London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time, history time.
And we’re off.
She had been at Dachau that morning.
Keep that in mind.
Because by the end of the day Lee Miller was naked in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub.
There’s a photograph of it.
Munich. April 30th, 1945. Hitler’s private apartment. Lee Miller is sitting in his bath, washing herself. Beside her is a little framed photograph of Hitler. On the bathmat are Lee’s army boots.
And those boots have just come from Dachau.
They have carried the dirt of the concentration camp into Hitler’s immaculate home.
The photograph was taken by Lee’s fellow war correspondent David E. Scherman.
And here’s the final turn of the screw.
That same day, hundreds of miles away in Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself.
Now.
Who on earth was this woman?
Because Lee Miller’s journey to Hitler’s bathtub is one of the most extraordinary journeys of the 20th century.
And it begins not with war.
It begins with beauty.
So, yes, London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
And today we’re connecting with Elizabeth Lee Miller.
American.
Model.
Muse.
Surrealist.
Photographer.
War correspondent.
Witness.
And, eventually, gourmet cook.
Try fitting Lee Miller onto a business card.
She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907.
Her childhood contained something terrible. When she was seven years old she was raped. There were serious medical consequences. The psychological consequences almost certainly remained with her for the rest of her life.
She became rebellious. Daring. An extreme tomboy. She was expelled from school after school.
And then, in New York, came one of those chance encounters upon which whole lives turn.
Lee Miller met Condé Nast.
Yes, that Condé Nast.
The publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair.
He saw her.
And before long, everybody was seeing her.
Lee Miller became a fashion model.
And she was perfect for the 1920s.
Short blonde hair. Piercing blue eyes. Athletic. Modern. Beautiful.
The great photographers photographed her.
Edward Steichen.
Arnold Genthe.
Nickolas Muray.
But something interesting was happening on Lee Miller’s side of the camera.
She wasn’t just posing.
She was watching.
Learning.
The photographers were looking at Lee Miller.
Lee Miller was looking back.
And then came Kotex.
Sanitary towels.
Her photograph was used to advertise them.
Today you’d scarcely blink.
In 1929 it was scandalous.
Her modelling career was badly damaged.
So Lee Miller did what Lee Miller repeatedly did when life closed one door.
She kicked another one open.
She went to Paris.
And sought out Man Ray.
Man Ray was one of the most famous avant-garde photographers in the world.
Lee Miller became his model.
His pupil.
His collaborator.
And his lover.
But be careful with that word “muse”.
It can make a woman sound like furniture in a great man’s studio.
Lee Miller was no piece of furniture.
Together she and Man Ray experimented with solarization, that eerie photographic effect in which light and dark seem to reverse themselves and figures acquire glowing outlines.
And Lee became a serious photographer in her own right.
A Surrealist.
She even appeared in Jean Cocteau’s film Le sang d’un poète, The Blood of a Poet.
And then she left Man Ray.
Back to New York.
Her own photographic studio.
And in 1933 Vanity Fair named Lee Miller one of the seven most distinguished living photographers.
She was 26 years old.
Twenty-six.
And then, extraordinarily, she walked away from that life as well.
She married an Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved to Cairo.
At first she barely photographed.
Then the desert got hold of her.
She travelled enormous distances through Egypt, photographing rock formations, buildings, oasis villages.
More than 2,000 photographs.
And one in particular.
Portrait of Space.
You look through a torn fly screen, through the ragged hole, and beyond it is the Egyptian desert and an enormous sky.
Classic Lee Miller.
The world is already strange.
You just have to know where to look.
But Egypt couldn’t hold her.
In 1937 she returned to Paris.
And met Roland Penrose.
British painter. Surrealist.
They fell in love.
And suddenly we’re in another extraordinary Lee Miller scene.
The south of France.
Mougins.
Man Ray is there.
The poet Paul Éluard is there.
And Picasso is there.
Picasso becomes fascinated by Lee Miller.
He paints her.
Not once.
Four times.
Think of the trajectory here.
She has been photographed by Steichen.
Loved by Man Ray.
Painted by Picasso.
And she hasn’t even got to the extraordinary part of her life yet.
In 1939 she joined Roland Penrose in London.
Then came the war.
And London began to explode.
Lee Miller went to work for Vogue.
But when the bombs came down, she turned her camera away from fashion and onto the Blitz.
And the Surrealist eye was still there.
A huge collapsed barrage balloon becomes, in one photograph, the gigantic egg of a pair of geese.
A bombed chapel becomes a visual joke.
Destruction rearranges reality.
And Lee Miller notices.
Then comes D-Day.
She becomes an accredited American war correspondent.
And follows the American army into Europe.
Women correspondents were not supposed to go into combat.
Lee Miller went into combat.
At St Malo she photographed the fighting.
Then came the bitter winter fighting in the Vosges Mountains.
Then the advance into Germany.
And then the camera that had photographed fashion and Surrealist games had to look at something else.
The concentration camps.
Lee Miller witnessed the liberation of four of them.
At Buchenwald and Dachau she photographed what she found.
The dead.
The survivors.
The evidence.
The unimaginable made visible.
And Vogue published her pictures.
There’s something almost unbearable about that.
The same magazine world that had once turned Lee Miller into an object of beauty now carried Lee Miller’s photographs of what human beings had done to other human beings.
And on April 30th, 1945, Lee Miller and David Scherman went from Dachau to Munich.
To Hitler’s apartment.
Lee took off her clothes.
Put her filthy boots on Hitler’s bathmat.
And got into Hitler’s bath.
Scherman took the photograph.
It is funny.
Obscene.
Triumphant.
Disturbing.
Surreal.
It is Lee Miller’s entire life compressed into one photograph.
Beauty and horror.
The model and the photographer.
The woman who was looked at and the woman who had learned how to look.
And while she was sitting in Hitler’s bathtub, Hitler was spending the final hours of his life in his bunker in Berlin.
He killed himself that afternoon.
Lee Miller survived the war.
But in some ways, peace proved harder.
She returned to Britain a celebrated war correspondent.
A heroine.
But the world she had seen could not simply be unseen.
She became depressed.
She drank heavily.
And she was bitterly disappointed by what followed the war. She had hoped that out of all that destruction might come a better world, new forms of government, a new international unity.
Instead came the Cold War.
The hoped-for new world didn’t arrive.
In 1947 she married Roland Penrose.
Their son Antony was born a few months later.
And in 1949 they bought Farley Farm in Sussex.
And then Lee Miller did something extraordinary again.
She reinvented herself.
This time as a cook.
Not just somebody who cooked dinner.
A serious, imaginative, adventurous gourmet cook.
There is something deeply moving about it.
After photographing starvation and death, she became fascinated by feeding people.
After the destruction, creation.
After Dachau, dinner.
She more or less stopped working professionally as a photographer.
And when she died of cancer in 1977, aged 70, a great part of her extraordinary photographic life had slipped from public view.
Then came one last Lee Miller story.
Her son Antony discovered the archive.
Thousands upon thousands of negatives.
Prints.
Documents.
The evidence of the life his mother had scarcely talked about.
And gradually Lee Miller came back into focus.
The model was rediscovered as the photographer.
The muse as the artist.
The beautiful woman as the witness.
And Lee Miller’s story goes on.
On into the 21st century.
On, indeed, into the National Portrait Gallery.
The National Portrait Gallery is, after all, a gallery of the people who have made British history and culture. Tens of thousands of faces are represented in its collections.
And here, among them, is this extraordinary American from Poughkeepsie, New York.
Lee Miller.
She’s one of the people who figures in Adam’s new London Walks tour, Face the Music.
And what a wonderful idea for a walk it is.
Adam takes a collection of portraits ranging across the centuries and does something wonderfully original with them.
You meet the people.
You hear their stories.
But you also hear the music of their time.
The music in their lives.
The soundtrack, if you like, to the faces on the walls.
It’s irresistible.
And, as usual with Adam, the walkers come away with a splendid playlist.
That’s walking-tour curating at its best.
Portraiture, biography, history and music, brought together in one walk.
And – bears repeating – Lee Miller is there.
Which is particularly appropriate.
Because when you look at a portrait of Lee Miller, there’s a trap.
She was exceptionally beautiful.
Man Ray saw it.
Picasso saw it.
Condé Nast saw it.
The camera saw it.
But if that’s all we see, we make exactly the mistake her life teaches us not to make.
Lee Miller spent the first part of her life being looked at.
Her great achievement was learning to look back.
And eventually she looked at things most of us would have turned away from.
She looked.
She photographed.
She brought the pictures home.
And she made the rest of the world look too.
That’s Lee Miller.
Not just the woman in Hitler’s bathtub.
The woman who put the dirt of Dachau on Hitler’s bathmat.
And then turned the camera on us.
See you tomorrow.
And maybe see you with Lee Miller and Adam in the National Portrait Gallery come August 21st. That’s when Adam’s next Face the Music NPG tour comes into the viewfinder. And there’ll be a second bite at that very tasty cherry on October 10th. And a third on November 27th.
There, you’re primed.