Surrealist Lee Miller

by Antony Penrose

A Surrealist before she even knew of the movement, Lee Miller was one of the most original photographic artists of the twentieth century. David E. Scherman, LIFE photographer and Miller’s close friend, described her as “caustically brilliant, yet totally loyal, unpretentious, human and intolerant of sham. She was a consummate artist and a consummate clown; at once an upstate New York hick and cosmopolitan grande dame; a cold, soignée fashion model and a hoyden. . . . She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman.”
 
The Surrealist eye informed everything Miller did, and her work presents the world in a way that encourages us to view it in a different manner. Written and collected by her son Antony, Surrealist Lee Miller amasses more than one hundred full-page images from throughout the artist’s life as an attestation to her wonderful way of seeing.

Genres: Art

158 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2020

About the author

Antony Penrose was born on 9 September 1947 in the London Clinic, central London. He is the son of Lee Miller, a model, fine art photographer and noted war correspondent, and Sir Roland Penrose, the surrealist artist, poet and biographer of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Man Ray, and Antoni Tàpies, who co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1947.