Scrubbing away the horror | Lee Miller at Tate Britain
Having missed the press view of the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain last month, I pitched up at the Pimlico gallery on a Tuesday lunchtime in mid-November. It was rammed, so much so that you often had to wait in turn to read a caption, or make a beeline for a picture when it became momentarily free. All this in a show of 230 photographs across eleven rooms, striving to trace a coherent trajectory through the many chapters of Miller’s very episodic career.
Lee Miller, David E. Scherman dressed for war, London, 1942. Lee Miller Archives. ©LeeMiller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
One picture was particularly Mona Lisa-mobbed. And no wonder. It was taken on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, and features Lee Miller scrubbing her back in Hitler’s bath, her muddy GI boots planted before the tub, having entered the Nazi dictator’s Munich flat on her US Army accreditation. It was taken by Life photographer David E Scherman with Miller’s Rolleiflex, though the composition is unmistakably hers.
Earlier the same day, Miller had documented the liberation of Dachau. In the same room you are confronted with images of the emaciated corpses of the prisoners, stacked with brutal indifference; stark portraits of starving inmates and beaten-up Nazi guards; a dead German soldier, floating in the Amper river. The bath photo brims with irreverent defiance, a triumphant metaphorical V-sign aimed at the late Nazi dictator, who is represented in a framed photo-within-the-photo, propped up on the tub’s rim. But, understanding the context of the image, it becomes imbued with horror. The mud on those boots is Dachau mud: having just witnessed the unthinkable, was Lee Miller attempting to scrub away that horror? If so, you learn from this remarkable show, she never succeeded.
Lee Miller, Untitled, Paris 1930. Lee Miller Archives. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
The exhibition retraces Miller’s extraordinary photographic career, its trajectory so savagely diverted by her WW2 experiences. Born in Poughkeepsie in New York State, Miller became a Vogue model at 19 years old, in the late 1920s. Itching to get the other side of the camera, she went to Paris to study photography, and hooked up with Man Ray, who became her sexual and artistic partner. She worked alongside Ray in the creation of ground-breaking photographic techniques, experimenting with solarisation and developing a surrealist eye, which never left her; he introduced her to his Modernist circle – Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró – who became lifelong friends. After a brief spell running her own studio in New York, having fallen in love with Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, she moved to Egypt, taking striking surrealist images of that country, for her own pleasure. In 1937, she returned to Paris, where she met and fell in love with Roland Penrose, the English surrealist painter. So far, so experimental; so far, so playful.
Lee Miller,Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London1941. Lee MillerArchives© Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved leemiller.co.uk.
When WW2 broke out, she moved into a London apartment with Penrose, becoming a home-front photographer for the UK edition of Vogue Magazine, progressing from austerity-driven fashion shoots to hard-hitting documentary photographs of the Blitz, still infused with her trademark surrealist twists: a fallen statue looks like a Picasso Cubist portrait; shattered shop mannequins lie like corpses in the rubble; a river of debris streams from a neo-classical doorway. In 1944 she wangled accreditation as a US Army war photographer, often in the thick of the action. The Dachau photographs signalled a shift in style: she couldn’t justify a playful twist to such appalling sights. That didn’t stop her composing intelligent shots: witness the corpse of a prisoner on the floor of a cattle truck, taken from inside the carriage, with two grim-faced GIs standing outside, speaking for us all. This more sombre, documentary style was maintained after Germany’s surrender, when she toured the war-torn shells of Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Romania, chronicling the continuing horror in the aftermath of the conflict.
In 1947, she finally returned to England, retiring to a farmhouse in Sussex, where she photographed visiting artist friends for Vogue, resuming her surrealist twists: Saul Steinberg crafts a sculpture from a hose; Henry Moore hugs one of his own creations. These photos were published until 1957, when, tormented by PTSD, addicted to alcohol, and tired of her art, she hung up her Rolleiflex, dedicating her life, with critical success, to avant-garde cookery. By the time she died, in 1977, she was all but forgotten as an artist, until her son discovered boxes containing around 60,000 negatives of her photos in the attic of their Sussex home. Day by day, photo by photo, exhibition by exhibition, he not only resurrected her reputation: he has made her significantly more famous and respected than she ever was in her own lifetime.
Lee Miller, Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa, 1937. Lee Miller Archives. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.
This massive exhibition represents the culmination of those efforts, with the curators dedicating each of its eleven rooms, chronologically, to a different episode of Lee Miller’s life and career. In doing so, inevitably perhaps within this structure, it overly lingers on certain episodes, rather scooting through others. I wonder, for example, whether the same space should have been given to her Egyptian hiatus, as to her extensive travels documenting ravaged post-war central Europe. But that’s a quibble: here is a show that dispels any notion of Lee Miller being a photographer unable to settle on a signature style, flitting from one photographic genre to another. Instead, it portrays a dynamic artist, constantly reinventing herself in extraordinary circumstances, while maintaining a singularity of vision, documenting her world through an often playful, always astute lens. All of which is summed up in that picture of her, staring into her own Rolleiflex, in Hitler’s bath.
Of course, Lee Miller being Lee Miller, many of the visitors will already be aware of the story of her life, and particularly her war years, portrayed in the recent movie Lee, starring Kate Winslet in the title role. In a recent interview for ROSA Magazine with her son Antony Penrose, I posed the question ‘have we reached peak Lee Miller?’ ‘No’, he replied, of course: there are always new cities to take her work to, always new angles to explore, always newly developed photos to display. There’s even been talk, he revealed, of a Netflix-type series about her life. Now there’s a great idea. For now, we’ve got this fine exhibition-of-many-moods, which will introduce some viewers to the work of one of the great twentieth-century artists, while offering plenty of fresh images and insights to her most dedicated aficionados.
Lee Miller runs at Tate Britain until February 15.