editorial

Lee Miller, When the model became the artist

Originally printed in Compass, February 27, 2019.

Women and art have always had a bad relationship. No, let’s rephrase that. Art, as pulled from sewage of common life, singled out from history’s clutter, buffed, shined and hung for all to see as exemplary, yes, that kind of art, has rarely considered the work of women. As a 1989 screen print by the anonymous female artist collective Guerrilla Girls famously stated of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Less than 5% of artists in the Modern Arts Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”

By the time you read this, another Academy Awards night will have officially passed. And while there will have been plenty of women on screen — actresses wearing the designs of another, awarded for inhabiting the vision of another — there were, once again, no women who were nominated for Best Director, nor any Best Picture nominees directed by women. In the 91 years of the awards show, which traditionally nominates five directors every year, Oscar has only ever recognized five women for filmmaking.

So what does this have to do with Whitney Sharer’s debut novel, “The Age of Light?” Well, just about everything really. Told in flashback, Sharer chronicles a fictional account of the early life of Lee Miller, a real, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. born fashion model who became a war correspondent for Vogue during the London Blitz, and later in Nazi-occupied France, exposing readers flipping pages in the states to the barbarity of the concentration camps. 

But before that, Lee is a 22-year-old American girl in Paris, trying desperately to untangle herself from her image as an image, and hoping, against everything she has been told up until that point, that there is an artist inside her. In 1929, Sharer’s Miller, discontent to remain an ingenue of allure, has no plan as to how to achieve her own artistry. What she does have is an innate need to extract herself from her previous career in front of the lens, where men “raked her over with their eyes, barked commands at her from under camera hoods, reduced her to pieces of a girl: a neck to hold pears, a waist to show off a belt.” Even when she secures a kind of secretarial position with fashion and surrealist photographer Man Ray, she is torn between the dichotomy of wanting to be seen by him and having him look at her. 

The difference is all in the right kind of recognition. The conflict whirling inside her is whether she can earn his attention as his potential protege and obtain the foundational education she needs to properly use the Rolleiflex camera she’s only just beginning to understand, or if she’ll succumb to the obvious scenario. A beautiful young girl hanging around, and attracted to, a famous photographer must want to become a muse. But it’s a narrative Lee is determined to resist, even as she teasingly tells Man of her ability to will her expression into anything she can dream up, her “wild mind,” as she called it, crafting roles and scenarios that project onto her face like an extension of the photographer’s will. 

It’s not enough. Even as she falls recklessly in love with Man Ray, it’s not enough to play a part in someone else’s art when she could still potentially shape her own. Today, Lee Miller is perhaps best recognized for a photo intricately bound to her wartime work, but one she did not actually take. Even though she had the idea, as Sharer writes, and set the stage, she appears in the photo as well: an inscrutable expression on her face, both mocking and serene, as her naked shoulders peek out from bathing in Adolf Hitler’s private tub in his Munich apartment. 

But which is it: another female nude ready for the Modern Arts Section? Or the work of a woman who had finally used her image for her own design, coating it with meaning that captured a moment in history with a blend of horror and intimacy? Look at it long enough, and it’s not a picture of a woman at all, but a victoriously embarrassing portrait of Hitler, the day after his death — by the artist Lee Miller.