Man Ray and Lee Miller
« back to All BlogsBy Debbie Hagan
A few weeks ago, I sat next to Lee Miller's son, Anthony Penrose, at a press opening at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Of course, Miller is one of the key subjects in an incredible love story/exhibit Man Ray-Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism up now at the museum until December 4. Man Ray was obsessed with his young muse—a beautiful model, who gave up that career to pursue art alongside her mentor, Ray. They lived together in Paris from 1929 to 1932 and produced some of the most powerful work in their careers--work that helped shape modern art. However, theirs was an intense, yet tumultuous relationship, and as the exhibit shows, Ray wanted to control Miller, evidenced in the images with her head in a jar, her lips spanning an entire wall, floating above the horizon, her eye set on a metronome.
Observatory Time--The Lovers, Man Ray, c.1931
Man Ray named this latter piece Indestructible Object (one of his "ready mades"). The title portends the course of their relationship, volatile, but evolving into a friendship that would last a lifetime. According to Penrose, Man Ray made several of the metronomes (like the one in the exhibit), and the one on display used to sit on the mantle of his childhood home. He and his siblings played with it, thinking it was a toy.
Indestructible Object, Man Ray (originally made 1928, destroyed Paris 1957, replica 1959)
Many of the works in this show came from Penrose's personal collection. He said that after World War II, Miller boxed up most of her work and placed it in the attic, and for years no one realized it was even there. Miller served as a photographer during World War II and was there when Allies released prisoners from concentration camps. She suffered PTSD for many years and stored her own work so she did not have to look back.
Thus, opening these boxes revealed much about Miller's early career and her tumultuous time with Man Ray, including a poignant letter from Ray (on exhibit), in his latter years, telling Miller that he still loved her.
Carl Belz, director and curator of the Rose Museum for twenty-four years and former managing editor of Art New England, wrote in a recent internet posting, about working on his Ph.D thesis on Man Ray and meeting him in Paris.
... [it] meant going to Paris for a month, visiting with Man Ray at his studio three or four times a week, seeing work both old and new, talking at length with him about his art and artistic thought, collecting and notating images of paintings, drawings and objects provided by the Man himself and, for much of the rest of the time, making copious notes for future reference. Throughout the process, Man Ray was fully and wonderfully accommodating. Along with all of the above, he sort of took me under his personal wing, loaning me old exhibition announcements and brochures to study, occasionally inviting me to accompany him on errands around town—we ran into Yves Klein one morning—taking me to lunch a few times and, shortly before I was scheduled to return home, showing me a little snapshot that I was unaware he’d taken in which I could be seen sitting on a couch in his studio, surrounded by objects of his making, among them the memorably cosmic painting of a woman’s lips called “Observatory Time, The Lovers” and, nearby, his early mobile comprised of readymade coat hangers called “Obstruction.” I naturally coveted the photograph to document my experience but, unable to summon the audacity to ask for it, I was fully content to return home with its memory—along with what I felt were the makings of a doctoral dissertation.
Read the entire blog post, with a stunning photograph of Belz, taken by Man Ray, at Left Bank Art Blog.
This exhibit features seventy-six works by not only Miller and Ray, but from other significant players in surrealism, including Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Max Ernest, Alexander Calder, and Le Corbusier. The exhibit will be up at the Peabody Essex Museum through December 4, 2011. Watch for a feature story about this show, written by David Raymond, in Art New England's November/December issue.
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