Photographer, artist, muse and model, Lee Miller held a uniquely complex place in the avant-garde of the interwar years and beyond.

Arriving in Paris from New York in 1929, her association with the pioneering photographer Man Ray put her at the heart of the burgeoning Surrealist movement, which had been founded in 1924 by the writer André Breton, whose Surrealist Manifesto proclaimed his belief in the resolution of dream and reality “into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

Miller soon found success on her own, and her Surrealist eye informed everything she did, from fashion photography, to private artistic projects, to the photojournalism for Vogue that distinguished her war years.

A remarkably beautiful woman, who inspired as much art as she made, Miller’s place in a network of great artists and writers is all too easily reduced to that of friend, muse and lover, her portraits of Picasso, André Masson and Henry Moore, among many others, interpreted as a consequence of her relationships with Man Ray, and then painter and writer Roland Penrose, whom she would marry in 1947.


But a new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield places Miller at the very centre of the Surrealist movement, her influence on those around her as significant as the influences she absorbed. An active creative voice, she contributed ideas and exhibited in Surrealist exhibitions, and was instrumental in establishing the Surrealists as a cohesive and influential force in Britain.