She was a model-turned-photographer whose unflinching eye captured the horror of the Nazis. But for too long, this extraordinary woman was defined as ‘Picasso’s muse’. As a new show puts this right, her son looks back
There’s a picture of the US photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller with Pablo Picasso, taken by her after the liberation of Paris in 1944. They are gazing into one another’s eyes with such intimacy that you feel you’re intruding on something deeply personal. Not romantic, exactly – although the way his hand grazes the back of her neck is certainly intimate – but profoundly loving, perhaps. With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that the image has been chosen to promote a new exhibition centred on Miller’s extraordinary life and the relationship between these two artists, which opens this week at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex.
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 in Rue des Grands-Augustins, hammered on the door. He opened it and nearly fell over backwards. And he hugged her and he kissed her and he hugged her, and then finally, when he stood back, he looked at her and he said, ‘It’s incredible. The first allied soldier I should see is a woman. She is you.’”
