Pablo Picasso was the most influential visual artist of the twentieth century. He is also the most recognisable, having been widely photographed. His famed stripy shirt, thick eyebrows and steady stare, his playful antics, and his hand gripping a long paintbrush poised over a canvas, have all been documented by photographers as diverse as Lee Miller, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Edward Quinn, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Lucien Clergue, Michel Sima and Arnold Newman. The resulting body of photographs and films, filled with fact, invention and myth, is vital to an understanding of Picasso’s achievements across his entire artistic output. As Picasso said: “I want to leave as complete a record as possible for posterity.”[1] He recognised the importance of the camera.

As his fame and fortune grew, so too did the demand for his time and attention. He became more selective about whom he allowed into his studio, and visitors were controlled closely by his then wife, Jacqueline. He also controlled how his image was presented to the public and would be careful with the way he was depicted. As his biographer John Richardson notes: “To his old friends and young ones like myself – above all if he saw that they understood his work and made no demands – he was infinitely affectionate and generous.”[2] Anyone who acted otherwise was denied entrance.

It is for this reason that the archive of Lee Miller’s photographs of Picasso is important. The friendship that they built throughout their lives, coupled with Miller’s intelligence and sensibility as an artist, meant that she was in a unique position not just to be granted access to his studio in later life, but also to photograph him off-guard, in more relaxed moments, or working intensely in his studio. The aspects of his personality captured in her images are second to none and reveal much about the artist, as well as the photographer.

Miller first met Picasso in the south of France in 1937, where she was visiting with her soon-to-be second husband, Roland Penrose. Picasso was staying at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon in Mougins. He was with a group of fellow Surrealist artists including his lover, photographer Dora Maar, with whom he was spending the summer. Photographer Man Ray and his partner, artist’s model Ady Fidelin, Surrealist artist and performer Nusch Éluard and her poet husband, Paul Éluard, were also in the group. Picasso was immediately attracted to Miller and painted her six times. In return, Miller photographed the artist, beginning a series that continued for forty years and eventually numbered more than a thousand images. Though there is some speculation about the nature of their relationship – whether it was purely friendly or had a physical element to it – it is clear that Picasso held her in high regard.

Picasso’s turbulent relationships with his wives have been much documented as part of the Picasso legend, but what is less known is that when Picasso left Spain in his youth, his aim was in fact to move to London, rather than Paris where he finally settled. His choice of destination was based on a few factors: his interest in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, his Anglophile father’s appreciation for English furniture which would have cultivated Picasso’s admiration for the country from a young age, and his fascination with the legend of the intrepid traveller and British aristocrat Lady Hester Stanhope. As Roland Penrose writes in his biography of Picasso, Stanhope was “a woman of a type so different from any he had ever met, a woman who had conquered her own liberty and also the hearts of men, that he decided he must investigate the country which fostered women of this admirable breed”.[3] Picasso would have found similar qualities in Lee Miller who, by all accounts, led an extraordinary life.

For her part, Miller felt she had found her place in Mougins among these free-thinking modernists who advocated intellectual and sexual freedom for men and women alike. Miller had already established her reputation as a Surrealist photographer and was welcomed into the group as one of their own. She was one of the most daring and talented female photographers of the time. Her hard work, brilliance and determination meant that she also lived her life by her own rules. Picasso would be one of many who would come to admire Miller, but one of the few who would be a close friend to the end of their days.  

Elizabeth “Lee” Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Theodore and Florence Miller. From an early age, photography had a presence in her life. Her father was an amateur photographer and often photographed Miller including, controversially, nude images of her during her adolescence. She suffered tragedy early in life at the age of fifteen, when her first love died in front of her in a boating accident. Restless for big city life, Miller moved to Manhattan and in 1927, at the age of twenty, was nearly run over by a car but was plucked out of harm’s way by publishing giant Condé Nast himself.

Struck by her beauty, Nast was quick to hire her as a model, and Georges Lepape's illustration of Miller appeared on the cover of Vogue a few weeks later. Her face came to define a generation, with a classical beauty that would typify the 1920s. She became a fixture on the New York social scene, hobnobbing with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin and the Vanderbilts. Fashion greats such as photographer Edward Steichen lined up to photograph her. She was fêted and pursued by suitors. A glassware manufacturer even moulded a champagne coupe in the shape of her breast. Exciting though it must have been for her, Miller found that the life of a model lacked the intellectual stimulation she craved. It is suggested that it was at this time that Steichen advised her that she might seek out Man Ray in Paris and become his student, though it is unclear if this is how the idea came to her.

Miller’s modelling career was cut short in 1928 after an image of her by Steichen was used for a Kotex advert without her permission or knowledge. It was the first advert for feminine products and, after it was published across America, no one wanted to work with the “Kotex girl”. Difficult as it might have been, this incident seems to have been the excuse Miller was looking for to escape her situation. She shrugged off the betrayal and left for Paris, where she sought out the great master of photography, Man Ray.

When she arrived at his studio in 1929, Lee discovered that Man Ray had just left for a month’s holiday, but she managed to catch him in the coffee shop next door and insisted that she should accompany him on the trip so that she could convince him to take her on as an assistant, which of course he did. Moreover, he fell in love with Miller, and a tempestuous romantic relationship ensued. Though attributed to Man Ray, it was in this period that both Miller and Ray developed the solarisation technique, where film is exposed during processing, creating a halo effect around the objects. With Ray, Miller perfected her photography techniques and developed her own artistic practice as a Surrealist photographer, being drawn to the ambiguous and radical free-thinking possibilities of the style.

In 1932 Miller returned to New York, leaving Man Ray. Though he advocated the Surrealist philosophy of open relationships, Ray had been unhappy with Miller having multiple lovers and grew increasingly jealous. Miller opened her own photographic studio, initially funded with share certificates that she issued to raise the capital. The studio quickly became the place to be photographed for New York’s high society. After she met Aziz Eloui Bey, whom she married in 1934, she abruptly closed her studio, leaving success and society behind her, and moved to Cairo. 

Her time in Egypt was formative for her Surrealist photography and resulted in some enchanting images of desert life. However, she was pining for Paris and adventure, and started embarking on trips around Egypt deep into the desert, exploring the cultures of the nomadic people living there. She also travelled into Europe and further afield, including Paris where, in 1937, she met Roland Penrose, with whom she visited the south of France to meet Picasso for the first time.  

The images taken in the south of France by Miller show scenes of carefree frivolity in which she demonstrates her outstanding technical abilities. However, 1937 was a year of great tension with the looming threat of war. It was the year that Picasso produced the political set of prints and prose poem The Dream and Lie of Franco, and the year he painted Guernica in protest at Hitler’s German air force which, acting in support of the Spanish Generalísimo Francisco Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, killing or wounding a third of the town’s population. The Dream and Lie of Franco is significant as it was Picasso's first overtly political work. The etchings satirise Franco’s claim to represent and defend conservative Spanish culture and values by showing him as a monstrous figure in various absurd guises destroying Spain and its culture, while the accompanying poem denounces "evil-omened polyps". The individual images were originally intended to be published as postcards to raise funds for the Spanish Republican government and were sold at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.

It was the dawn of a new reality in Europe, one fraught with war, death and hardship. That Miller and Picasso experienced the war, each in their own very different circumstances, and resumed their friendship afterwards, means that we can track their lives through these troubling times.

In 1939, Miller was living in London and offered to work for Vogue as a photographer, though found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on fashion assignments when the urgency of the war was calling her to Europe. In 1944, she was tipped off that, as an American, she could join the US Army as a reporter from the field. She was one of only four female photographers accredited as official war correspondents with the US armed forces. In August 1944, she arrived in Paris where she set out to find some of her old friends. On the day of the liberation of Paris, she entered Picasso’s studio who warmly exclaimed: “This is marvellous, this is the first Allied soldier I have seen, and it’s you!” The images Miller took during this meeting reflect a distinctly different atmosphere from their previous encounter, though they retain their intimacy.

Picasso had chosen to stay in Paris during the Second World War. The deprivation and tension were extreme in the city and many people faced persecution for their religion, race, sexuality or disability. Picasso’s art did not comply with Nazi ideals, and he was labelled by Hitler as a “degenerate” artist. For the sake of his own safety and due to a lack of opportunity, he did not exhibit at the time, although he was still harassed by the Nazis. There is a famous story of a Gestapo officer who barged into Picasso’s apartment and pointed at a photograph of Guernica, asking: “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did”, his wit fizzing with the same anger that animates the piece. However, his studio on Rue des Grands Augustins was a refuge for the artist, who continued to create tirelessly. His joy at seeing Miller on the day of the city’s liberation is palpable in her portrait of them in an embrace.

Some of those who had stayed in Paris, including Nusch and Paul Éluard, fought hard for peace by working with the French Resistance. Nusche’s skeletal appearance disturbed Miller when they were reunited. The years of war had taken their toll and she died, aged forty, in 1946, collapsing in the street after suffering a massive stroke.

As a war correspondent, Miller carved a reputation for herself of fearless excellence. She was often the first to arrive at battle sites, beating all other war correspondents and getting the “scoop” for Vogue. In 1944, a failure in military communications found Miller at the heavily besieged St Malo, where she witnessed the American assault on the German-held port. Women war correspondents were typically prohibited from the front line, making Miller's presence as the only photojournalist – male or female – at St Malo during the assault even more remarkable. But Miller did not have authorisation to be in St Malo and had broken the terms of her accreditation. When she was discovered by Allied commanders, she was placed under temporary arrest and later barred from the front line.

Miller excelled as a war photographer but she also discovered a talent for writing during this time, and her work as a correspondent was a new outlet for her creativity. Her journalism was sharp and descriptive, capturing the public’s imagination and unexpectedly propelling Vogue into “serious journalism”. Audrey Withers, the editor of British Vogue at the time, had to edit the paper in accordance with what was being filed by Miller. “No one expected Vogue to have one of the greatest war correspondents during the Second World War, not least Withers, who was a big supporter of Miller,” explains British Vogue archivist and editor Robin Muir. “Miller helped make Vogue important. In a way, she was leading Vogue alone.”[4]

Miller accompanied the Allied forces as they advanced into Germany in early 1945 and discovered the extent of the Nazi atrocities at Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Miller's photographs of the camps are some of her most powerful, and the scenes she witnessed there marked her deeply for the rest of her life. Her professionalism was noted by the accompanying photographer, David E. Scherman. Her compulsion to document and expose the truth dictated her composure, and her cold rage rings through the photographs she took of the guards, both dead and alive. Determined to create a record to show the world, she photographed the horrors of the camps and cabled the pictures to American Vogue,which took the theme of her message as the title for her article, “Believe It!”, which was published in July 1945 and rocked the world.

Perhaps one of the most famous, if not the most notorious, of Miller’s images is a photograph devised by Miller and Scherman, of Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. In the modest-looking bathroom, a framed photograph of Hitler is balanced on the edge of the bath. Miller had arrived at the flat with Scherman a few hours after they had left Dachau. They had been on the move for over three weeks, reporting from concentration camps, hospitals and the front line, witnessing the worst of the depravity of the Second World War. When asked about the photograph, her son Antony said: “I think she was sticking two fingers up at Hitler. On the floor are her boots, covered with the filth of Dachau, which she has trodden all over Hitler’s bathroom floor. She is saying she is the victor.”[5] After the war, Miller put all her negatives and letters into the attic of her house in West Sussex and never spoke again about her time as a war correspondent. Her article also marked the last time Vogue would publish war-combat photography.  

Miller continued travelling around Europe after the end of the war, witnessing the suffering of the war-torn continent. Unable to return to a normal life, it took much coaxing by Roland Penrose to convince her to come back to England. She found it increasingly hard to write and, though undiagnosed, it is possible that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1947, when she finally returned to England, Miller divorced Aziz Eloui Bey and married Penrose, after discovering she was pregnant with their son, Antony. In 1949 Miller and Picasso were reunited in France, and the images that Miller takes of Picasso during this time are more subdued and focused on Picasso and Miller’s family.

Picasso’s hardened resolve to campaign for peace, having witnessed two world wars and a revolution in his home country, resulted in him joining the Communist Party in 1944. This led to his second and last visit to the UK in 1950, when he visited Miller and Penrose at their family home, Farley House in West Sussex. Picasso had been invited to attend as a delegate at a proposed world peace congress in Sheffield, a thinly veiled Communist conference which was of concern to the British government. Of around 260 foreign peace delegates confirmed to appear at the conference, only Picasso was granted an entry visa by the government. This was done to undermine the event, and the congress was forced to relocate to Warsaw. As a result, Picasso spent his time in Sussex playing with the three-year-old Antony, with whom he had a strong bond, and walking in the countryside. The images taken of Picasso from this time are the few rare shots in which he is depicted away from his studio and his work, in moments of relaxation with friends and family. Dressed in cap and boots, he can be seen on country walks and attending to the family bull, William, whom he later drew for a print that was used in the 1950s for a fundraising campaign for the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in the Mall, London.

Miller and Penrose had bought Farley House in 1949, which was their home for the rest of their lives. They often hosted dinner parties, where their many guests included Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Eileen Agar, Kenneth Armitage, William Turnbull, John Craxton and Richard Hamilton. The couple filled the house with a collection of Surrealist art and objects which lined the colourful vibrant walls.

Though Miller retained her dry sense of humour and legendary hosting abilities, her sunny disposition had notably disappeared. The smiling beauty Picasso had painted almost twenty years earlier, bathed in yellow and light, had all but vanished. After the war and following the birth of her son, Miller entered a turbulent time, suffering from bouts of depression and struggling with alcoholism. When asked about her wartime work, she claimed she did nothing of importance and changed the subject. Miller just wanted to forget.

Roland Penrose increasingly spent his time curating exhibitions and working for the ICA, which he had co-founded in 1947. His reputation as an art historian and curator was gaining momentum. Miller’s final contribution to Vogue was in 1953, with a humorous photo-essay titled “Working Guests”. She no longer occupied centre stage, a position which it was hard for this entrepreneurial and talented woman to concede. In addition, she was rapidly losing her looks and figure, accelerated by her toxic habits. Her relationship with her son was difficult, as he explains: “There were times when I just knew it was a bad idea to be around her – she could be verbally cruel. She didn’t have to hit anyone. She could do all the damage she wanted with words.”[6] The family housekeeper, Patsy Murray, became part of the family and raised Antony, acting as a de facto mother.

Showing incredible resilience of spirit and stubborn determination, Miller found solace in the kitchen and excelled at yet another talent, as a gourmet chef. Applying creativity and Surrealist flare, Miller expended her nervous energy over the kitchen stove, which she had designed and built to her own specifications. She bought whatever new cooking gadget was available in the shops and studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris to further refine her technique. This suited her personality well because, unlike writing, cooking had a social aspect to it which prevented Miller from isolating herself. She amassed a cookbook collection of over 2,000 volumes, which took up so much space that Penrose built an extension on to the house for her that served as her office. Her recipes were inventive, often inspired by her extensive travels, and were published in magazines such as House and Garden and her old familiar haunt, Vogue. They reflected her humour and political opinions, and she experimented with the idea of food as protest to the objectification of women’s bodies. She won several cooking competitions, including the first, second and third prizes of the Norwegian open-sandwich award. Cooking had become another expression of her genius. A book of her recipes was published in 2021 by her granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane.

In 1966 Roland Penrose received a knighthood for his work in promoting the arts. As well as co-founding the ICA, he worked on various seminal exhibitions, bringing Modern art to the UK public. Though Picasso had already exerted a fundamental influence on various artists working in the UK, it was not until the 1960s that he began to gain public and institutional recognition. A comment in a speech by Sir Alfred Munnings, the President of the Royal Academy of Arts, which was broadcast to the nation in 1947 over the BBC, reflects how Picasso and Modernism were received the UK at the time. In his speech, Munnings denounces Modern art, specifically Picasso, as a fraud. “Not long ago,” he said to an approving audience, “Mr Churchill and I were walking together. Mr Churchill said to me, ‘Alfred, if we saw Picasso coming down this street towards us, would you join me in kicking him hard up his so-and-so?’ I said, ‘By God, Winston, I would!’”[7] Though Churchill would later deny the exchange ever taking place, the anecdote demonstrates the general consensus of disapproval.

Operating in opposition to the views of the Establishment, Penrose worked closely with Picasso on various exhibitions in the UK, including the highly acclaimed show for the Tate Gallery in 1960, two years after his biography on Picasso was published. The show proved to be extremely popular and suffered none of the negative reception of previous Picasso exhibitions. The critics hailed it a success and it was visited by famous figures, including the Queen Mother. The queues to enter the galleries spelt financial success for the Tate, with the show attracting over half a million visitors. Inevitably, the press declared the UK was living through Picasso-mania. At long last, Modernism had truly arrived.

The increased engagement between Penrose and Picasso resulted in Penrose taking numerous trips to visit Picasso and his studio near Cannes in the south of France. Miller joined Penrose on some of the visits, and her images manage to capture the intensity of the men’s work together, but also the good-humoured levity for which Picasso was famed. Picasso trusted and valued Miller, allowing her time and again into his inner sanctum to photograph him in his studio.

In 1977, Lee Miller died at home, followed by Penrose seven years later, on 23 April 1984, Miller’s birthday. Overshadowed in the UK by her husband’s success, and keeping her past a close secret, her name would have become but a footnote had it not been for her son, Antony. On the birth of their daughter, Antony’s wife climbed into the family attic in search of family photographs to see if she could discern any family likenesses with the new-born baby. What she and Antony discovered was a hoard of old negatives and correspondence, with which Antony was able to piece together Miller’s life and discover his mother anew, including what she had achieved during the Second World War, and to bring her work to public attention. Looking into her past, Antony also learned from his uncle that Miller had been raped at the age of seven by a family friend and had had to undergo a course of invasive and painful treatment to cure the gonorrhoea she had contracted. Unsurprisingly, she never disclosed this to anyone.

The story of Lee Miller is that of an exceptional woman living through remarkable times. Her wit, intelligence and brilliance were compounded by her physical beauty, making her irresistible and unforgettable. She suffered greatly for her many gifts, and lost as much as she gained. Living at a time when women were still expected to play a certain role, Miller carved out a life for herself, fearlessly and to her own rules. Picasso admired her beauty when they first met, resulting in the six portraits he painted of her. It is their enduring friendship that went beyond this initial admiration, however, and reflects his deeper respect for this extraordinary woman.

[1] Picasso quoted in John Richardson, Picasso and the Camera, Rizzoli International Publications, 2014

[2] James Beechey and Chris Stephens, Picasso and Modern British Art, exh. cat., Tate Britain, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2012

[3] Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, London 1958

[4] Robin Muir, interview with Maya Binkin, London, 5 July 2022

[5] Antony Penrose, interview with Pat Parker, “Lee Miller: The Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub”, Telegraph, 2 December 2016

[6] Antony Penrose, interview with Chris Hall, “Lee Miller, The Mother I Never Knew”, Guardian, 19 March 2016

[7] Alfred Munnings, speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1949