Lee Miller and Man Ray, a love between art and jealousy

The Lee Miler told by the film directed by Ellen Kuras is the already established photographer, an “imperfect middle -aged woman” (as Kate Winslet said who impersonates her) sent by Vogue to document the destruction of the Second World War in Europe.

The portrait that comes out of it manages to represent anticonformism Of this woman and yet it conceals its breadth by choosing, deliberately, to leave the first part of Lee Miller’s life in the background, the one that had transformed her From model to photographer, Musa and at the same time creative of American Dadaism and surrealism. An intense and fertile phase, where the love story with Man raythen affirmed American artist and photographer, older than you are 17 years old.

They meet in Paris in 1929. At that moment Elizabeth “Lee” Miller is 22 years old, he has already posed for fashion services, noticed by Condé Nast, the founder and owner of great magazines that had saved her from being hit by a truck in Manhattan and who had remained dazzled by his beauty. Wavy blonde hair, penetrating gaze, in front of the goal has no deplets: her father was passionate about photography and used it as modelOften naked. That of 1929 was a return to Paris: there was already years earlier, to study lighting and costume design and get away from that American house where child had still faced the death of the mother and one rapeat just 7 years old, by a family friend who moreover had sent her the gonorrhea.

In Paris, therefore, he decided to return in 1929 because being a model is not his dream: “I prefer to take a photo of being a photo”said. He saw Man Ray’s works and would like to know more. The way to take Chiara appears to her during a trip to Italy: “It was spring, the beginning of the summer of 1929, and I was in Venice and I had just visited all of Italy looking at paintings – he remembered Miller in 1975 – it was then that I had that repulsion for classical art And all that stuff there…. So I took a train, I went to Paris and I knock on the Man Ray’s door…. I never turned back! ».

In Paris, on the Gauche Rive, in a place called “Le Bateau Ivre”, Lee Miller entered after having knocked unnecessarily on the door of Man Ray’s study. He has just known from the concierge who has left and will spend the summer outside the city. And instead he sees it, he approaches and presents himself: “I’m his new student”. Confused replies that he does not accept students and that he is still leaving for Biarritz. Lee surprises him with audacity: “Me too”. Thus began an artistic collaboration that soon becomes love.

Miller later told: “If Ray took his hand or touched you he felt an almost magnetic warmth.” In the following years, several times for him he returns to being a model and inspiring muse, but theirs is above all a creative union. Together, between prints and dark rooms, develop innovative techniques such as solarization. The mixture of art and love for a time is total. He wrote to her in 1931: «My beloved Lee, I will try to be everything you want me to be with you, because I realize that it is the only way to keep you. You are so young, beautiful and freeand I hate myself to try to repress all this in you ».

The freedom of Lee Miller, in fact, puts a strain on the beliefs about crazy and free love in vogue among the surrealists, who also in words man Ray says to share. Becomes more and more jealouseven on a professional level. In the end the plans, as always between them, confuse and the worst quarrels find the trigger for art. It happens once, for a photograph: the one that Man Ray takes her for the series Anatomies And that portrays her neck and head. The photographer, finding it uninteresting, throws it. Lee Miller recovers and develops it. It follows a furious dispute that ends with Miller who slams the door leaving the study. When he returns to you, he discovers that the image was hung on the wall, cut with a blade and colored in part by Poic -red ink from the gash, to simulate a deep wound.

Then when Man Ray discovers that she has a lover, the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey, first the plea not to leave him and then move on to the threats, boasting among the acquaintances who if he had pushed too much further he would not hesitate to use the gun. At that point, in 1932, Lee Miller decided to return to New York to open his own photo studio. He goes suddenly: Man Ray returns home one evening and finds her empty. A period of suffering begins for him, which this time also finds one artistic representation: revisit his famous work, Object to be destroyedfrom 1923 Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and adjust the weight according to the desired time. Continue to the limit of endurance. With a well -targeted hammer, try to destroy everything with a single blow ». The eye on the metronome arm is just taken from a photo of the beloved who left him.

Only in 1937 Lee Miller and Man Ray find themselves, again in Paris: she in the meantime married Aziz Eloui Bey, with whom she lived in Cairo. For all that time the desert was a favorite subject of his photos, but that life seems to have tired it. It is the right time to mend with Man Ray a relationship of sincere friendship that lasts until the end of their days.

He supports her in the period in which Miller gets sick of post -traumatic depressionafter his work in Europe destroyed by the war and the images taken in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau. He sends them letters and small gifts. One of the latest images portrays them together in 1975: Now elderly lee pushes a wheelchair on which Man Ray sits onfor the inauguration of an exhibition dedicated to him. When Man Ray died, in November 1976, Miller and his family are among the first to receive Juliet’s phone call, his second wife.

Just a few months later, in July 1977, Lee Miller also died.