller tells
her version of how the solarisation process was discovered: "Something
crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I let out a yell and turned on
the light. Then I quickly realised that the film was totally exposed: there
in the development tank, ready to be taken out, were a dozen practically
fully developed negatives of a nude against a black background... Man Ray
grabbed them, put them in the hypo, and looked at them later... The
background and the image couldn't heal together, so there was a line left
which he called a 'solarisation'."
As Miller's confidence grew, she began to urge Man Ray to leave the portrait
business to her. He could stop wasting time on celebrity photographs and
concentrate on his first love, painting. Miller's account of her apparently
selfless offer conveys the practicality of a 24-year-old muse trying to
support herself without depending on the generosity of her artist.
Miller must have welcomed any sort of fallback plan. Jealously possessive,
Man Ray consistently failed to rise to the lofty high-mindedness of Miller's
insistence on maintaining complete sexual freedom. She was resolutely
unfaithful - by nature and on principle - and Man Ray responded to her
affairs with letters like this one written during her romance with Zizzi
Svirsky, a Russian emigré interior decorator: "I have loved you
terrifically, jealously: it has reduced every other passion in me, and to
compensate, I have tried to justify this love by giving you every chance in
my power to bring out everything interesting in you. The more you seemed
capable, the more my love was justified, and the less I regretted any lost
effort on my part... You met me halfway on every occasion - until this new
element appeared, which has given you the illusion that you are freeing
yourself from me... "
What is striking is Man Ray's description of the talented and resourceful
Miller as merely "capable". Eventually, his jealousy spilled over from the
erotic arena to the professional. He was enraged when his muse played a muse
in Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.
The tempestuous climate worsened drastically in 1931, when Miller fell in
love with an older man, a rich Egyptian named Aziz Eloui Bey. Aziz's wife
Nimet was a celebrated beauty who had modelled for Man Ray - and for Miller.
Not long after the start of Miller's affair with Aziz, Nimet committed
suicide. Man Ray threatened to do the same and took a picture of himself
holding a pistol, with a rope around his neck. Finally, at the end of 1932,
Miller - seeing no other way to unravel this snarled erotic imbroglio - left
Paris for New York, where she established her own portrait-photography
business with her brother Erik.
As it dawned on Man Ray that the unthinkable was occurring - that Miller was
leaving him for good - he was inspired to produce some of his best pieces.
And so Lee Miller's work as muse outlived the demise of their affair, thus
making her one of the many muses whose departure and absence motivated their
artists as much as, if not more than, their love and their physical
presence.
· This is an extract from The Lives of the Muses by Francine Prose, to be
published on September 22 by Aurum Press.