Displaying items by tag: Lee Miller

The unique relationship between Pablo Picasso and the iconic photographer Lee Miller is explored in a stunning new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery this summer. This fascinating relationship, between the greatest artist of the twentieth century and the beautiful model, who became a skilled and highly influential photographer, spanned 36 years, from their first meeting in 1937 to Picasso’s death in 1973. 

Over the course of their friendship Miller photographed Picasso more than a thousand times, and the artist, in turn, created a remarkable series of portraits of Lee.

Man Ray Portraits opens today, February 7, 2013 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The first major Man Ray (1890-1976) exhibition to focus on his portraits, the show presents over 150 vintage prints and important works from international museums as well as private collections. A number of the photographs on view are on loan from the Man Ray Trust Archive. Taken between 1916 and 1968 in both Paris and the United States, many of the works have not been exhibited in the UK until now.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Man Ray spent most of his career in Paris. He made significant contributions to the Dada and Surrealist art movements and worked in a variety of media, but became best known for his avant-garde photography as well as his fashion and portrait work. Man Ray was keen on experimentation, which led to the production of camera-less Rayographs. With the help of fellow photographer, Lee Miller (1907-1977), who was also Man Ray’s muse and lover, he invented solarisation, a technique that involves recording an image on a negative or on a photographic print, reversing the image’s tone so that dark areas appear light and vice versa.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition features Man Ray’s portraits of artists, friends, celebrities, and lovers including Miller, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Kiki de Montparnasse (1901-1953), and Catherine Deneuve (b. 1943). Man Ray Portraits will be on view through May 27, 2013.  

Discovered by Condé Nast when he pulled her from the path of a truck barreling down a New York City street, the unpretentiously beautiful model Lee Miller gazed back at readers with sultry eyes from Vogue covers throughout the 1920s. She left the fashion world for France and an art apprenticeship in 1929, and in Paris, under the tutelage of modernist Man Ray, Miller was taken—both with photography and with her mentor. From 1929 to 1932 they worked in artistic and romantic symbiosis, with Miller frequently appearing as muse and subject of Ray’s work. “He rarely made very emotional pictures,” says Phillip Prodger, curator of “Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism,” opening Saturday at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. “His paintings were mostly like thought puzzles. But when he and Lee were working together, he opened up a little more. The pictures that he made of Lee—there’s one where she seems to be flying through space, and there’s one where she’s sleeping—are among the most touching he ever made.”