The Roving Eye.('The Art of Lee Miller')(Book review)

The American model and photographer Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, a century ago, but spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East. Last September, a retrospective of her work in front of and behind a camera, "The Art of Lee Miller," curated by Mark Haworth-Booth, opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. (It travels to the Philadelphia Museum of Art this month.) In his introduction to the show's companion volume (Yale; $60), Haworth-Booth describes Miller as an artist of "the first electric century," and he invokes the metaphor of electricity--its power to attract, repel, shock, and illuminate--in making a case for her significance.

Miller's power, however, generated an uneven legacy notably indebted to her lover Man Ray, to her mentor Edward Steichen, and to Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, Brassai, and Paul Strand. Her audacious sexual history has colored perceptions of her art, as has her enshrinement by the fashion world. She traded on her exceptional beauty while it lasted, but she also struggled for respect, and for something more elusive: self-respect. The formal tension in her work is a play between veiling and exposure, glamour and brutality. It carries an erotic charge even when the subject isn't erotic.

On my way to the London preview, I stopped to ponder a startling image of Miller in a show of military and couture camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. The French were the first, in 1915, to experiment with "disruptive patterns" of light, shade, and color hand-painted on uniforms and artillery--a technique indebted to Cubism. In 1940, the rich and eccentric British Surrealist Roland Penrose decided that he could best contribute to his country's defense by recruiting artists for a camouflage unit, and lecturing on their research to the Home Guard. The unit had been testing an ointment developed to hide skin from a rifle scope, or at least to disguise it, and on a summer day, in a friend's garden, Penrose asked Miller, his mistress (they married a few years later, to legitimatize their only child, Antony), to play the guinea pig.

Miller was in her mid-thirties. She had been covering the blitz for British Vogue, and, after the Normandy invasion, she would help to document the liberation of Europe as one of an elite company of women (Margaret Bourke-White, Marguerite Higgins, Mary Welsh, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Martha Gelhorn, among others) accredited as war correspondents. That afternoon, she gamely stripped for the assembled house party, smeared the dull, greenish paste over her body, and stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting. In the course of the demonstration, her groin was covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds--a trompe-l'oeil pubis--and one of her nipples snagged in the net. As a finishing touch, the severed heads of two blood-red lilies were placed between her breasts like a funerary offering. The couple's friend (and partner in a menage a trois) the American photojournalist Dave Scherman captured the scene, and Penrose used the image in slide shows--no doubt to great effect with the guardsmen.

The earliest known nude study of Lee Miller, who was christened Elizabeth, was made by her father, Theodore, an engineer whose hobby was photography. He titled the picture "December Morn," even though it was taken in April of 1915, two weeks before Elizabeth's eighth birthday. Poughkeepsie had been blanketed by a spring snowfall, and the shivering little girl is posed outside the family house wearing nothing but bedroom slippers. A year before, as Carolyn Burke observes in a fine biography, "Lee Miller: A Life" (2006), the likeness of a fleshier maiden--"September Morn," by the French painter Paul Chabas--had provoked a storm of outrage and titillation when it was displayed in the window of a Manhattan gallery. The public rallied to one side or the other, and Theodore, a health faddist, evidently took the liberal view. He had persuaded Lee's mother, Florence MacDonald, a Canadian nurse from a respectable family, to pose nude for him before they were married, and if he later philandered with impunity she considered divorcing him to marry a lover. They kept up appearances, but something in the household was seriously peculiar. Lee became a promiscuous hellion; her older brother, John, was a cross-dresser; Florence attempted suicide; Theodore continued taking nude pictures of his daughter, often with a stereoscopic camera, well into her twenties. He also talked her girlfriends out of their clothes and into posing for group portraits, though when other people's naked children were involved Florence chaperoned the sittings.

None of those "art studies," or none that survive, cross the line into obscenity, and the family seems to have been unperturbed by them. They did, however, bury a painful secret that Antony Penrose revealed in "The Lives of Lee Miller" (1985), an illustrated biography of his mother. At the age of seven, Elizabeth had been raped, ostensibly by a family friend (all attempts to verify his identity, Penrose told me, "have drawn a blank"), and infected with gonorrhea. Venereal diseases were still incurable, so she was treated at a hospital and by her mother with disinfectant "irrigations." The Millers also consulted a psychiatrist, Penrose said, who counselled them to tell Elizabeth that sex was merely a mechanical act, and not the same thing as love, so the damage wasn't permanent. But the damage to a violated child, even one as resilient as Miller, is permanent in incalculable ways.

Given the timing, the kindest interpretation of "December Morn" is that it represents a form of shock therapy--physical immodesty as a cure for shame. Whatever it was, Miller's story suggests that beauty can also be a form of camouflage, one that successfully deceives the beholder without offering much protection to the wearer. Her art was always improvised on the run, escaping from or to a man or a place, and she described her life as "a water soaked jig-saw puzzle, drunken bits that don't match in shape or design." The memory of a trauma is often fractured in the same fashion by that most devious of camouflagers the unconscious. Few artists achieve lasting renown without a body of work that is cumulative in its power, and Miller wasn't capable of sustained ambition. But her finest pictures--the semi-abstract desert landscapes; the poetic rubble of wartime London; the graphs of desolation from the battlefront; the sculptural female torsos, which were considered shockingly "phallic"--tantalize you, as they tantalized those who championed her career, with the promise of what she might have achieved.