# Lee Miller: Witness to the Holocaust (Part 2)

An episode of [Stories of Art](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877705944), 21 Sep 2026, 1 h 08 min.

Audio: https://episode.flightcast.com/01M31N2PH9N7BN7N9GC5FWYN71.mp3

How did Lee Miller find her way into Hitler's apartment on the day his death was announced? And did what she witness in the Nazi concentration camps change her forever? Join Alastair and James as they conclude the story of one of art history's most remarkable photographers - Lee Miller. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: Lee Miller, The Deputy Bürgermeister's daughter (Regina Lisso), 1945 Margaret Bourke-White, The Leipzig Suicides, 1945 Lee Miller, Fire Masks, London, England, 1941 Lee Miller, Non-conformist Chapel, 1940 Robert Capa, US troops assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings, 1944 Lee Miller, Bad Burns Case, 1944 Lee Miller, Beaten SS Prison Guard, 1945 Lee Miller, US soldiers examine a rail truck load of dead prisoners, 1945 Lee Miller, Dead SS Prison Guard Floating in Canal, 1945 Lee Miller and David E. Scherman, Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub, 1945 Lee Miller and David E. Scherman, David E. Scherman in Hitler's Bathtub, 1945 Recommended Reading: Anthony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller, 1985 Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera, 2006 ————————— Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

## Transcript

[0:01] Welcome to Stories of Art.
[0:03] I'm Alastair Souk.
[0:04] And I'm James Fox.
[0:09] A beautiful, young, blonde woman, wearing the insignia of the German Red Cross on an armband around one sleeve of her double-breasted greatcoat, appears to swoon over the arm of an imposing leather sofa.
[0:22] Bathed in gorgeous light, she has the quality almost of a religious sculpture in a church.
[0:27] Her pose, her expression, mouth half-open, called to my mind the Ecstasy of St Teresa, you know, that famous 17th-century marble alterpiece by Benigni, the Italian artist.
[0:38] Yet just visible above her right shoulder, there's a single popped sofa button that's dangling by a thread, which suggests that something isn't right, because this pretty nurse isn't in raptures.
[0:51] She's dead.
[0:53] So, James, that's just a little description of a photograph balancing beauty and horror, which was taken in April 1945 by the American photographer Lee Miller inside Leipzig's Town Hall, which is where she encountered the bodies of a high-ranking Nazi official and his family, who, as the Allied forces were pressing into Germany, had chosen to die by suicide rather than be captured.
[1:20] Her name was Regina Lisso.
[1:23] And according to Miller, she had extraordinarily pretty teeth, which I always think is really telling, given that Miller, as we found out in the last episode, was famously gap-toothed.
[1:34] And as her biographer, Carolyn Burke, has argued, this blonde Aryan beauty looks like a younger version of herself.
[1:43] Now, if that is true, then this photograph could function on some, just bear with me, unconscious level.
[1:50] I know you're a meaning sceptic, but I can see from your expression where this is going.
[1:55] But the photograph, maybe it does function as a metaphorical self-portrait in which Miller, now a courageous war correspondent, is laying to rest her modelling past.
[2:08] I don't know what you make of that, James.
[2:10] Either way, what do you think that this extraordinary picture reveals about her photography during the Second World War?
[2:16] It is extraordinary, isn't it?
[2:17] One of the most interesting things about this image is that two of the other great photojournalists of the age, Robert Capper and the wonderful Margaret Burke White, who would make her a great episode or series, in fact, they photographed the same scene.
[2:32] And it's really instructive to compare how these different photographers captured that scene.
[2:37] What's the difference?
[2:37] Well, for Capper, this scene is part of a much wider, more violent survey of what is happening on the front line in April 1945.
[2:47] Margaret Birkwhite pulls back.
[2:49] She shows the entire room with the three members of the Lysso family dead.
[2:53] Right.
[2:54] But Lee Miller, as you've described, homes in on the daughter, on the beautiful, blonde, fantastically toothed 20-year-old Regina Lysso.
[3:04] And I think there is a lot going on.
[3:05] And I think you're completely right.
[3:07] There is something that is, in some ways, it feels like this is a combination of Lee Miller's past as a fashion photographer and her present as this hard-bitten war correspondent.
[3:20] Because actually, if you look at this photograph through a slightly squinted eye, it's almost like a fashion photograph.
[3:24] I know you mentioned Benigni, but it's almost like a beautiful young woman reclines on a sofa in a while.
[3:30] It's only when you look closely, it's only when you know the context that you realise this is a Nazi who has taken her own life before the Americans take over.
[3:40] It's a fascinating image and it's so ambivalent, don't you think?
[3:43] I think that's part of the strength of it.
[3:44] She's showing that Nazis are not just monsters.
[3:47] They can also be beautiful young girls who are members of the Red Cross.
[3:50] I think as well, I mean, we started the last episode with probably her most famous image, which is that series of constructed self-portraits in which she appears in a bathtub, which was Hitler's bathtub in his private apartment in Munich.
[4:02] And this predates that by just a few days.
[4:08] We're now approaching that part of the story, which is Lee Miller, as you say, war journalist, war correspondent.
[4:15] And for some listeners, it might feel like quite an abrupt turn, right?
[4:20] Because, I mean, maybe it's worth just briefly recapping where we've got to in the story.
[4:25] She's born in New York State in Poughkeepsie.
[4:28] Poughkeepsie.
[4:28] Poughkeepsie, which you visited and know well.
[4:31] Love Poughkeepsie.
[4:32] She has this...
[4:33] Her father is a very big figure in her life, engineer, amateur photographer.
[4:39] She credits him with really introducing her to the medium of photography.
[4:43] He creates a series of portraits of her when she's a young girl and a young woman, some of which are nude and quite controversial in a way, which we touched on last time.
[4:54] She...
[4:55] Spends time in Paris, then New York, where she has this accidental meeting with Condé Nast.
[5:01] She becomes a model, famous socialite, fashion model in the pages of Condé Nast magazine Vogue.
[5:06] She then goes back to Paris and she's a surrealist muse.
[5:09] And she's having this great love affair with Man Ray.
[5:11] Then she goes back to New York.
[5:12] She has her commercial photography studio.
[5:14] But then, weirdly, she's suddenly in Egypt.
[5:16] She's in Cairo for a few years.
[5:17] It's an incredible life, isn't it?
[5:19] I mean, it is actually dizzying when you start listing everything.
[5:22] And I think where we ended last time is we were describing those years in Egypt where she has this really, this resurgence of creativity in terms of her own fine art practice as a photographer.
[5:32] And towards the end of the 30s, that's when she creates that stunning image, a portrait of space.
[5:36] Oh, so good.
[5:37] Where you could see that Egyptian landscape through, what is it, like a ripped mosquito net.
[5:42] And then there was the summer of love in Egypt.
[5:46] Cornwall, then Moujean in the south of France, where she's painted by Picasso.
[5:49] And that's really where we got to.
[5:51] But I think you had pointed out that towards the end of the 30s, she'd been married to this Egyptian businessman.
[5:57] She falls in love with an Englishman, Roland Penrose.
[6:01] And that chapter of her story, which is the beginnings of how she becomes a war journalist, is where we're starting now.
[6:08] So this is the second and final part of our mini-series about the life and work of the American photographer and artist and, I say as a journalist, journalist, Lee Miller.
[6:29] So Alistair, with my historian hat on, just a little bit of context.
[6:33] While Lee Miller had been enjoying herself through the 1930s, Europe had been sliding quietly but unstoppably into war.
[6:43] So while she's photographing the great and the good in uptown New York in 1933, Hitler comes to power in Germany.
[6:49] And in September 1939, while she's on this wonderful holiday in France with Roland Penrose,
[6:55] Germany invades Poland.
[6:57] And this really is the beginning of the Second World War.
[7:00] The European powers have been trying very, very hard to avert and to avoid war.
[7:05] But the invasion of Poland really is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
[7:09] And two days later, on the 3rd of September 1939,
[7:12] Britain and France declare war on Germany.
[7:15] And this is the beginning of the Second World War.
[7:17] This is the beginning of a war that will last six years.
[7:20] It will kill tens of millions of people.
[7:22] It will leave Europe in ruins.
[7:24] But it will also be transformative for the career of Lee Miller.
[7:29] And part of that transformation comes about from her decisions in her personal life, because after she meets this Englishman, Roland Penrose, who is a painter and a curator and a collector and intellectual left wing intelligentsia in London, Britain's.
[7:44] one of premier surrealists in Britain, she has to make a decision ultimately.
[7:48] She goes back to her husband in Egypt, but then whilst everything you're describing is brewing, she's still in touch with Roland Penrose.
[7:55] There are these love letters that go between them.
[7:57] And eventually, as you have the outbreak of war, as she's had this holiday subsequently in 1939 in France with Roland Penrose,
[8:06] she decides that she's going to go and live with him.
[8:10] And so they catch, I think, is it the last boat, one of the last boats out of, interestingly, the port city in Brittany in France of Saint-Malo.
[8:17] Oh, well, did you... Yeah, well, it becomes relevant later.
[8:20] It does, it's very much so.
[8:21] It's a strange serendipity.
[8:23] And she goes back to England and arrives there in the autumn when war is being declared.
[8:29] And she's now living with Roland Penrose in his home in Hampstead at 21 Downshire Hill.
[8:36] One little thing, I don't know if you were going to bring this up, but when she arrives at the house in Hampstead, there is a letter on the doormat.
[8:42] It's a letter addressed to Lee Miller from the US Embassy that says...
[8:47] You've got to get out of Britain.
[8:48] It's no longer safe.
[8:49] You need to leave Britain and return to the USA.
[8:53] So what does she do?
[8:54] She tears the letter up.
[8:56] She ignores it.
[8:56] Of course she does.
[8:57] She ignores it because Lee Miller is someone who is addicted to danger.
[9:00] Also, she loves...
[9:01] I mean, you really get the impression that this is a proper romance, a real love affair.
[9:05] You know, she's deeply in love with Roland Penrose.
[9:07] So presumably there is that sense of being, you know, where the action is.
[9:12] But also she doesn't want to be split by an ocean.
[9:14] She's just spent some time...
[9:15] away from Roland Penrose whilst she was in Egypt.
[9:17] Yeah, I think she does adore him.
[9:19] But she also adores the thrill, the excitement of war.
[9:22] There's a particular moment for those people who haven't been to London.
[9:25] Hampstead is quite high up.
[9:27] You can look down over the city from Hampstead.
[9:30] And one evening, they're standing at the top of the hill and you can see the buildings are in flames.
[9:35] The air raid sirens are going.
[9:37] The searchlights are roving across the sky.
[9:40] And she grabs his arm and she looks at him and smiles and says, darling, isn't this exciting?
[9:44] Yeah.
[9:45] So she is thrilled and excited by this extraordinary thing that is taking place.
[9:50] And she very quickly tries to get to work, doesn't she?
[9:53] Well, she does.
[9:53] And bear in mind that she didn't really need to work while she was in Egypt.
[9:56] So she is making her own photographs, which are, of course, some of them quite great artworks.
[10:02] Yeah.
[10:02] But now she needs, she wants to find a job again.
[10:06] She has this history of having been a successful fashion photographer, commercial photographer.
[10:11] And quite soon after the war is declared, well, you have this odd initial period, which is known as the phony war, don't you?
[10:18] where seemingly nothing much actually is happening in terms of the great threat that was imminent for London.
[10:25] This is sort of pre the Blitz.
[10:27] But quite soon in that period, she's approaching British Vogue, which has the brilliant nickname of Brogue.
[10:34] which is superb, possibly my favourite detail in the Lee Miller literature.
[10:38] And she's presenting herself to that magazine.
[10:41] And because a lot of people who work for the magazine are taken off their day-to-day duties and are either, well, they're involved in the war effort in some way, perhaps an opportunity opens up for her.
[10:53] Oh, this is a really important point.
[10:54] I mean, and I think it's worth a little bit of wider context.
[10:57] One of the great social transformations that is brought about by the Second World War is an incredible new range of professional opportunities for women in various different sectors for the simple reason that loads of men are away.
[11:11] And so they need people to take on their jobs.
[11:13] And this opportunity is also one that becomes open to Lee Miller because the great Vogue photographers of the time, people like Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, they're doing work with the war effort.
[11:23] And so an opportunity does arise.
[11:25] And also, Alistair, the editor of Brogue.
[11:28] Yes.
[11:29] Incredible woman.
[11:30] She's a great figure.
[11:31] Audrey Withers.
[11:32] That's her name, Audrey Withers, who obviously partly perhaps wants to support women, but also feels very strongly that Vogue cannot ignore the war.
[11:40] It's got to really try to deal with the reality that is facing it.
[11:45] I think there's an editorial in which the magazine is kind of typical of the time, which was pointed out by this...
[11:50] Great Tate exhibition recently that was held at Tate Britain about Lee Miller, in which Vogue describes this business of beauty as become a duty.
[11:59] And actually for the government, for the British government, Vogue has a role to play and for the Ministry of Information.
[12:05] Initially, they're wanting women to spend...
[12:08] to sustain the economy.
[12:10] And so the magazine's content is trying to encourage that.
[12:13] But then obviously all sorts of rationing comes in.
[12:16] Ultimately, there's going to be food rationing.
[12:18] There's also paper rationing quite early on.
[12:19] So the magazine goes down to monthly.
[12:21] I think it was fortnightly.
[12:23] And one of the things is also clothing rationing.
[12:26] And so suddenly there's a whole new aesthetic, which is more make, do and mend.
[12:30] And so Vogue's creative teams, including Leigh Miller, when she's working after she is now working for them, are trying to
[12:37] further that message, if you like.
[12:40] And it's interesting because even Roland Penrose, he starts teaching camouflage to the Home Guard.
[12:47] And, I mean, this is slightly jumping around, but there's a wonderful story of their time together in the war.
[12:52] Have you come across this one, which is, possibly it was Elizabeth Arden, but a company come up with a green ointment that they say, if you put it on your face, it will camouflage your face.
[13:02] You know, you become invisible, as it were.
[13:04] through camouflage.
[13:05] And Roland Penrose, who's teaching camouflage to the Home Guard, decides that he will try and use this ointment and introduce it to the people he's teaching.
[13:14] And his vision for it is to create, like, a parody of an English tea party in a garden in which...
[13:21] Lee Miller reprises her role as a surrealist muse and strips naked, is covered with the ointment, and then photographs are taken of her.
[13:30] And Roland's line about it is, my theory was that if this ointment could hide such eye-catching attractions as hers from the invading Hun, smaller and less seductive areas of skin would stand an even better chance of becoming invisible.
[13:43] And actually, I was just listening to something on the way, which he supposedly said after that was a great success.
[13:48] Suddenly, his lectures were much better attended.
[13:50] Oh, right, OK.
[13:51] No surprise there.
[13:52] But what about Lee's own work?
[13:54] So she tries very early on, this outbreak of war, to get this job with Vogue, to get commissioned by Vogue.
[14:00] They say no repeatedly, but eventually, through her classic Lee Miller persistence, she does get a role with Vogue.
[14:08] What do the early war photographs by Lee Miller look like?
[14:13] So there's one picture which I think is fairly typical of her approach in this early phase of the war.
[14:18] It's now known as Firemasks, and it was taken at Downshire Hill, which is where she's living with Roland Penrose, and there are two models in it, and they're sitting at the entrance to one of these air raid shelters.
[14:30] Now, supposedly Penrose had created a pastel pink, typically, surrealist air raid shelter with a Barbara Hepworth sculpture at the entrance in the garden of Downshire Hill.
[14:39] And I think it's an amazing image because...
[14:43] A bit like you said at the start with that image of the young German dead nurse, this reads as a fashion picture because you can sense that these are beautiful models and they look like they're wearing quite chic clothes.
[14:56] But they have these masks that were made of tin and rubber and would have been worn by air raid wardens, which give it a completely odd, unsettling, surreal quality.
[15:08] So I think a lot of her work, which, and there is a bleed because she's working for specific commissions for Audrey Withers and others at Vogue.
[15:16] But she's also going around and experiencing the city during the Blitz when the Luftwaffe is annihilating London, decimating London.
[15:25] And she takes lots of pictures.
[15:27] There's another one which is called Nonconformist Chapel.
[15:30] So this is an image that she takes in Camden in 1940, and you see the outside of a church, and it has a grand threshold with that architecture of a doorway with its lintel, its architraves, and the brick wall.
[15:45] And then seemingly spilling out of this threshold is this cascade, a torrent of broken bricks, masonry bits of building.
[15:56] It's clearly suffered bomb damage, and...
[16:00] You know, I think here too, a bit like with the other image, you see a sense of Lee Miller's wit as a photographer.
[16:05] It is a non-conformist chapel because it's sort of spewing out its guts, if you like, to the viewer.
[16:12] And there's just a small sort of aside as well that, you know, a lot of photographs that were taken at this time, they were having to go via the censors.
[16:19] And there's this curious quirk that the censors thought, if you're depicting imagery of the Blitz...
[16:24] it can only really show about 50% rubble or damage.
[16:28] And I think non-conformist chapel is a good example of that because she gets around the censorship in a way.
[16:34] It's implied that through that threshold, a bit like with a portrait space, you're taken somewhere else to another realm through a threshold.
[16:40] There's just loads more.
[16:41] It's just completely chock-a-block with all of this damage beyond.
[16:44] There's a sense, I wonder what you think about this, Alistair, but we talked in the previous episode about Lee Miller as a surrealist.
[16:50] Yeah.
[16:51] She's in Paris.
[16:51] She's working with Man Ray.
[16:53] She's photographing severed breasts.
[16:55] She's really at the heart of the surrealist movement.
[16:58] I feel that this is a continuation of that surrealism.
[17:01] What she's finding with the Second World War is the war itself is surrealist.
[17:05] She's going out after these bombing raids at night.
[17:08] She's travelling around London and she's seeing the world turned upside down.
[17:13] And so she is finding a ready-made form of surrealism in the world around her.
[17:19] I think you're so right.
[17:21] There's an artist called Nigel Henderson who, at the time of the Blitz, is in his early 20s.
[17:25] This is what he says.
[17:26] Surrealism was everywhere, in a sense.
[17:29] Houses chopped by bombs while ladies were still sitting on the lavatory.
[17:33] The rest of the house gone, but the wallpaper and fire still burning in the grate.
[17:37] Who can hold a candle to that kind of real-life surrealism?
[17:39] They are.
[17:40] And you see that writ large.
[17:42] You know, interestingly, she doesn't really show...
[17:44] I mean, that non-conformist chapel suggests a great deal of destruction, but she's not showing explicit suffering and violence at this point.
[17:52] There's a sense of approaching the impact of the war on British life almost...
[17:59] through a witty lens and trying to find within it a sense of strange beauty.
[18:05] I think that's a classic surrealist trope as well, isn't it?
[18:08] That's her sense of strange beauty in the everyday world.
[18:11] And also, surrealists, they loved wandering the city.
[18:14] So suddenly this is what she's finding and look at the sights, the riches, the treasures that she can uncover as she does so.
[18:19] Absolutely.
[18:20] But I get the sense, Alistair, that after a couple of years, something is a characteristic of Lee Miller that she gets bored very quickly.
[18:26] She's always wanting the next challenge.
[18:28] And I get a sense that after a couple of years of doing this, she just wants to see some real action.
[18:34] Well, I can tell you what I think is a real turning point, because you're right, she's writing home to her parents.
[18:39] Her writing, by the way, is so vivid and extraordinarily good and will come to the fore when she becomes a war correspondent shortly.
[18:47] And in some of those letters, she talks about it.
[18:49] Isn't it just a bit, I think the word she uses, frivolous?
[18:52] You know, working for Vogue when everything's going on, even though there was a sense that Vogue was doing its bit for the war effort and was in sync with what the Ministry of Information was after to a degree.
[19:03] I think a turning point comes at the end of 1941.
[19:06] So quite early still in the war.
[19:08] But she meets the man who took that picture of her in Hitler's bathtub that you started the last episode with.
[19:15] He's called David E. Sherman.
[19:18] He's an American.
[19:19] He's a photojournalist working for the magazine Life.
[19:23] And there was a whole group of American journalists who suddenly they've moved.
[19:27] They're based in London as America's coming into the orbit of the Second World War.
[19:32] And I believe they're based even on Dean Street in Soho.
[19:34] There's a dinner party.
[19:36] Lee Miller meets Dave, as she calls him.
[19:40] She invites him back to Downshire Hill.
[19:42] And quite soon, which is of a piece with some other aspects of her life and biography, they become romantically involved.
[19:50] And Roland is quite understanding of this.
[19:53] So Dave's...
[19:56] Dave's line is that it was a menage a trois.
[19:59] But because Roland's in the army, soon it became a menage a deux.
[20:03] And they spend a great deal of time together in the ensuing years.
[20:07] I think Roland's actually, Roland Penner is quite fond of David, Dave.
[20:10] His nickname, Dave's nickname for Roland was Rollers, apparently.
[20:14] How do we say that?
[20:15] Rollers?
[20:15] Rollers?
[20:16] What do you think?
[20:17] Was it a single L or two Ls?
[20:19] Well, I've seen it transcribed in the double L, but yeah.
[20:22] I must be Rolers.
[20:23] He said, I was very fond of Dave and admired him greatly.
[20:26] That's Rolers saying that.
[20:27] And David Sherman is a war correspondent, and he keeps on saying to Lee Miller, look, you know, you are a US citizen.
[20:36] you could apply to be accredited as a correspondent for Vogue for the US military, for the army.
[20:45] And that, by the end of 1942, is what happens.
[20:49] She gets the backing of this far-sighted, brilliant editor who really supports her, Audrey Withers, and she is accredited to become a photojournalist reporting on the war.
[20:59] Yeah.
[21:00] Now, initially, you mentioned the famous American photojournalist Margaret.
[21:05] Margaret Burke White.
[21:05] Yes.
[21:07] Do you have a sense of, you know, she was quite a swashbuckling figure.
[21:11] Oh, yeah.
[21:11] And to begin with, Lee Miller, you know, she's not allowed to go to the front line, is she?
[21:16] No, women weren't allowed on the front line.
[21:18] So we will come to this in a moment.
[21:20] But actually, there was no real provision.
[21:21] There were male photojournalists who were out photographing combat, Robert Capper being the most famous example, and Dave Sherman, another one.
[21:29] But women simply really weren't allowed to go into harm's way.
[21:34] So anyway, so she gets this accreditation at the end of December 1942.
[21:37] But at this point, it is not considered safe enough for female photojournalists, including Margaret Bourke-White, to be able to cross the channel and to enter combat territory.
[21:49] It's worth at this point slightly skipping forward in the story because she's essentially itching to do some quote-unquote proper work reporting on the war.
[21:57] She is accredited, but the great turning point that allows women photojournalists to actually go into Europe comes after D-Day.
[22:05] Yeah, so this is the 6th of June 1944, when the Allied forces, the British, Americans and Canadians primarily, they land, I think, 150,000 troops on...
[22:15] on five beaches in Normandy, and they begin the process of liberating Nazi-occupied Western Europe.
[22:24] This is really the beginning of the end for the Germans.
[22:26] Of course, in the east, you've got the Red Army coming the other direction from Russia.
[22:31] And as they start to move west through France, this creates opportunities for photojournalists to capture what is happening on the continent.
[22:40] Some male photographers are there during the D-Day landings.
[22:43] Robert Capper is there, takes incredible photographs during the landings themselves.
[22:47] But female photographers are not allowed to do that.
[22:50] It's only some weeks later, in July 1944, when Lee Miller finally gets permission to cross the Channel and to photograph what is happening on the continent.
[23:00] So she flies to Normandy.
[23:02] You sense that she's really eager to get there.
[23:04] And her first job is to document what's going on within these hospitals, these makeshift hospitals in tents where wounded soldiers are being treated and operated on.
[23:15] Before we get into the detail of a specific photograph, Alastair, one of the fascinating things about her work at this point is that she's not just taking photographs, she is also writing her pieces.
[23:26] And I think she had been growing frustrated during the early 1940s at the, I suppose, the anodyne copy that had been used to accompany her photographs.
[23:35] And she had demanded that she were able to write her own pieces.
[23:40] She found writing extremely difficult.
[23:42] Yeah, really hard.
[23:43] She had a phrase for it.
[23:44] She called it stone ringing, as in trying to get tears out of a stone, ringing tears from a stone.
[23:50] And it's so interesting, this, because, you know, when she starts working for Vogue in the 40s, some people at the magazine felt, well, hang on.
[23:59] In a way, she's a little bit of a novice, even though she had this extraordinary history as a photographer in New York and in Paris.
[24:05] She'd sort of been out of the game for a little bit.
[24:07] She'd never been on a magazine staff.
[24:10] Suddenly, here she is.
[24:11] Well...
[24:11] Try applying that to her writing.
[24:13] Totally untrained as a writer.
[24:15] It's not something that she had any experience of at all.
[24:18] And what you find during the war is that she's sending back cables, letters, notes, observations that could have been used for articles and were subsequently turned into her articles back home by the magazine's editors.
[24:31] And these are some of the most vivid and evocative pieces of writing, which just take you straight there.
[24:39] Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[24:40] There's a passage.
[24:41] Let me just read this, because she found, as we say, writing very, very difficult.
[24:45] It was always difficult for her.
[24:46] Later on in her life, Roland Penrose actually wrote to Vogue and said, please do not ask her to write anything.
[24:52] It is so bad for her mental health.
[24:54] It's making everyone miserable.
[24:55] Indeed, but she really could write very well.
[24:57] And that first piece she writes when she goes over to France, she begins it, so brilliant.
[25:02] She says, As we flew into sight of France, I swallowed hard on what were trying to be tears and remembered a movie actress kissing a handful of earth.
[25:12] Fantastic.
[25:13] Anyway, so she's writing these big pieces.
[25:15] She's taking the photographs as well.
[25:16] And her first job is to record this makeshift hospital that is treating, I presume, American patients who have been injured during the D-Day landing.
[25:26] Yeah, and there's one which is known as Bad Burns Case.
[25:31] It's very famous.
[25:33] You see a figure lying on some sort of bed and he's covered in bandages.
[25:40] He looks like he's wearing boxing gloves.
[25:42] There are bandages across his torso and then crucially his entire head.
[25:46] is covered in these bandages and you just see this darkness where his eyes are like two sockets sense of his nostrils and mouth he sort of reminds me somehow of like a big lumbering polar bear that's lying down against this pillow and it's almost it's almost comical at first sight though isn't it but it's almost like the kind of bandages a cartoon character would have right mr bump
[26:08] Yeah, exactly.
[26:09] It totally is Mr Bump.
[26:10] But of course, the context is anything but.
[26:12] Oh, yeah.
[26:13] And the crucial detail about it is that it's out of focus.
[26:17] Right.
[26:18] And I think the brilliance is that she recognises that that is its strength, if you like, as an image, because she writes about the photograph.
[26:27] This is her description of how it came about.
[26:29] A bad burn case asked me to take his picture as he wanted to see how funny he looked, to your point.
[26:36] It was pretty grim.
[26:38] It's not very comical, this.
[26:39] And I didn't focus well.
[26:42] It's reproduced in vogue with that line.
[26:45] I didn't focus well.
[26:47] And, you know, look, to use your phrase as the meaning sceptic, I can't help.
[26:52] I want to run with that.
[26:53] You know, I sort of hear that.
[26:54] I look at this.
[26:55] I see it's blurry and out of focus.
[26:57] And immediately it becomes a metaphor.
[27:00] It becomes a metaphor for the incomprehensibility of wars.
[27:04] OK, it's a bit cliché, the fog of war.
[27:07] But it feels like she is using what was something supposedly bad, an accident, to become a strength.
[27:16] She's transforming that.
[27:17] That's a sign of authenticity, isn't it?
[27:18] The authenticity of the lived experience of the photographer...
[27:21] the panic, the anxiety, the chaos of the moment in which she is trying to do her work.
[27:26] It's absolutely brilliant to keep that.
[27:28] I mean, maybe there was one that was in focus and they decided to keep the one that was out of focus.
[27:32] But the thing we should say is even at that point, even though she is on the continent now, she's not in great danger.
[27:40] It is only the next month in August 1944 when she genuinely does find herself in danger.
[27:47] So this is her first big scoop.
[27:49] And this is the moment where she, if you like, she really becomes the war journalist, the war photojournalist that we know.
[27:55] And she is sent to that place where she got the boat to get to Britain before the war or at the outbreak of war in Brittany, this port city of San Marlo.
[28:05] And it's a massive balls up.
[28:07] There's a military intelligence cock up where they think that this city has been secured by allied forces.
[28:12] Which is the only reason they send her.
[28:14] Which is why she goes.
[28:15] And she's allowed to document that, you know, in the same way that the operating theatre is behind the lines, behind the front line.
[28:20] What quickly becomes apparent when she arrives is that it is still an active combat zone.
[28:27] There are a bunch of Germans who are in the citadel of the port city under the leadership of Colonel von Orlok.
[28:34] And they have to be, they have to surrender.
[28:37] I mean, there's still a fight going on.
[28:39] And it becomes clear that Lee Miller is, as she says, the only photographer for miles around.
[28:44] She essentially has what she calls this private war, where for five days she gets to document what is going on.
[28:50] And some of the photographs are just so extraordinary.
[28:53] They're often shot, again, classic Lee Miller device, through a window or an opening or a doorway or maybe French doors.
[29:00] You can often see the silhouetted balustrade in the foreground of the picture.
[29:04] And then on the other side, there's the citadel and the moments of the explosions.
[29:08] Huge, great mushrooming, belching columns of smoke.
[29:12] In some of these, I believe she's even, although she didn't know it at the time, documenting the Americans' first use of napalm.
[29:19] One of the things she writes, she writes here, and again, incredibly vivid writing.
[29:23] She says, I sheltered in a kraut dugout, squatting under the ramparts.
[29:27] My heel ground into a dead, detached hand, and I cursed the Germans for the sordid, ugly destruction they had conjured up in this once beautiful town.
[29:37] I picked up the hand and hurled it across the street, and ran back the way I'd come, bruising my feet and crashing in the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in blood.
[29:47] Christ, it was awful.
[29:49] I mean, imagine reading that in Vogue.
[29:51] I mean, it is such a strange collision.
[29:54] It's itself so surreal.
[29:55] But some of the most immediate, alive, in-depth, bravest, most courageous war reporting that exists on record was published first in American and British Vogue, a high-fashion, glossy magazine.
[30:08] It's beyond bizarre.
[30:10] That passage is fascinating because this moment of finding the severed hand, still at this point she's not...
[30:16] She's directly photographing.
[30:18] You would think, given that she'd done that severed breast, given that she's often photographed hands over the years, it's a bit of a surrealist trope.
[30:25] This feels like a gift to a surrealist photographer, but she doesn't photograph the severed hand.
[30:30] She still possibly is thinking that that would be too much for the pages of Vogue.
[30:35] The stuff that she does produce, that gets published, gets a lot of praise from Audrey Withers' Cables Her and says, "'Good girl, great adventure, wonderful story.'"
[30:43] And she has very limited contact with her superiors at the magazines.
[30:48] And so she's often just proceeding.
[30:50] She's learning on the job, proceeding by instinct.
[30:53] But this is almost the beginning, that severed hand moment of the next phase, if you like, of her war reporting.
[31:00] She's in the doghouse for having been at St. Marlowe.
[31:02] She's arrested briefly.
[31:04] She's arrested.
[31:05] She's sent to Rennes, where she witnesses this horrible thing of the women who supposedly collaborated with Nazi soldiers.
[31:13] They often had their heads shaved in a ritual in public.
[31:17] She creates this really quite complex, I think, sensitive and sympathetic portrait of one of these women, although she writes about how these alleged collaborators, they're stupid little girls, not intelligent enough to feel ashamed.
[31:30] And then Paris is liberated.
[31:32] She gets to Paris.
[31:33] She says it's gone totally mad.
[31:35] She re-encounters Picasso.
[31:38] She goes to meet him.
[31:39] Do you know the story about Picasso?
[31:40] Go on.
[31:40] So she goes to Picasso's studio and he's got on his, I think, window ledge, a little tomato plant full of ripe red tomatoes.
[31:49] And when he goes into another room, she just can't resist.
[31:52] plucks tomato, eats it, and then proceeds to eat every single tomato off the plant.
[31:56] And when he comes back into the room and he sees the tomato plant completely denuded of fruit, he is crestfallen.
[32:02] But all this time, all this point, the Allied troops are moving east through Europe and liberating more and more of France.
[32:10] So she goes into Germany as the US Army and the Allied forces are going into the country.
[32:16] And this is really where the story becomes unbelievably upsetting.
[32:21] And it's worth saying that some of the photographs that we're about to discuss, there was when they were shown at the Tate recently in that...
[32:28] very popular Lee Miller show.
[32:30] There was, understandably, they were put together in a room.
[32:33] You weren't allowed to take photographs of the photographs.
[32:35] There was a content guidance warning.
[32:37] And it's worth just saying at this point that the stuff we're about to discuss is really very harrowing and upsetting.
[32:44] But there are a few stages.
[32:46] So one of them is that this is the beginnings of the discovery of the rest of the world that the Nazis had created, the concentration camps.
[32:58] And the first one that she visits in April 1945 is Buchenwald.
[33:06] And this was a concentration camp.
[33:07] It's one of the largest in Germany.
[33:09] It's built in 1937.
[33:11] And just a few days after the liberation, she enters there.
[33:15] And one of the things, before we discuss the images, one of the things that I think is very telling and it's worth just observing is
[33:21] We've been describing the great power of her writing and the fact that words, even though she described it as stone ringing, you know, they seem to pour out of her in certain contexts.
[33:30] Here, words almost fail her because she talks about what she witnessed and it's an abbreviated list of things.
[33:37] It's bones, the crematorium.
[33:39] The rest speak for themselves.
[33:41] She's quite furious because she recognises that it's only thanks to recent fuel shortages that the Germans who were leaving the camp hadn't destroyed more of the evidence of what they'd done.
[33:51] But she encounters these enormous piles of bodies which are starved to death
[33:57] And she photographs the camp gates.
[34:01] She also photographs these SS guards, these guards who'd been guards at the camp.
[34:06] And there's one in particular, which I just think is so shocking and powerful and difficult to look at and comprehend, which is often the case with her finest work.
[34:18] It's called Beaten SS Prison Guard.
[34:20] And you see this wide-eyed figure
[34:25] with a broken nose and a smashed-up, mangled central part of his face, covered in blood, and he's staring quite frenziedly, wildly, at Lee Miller's Roliflex camera in this grubby suit...
[34:41] She pointed out when she was in these camps that you can always tell this is she was talking about corpses, of course, but those people who were guards because they're well nourished.
[34:50] This guy's not skeletal starved like the piled up body she'd already encountered at the camp.
[34:56] But he seems to be kneeling before us.
[34:59] And because she doesn't have a zoom, there's a real sense of both her and then by proxy us, the viewer, we're brought right up close to this figure.
[35:08] And she, we know from her writing that very swiftly as she's moving into Germany, I mean, you know, a bit like that passage you described with a severed hand.
[35:15] She's describing her, this essentially burning hatred she starts to feel for the Nazis, quite understandably, and is finding it difficult to deal with...
[35:25] even people who were not directly involved with the camps that she encounters.
[35:29] I mean, what do you make of an image like this?
[35:31] It just seems so unsettling and combative confrontational somehow.
[35:36] I find it very difficult to deal with this subject because my father is Jewish and many of my family members perished in Buchenwald itself.
[35:45] So the thought that Lee Miller might have seen them, he might have...
[35:50] treated them so appallingly is very moving, and it's evidence of the extraordinary images that she was able to reproduce at this point and how much bravery it would have required for her to do this.
[36:03] After this, she gets to Leipzig.
[36:05] We've described at the beginning of this episode some of the things that she photographs there, including this family that had died by suicide.
[36:12] And then on the end of April...
[36:16] A day after another concentration camp, Dachau, is liberated, Miller is travelling with David Sherman, David E. Sherman, Dave.
[36:25] They're some of the first photographers to actually get into that concentration camp.
[36:29] They've got a tip that this camp is about to be liberated in this village 10 miles north of Munich.
[36:35] They get there, they discover this...
[36:38] very very long train that's parked um on the line next to the camp and there's just this stench from all of the the carriages the open cars of the train because you have inside all of these well i've read thousands of bodies um people who are still in that striped prison garb they're
[37:00] totally desecrated, covered in blood and worse.
[37:05] And it's an unspeakable horror and sight.
[37:09] Lee Miller gets inside.
[37:12] This is the thing that is truly remarkable, because as the American forces come to this train, many of them really hard-bitten, very experienced soldiers who have seen great deals of violence,
[37:23] In the previous years, they are just broken by this.
[37:26] They collapse, they faint, they're vomiting.
[37:29] And Lee Miller somehow finds the strength not only to record and photograph these scenes, but to my understanding, she is the only photographer who actually goes inside the train cars and photographs from the inside looking out.
[37:46] There's one in particular that I think, I mean, again, it's completely inadequate language to call it astonishing, but it is.
[37:53] She's in the carriage, she's in that car, and in the bottom left there is a body, a dead body, completely starved, emaciated, gaunt face, covered partly with a blanket, but you see around his neck some of that striped prison garb uniform.
[38:09] She's using the, as it were, architecture of the train car to...
[38:15] direct our attention to his head, to the one thing you don't want to see.
[38:20] And on the other side, outside, again, Lee Miller looking through a threshold, using framing as a device, that's something we've talked about a lot in these two episodes that she does artistically.
[38:29] You have two of these presumably American soldiers who are examining the inside, and they are definitely surrogates for us, the viewer, looking at this unspeakable horror.
[38:41] And I suppose one thing I wanted to ask you about is...
[38:45] I've described how...
[38:46] I think she's doing it... Is she doing it consciously, unconsciously?
[38:49] But irrespective of that, she has this innate ability as a photographer to compose something with great art, so that, as I say, the lines of the train carriage structure this particular photograph and tell us where to look.
[39:04] They become like an arrow pointing at this poor victim's starved, dead head at the almost centre of the composition.
[39:13] Do you find...
[39:14] I don't know.
[39:16] Is there anything jarring between...
[39:19] using the sort of what we would call the formalist language of art history and noticing those strategies and devices that are used with the content.
[39:27] I'm not sure if they necessarily sit awkwardly, but I think it's just an incredibly difficult thing to do in the moment.
[39:33] You can imagine her hands must have been shaking, her legs must have been weak, she must have been overpowered by emotion, as everyone who witnessed these scenes would have been.
[39:43] And to have the foresight, to have the ability...
[39:45] To fight through those emotions and to compile, if you like, to create a compelling composition is quite remarkable.
[39:55] And we know that actually she took many, many more photographs.
[39:58] After she visited this train car, she then went into Dachau itself, to the concentration camp.
[40:04] She walked around.
[40:05] She gave some military-issued chocolate to various survivors.
[40:09] She took lots more photographs.
[40:11] And then she ended up destroying many of those photographs.
[40:14] And she said, I don't want anyone to have to see what I witnessed, but I'm leaving enough to make sure there's no doubt about what happened.
[40:22] I mean, there is no question that the experiences in these camps and definitely in Dachau, they mark her and change her forever.
[40:30] She isn't ever the same person.
[40:33] And it's tremendously sad on that personal level for her.
[40:37] She later says way later in the 70s, I got in over my head.
[40:42] I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.
[40:46] And I think the thing you've just mentioned you're alluding to is it's this episode in the 40s.
[40:51] There's someone at Vogue who remembers her.
[40:52] Suddenly she's really agitated.
[40:54] She comes into the offices.
[40:55] She's had lunch.
[40:57] Suddenly she's pulling out all these negatives and she starts really going at them with scissors.
[41:02] And eventually this assistant takes the scissors away.
[41:05] Thank God that she did, because these images, many of which ended up sitting in an attic and were just not known, although they, of course, were published in Vogue at the time.
[41:15] But some of the ones that were unpublished, they are testimony to what happened in these camps.
[41:20] Yeah.
[41:21] And already at the time she was there, there were immediately conspiracy theories that this was a bit of faked allied propaganda.
[41:28] And it's very important just simply historically that these documents exist.
[41:34] I just want to just finish this difficult section by just talking about this one other image that she creates at Dachau, because I find it fascinating.
[41:43] It's...
[41:45] It's a picture of a dead SS prison guard who's floating in a canal.
[41:50] So she describes the fact that there was a small canal that bound the camp and she says it was a floating mess of SS.
[41:57] That's quite an amazing phrase in itself.
[41:59] In their spotted camouflage suits and studded boots, they slithered along in the current along with a dead dog or two and smashed rifles.
[42:08] And in this one...
[42:09] You can see the corpse of this German officer beneath the surface of the water in the moment seemingly of perhaps he's sinking, moving away.
[42:18] But it's a piece of documentary photography.
[42:22] It also has great metaphorical potency and charge because in many ways it's a very beautiful image.
[42:31] And some writers have looked at it and said...
[42:33] Is this somehow redemptive, transcendent?
[42:38] But I guess for me, is it a metaphorical image of, if you like, given what you've just described, all of that stuff of how she was later in life, she didn't really talk about Dachau very much, but she can never get the stench of it out of the nostrils.
[42:51] Is this almost an image of PTSD, a metaphor of what PTSD is, that suddenly this thing, it never really will go away.
[42:58] It can recede, it can come to the surface, it might go back to the depths, but something will trigger it.
[43:03] And there it is, somehow ineradicable.
[43:06] A lot of these images we've been describing, they really, they feel monumental.
[43:12] I think the surprise is to remember that she's working quickly.
[43:15] She's working at pace.
[43:17] And she and Dave, they get to Dachau.
[43:20] It's the 30th of April, 1945.
[43:22] And a day later, they're already pressing on and they're on their way to Munich where they make a beeline for Adolf Hitler's private apartment.
[43:31] And to find out what happened there, join us after the break.
[43:38] A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time.
[43:45] And some good news.
[43:47] You can now find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny.
[43:52] So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.
[44:03] Welcome back to Stories of Art.
[44:05] It's the 1st of May, 1945, and Lee Miller and her lover and collaborator David E. Sherman, the American Life photojournalist, are about to enter Adolf Hitler's Munich apartment, which is now occupied by the US Army.
[44:20] Do you have a sense of what they discover there, James?
[44:23] I'm not sure, Alistair, if they know initially that it is Hitler's apartment, but very quickly they start to see some clues.
[44:30] So there's some silverware, for instance, that has the AH monogram on it.
[44:36] And it's also one of the only buildings with running hot water.
[44:40] And they are just desperate.
[44:41] As you might imagine, if you've been in Dachau, if you've been on the road for so long, you would be desperate for a bath, desperate for a shower.
[44:48] I think Dave says we hadn't seen a bathtub in weeks.
[44:51] So naturally enough...
[44:53] They want to have a bath.
[44:54] They want to have a bath.
[44:54] So they head up there.
[44:55] I don't know if the bathroom is upstairs or on the ground floor, but they head up to the bathroom and they proceed to have some baths.
[45:02] And actually, Lee Miller goes into the bath first, I think.
[45:04] Well, there's a lieutenant on the other side of the door with his soap in his hand, banging the door saying, come on, let me in.
[45:10] I need a bath.
[45:11] And this is when Lee and Dave Sherman take probably, I mean, the most famous image that
[45:17] she ever appeared in, would you say?
[45:19] I think definitely.
[45:20] And I think it's worth actually thinking about it and analysing it in a little bit of depth because it is such an extraordinary thing.
[45:28] I mean, do you want to...
[45:29] I know we talked about it briefly at the start of the previous episode, but is it worth describing it a bit?
[45:34] Let's describe it.
[45:35] We're in a relatively small tiled bathroom and there is a bathtub at the end of the room.
[45:42] And in the centre of the bathtub, we can see in the most famous of these iterations, we can see Leigh Miller.
[45:50] She's naked.
[45:51] She's right in the centre of the bath.
[45:53] She's got her arm over her shoulder.
[45:54] She's washing herself.
[45:57] And around her, there are almost like saintly attributes.
[46:01] They're these objects that I suspect have been placed there deliberately.
[46:05] I'd say definitely.
[46:06] So behind her on the left, we can see a photograph of Hitler.
[46:10] On the right, there is a sideboard that has a nude statue of a woman doing a similar pose to Lee Miller, actually, this contrapposto pose with the arm over the head.
[46:20] Very significant detail, that, I think.
[46:22] because it establishes a link between her and this classical statuette.
[46:27] Definitely.
[46:27] We'll come back to that.
[46:28] There's also a little stool in front of the bath, and you can see she's put her combat clothes on the stool.
[46:34] There's also a watch that's been very carefully placed on top of the clothes.
[46:38] And perhaps most revealing of all, in the foreground, bottom of the bath, there is a bath mat that is covered in mud...
[46:47] And on top of that bath mat, we have her boots, the boots that she has used on her weeks on the road.
[46:53] And also the boots, of course, that have just that previous day gone through the killing fields of Dachau.
[47:00] It's a brilliant image.
[47:02] It's such a complicated.
[47:04] I mean, the fact that then Hitler, the news of his death arrives later that same day on which the photograph is taken just adds another layer of meaning and significance to it.
[47:16] I find it interesting that she almost, a sort of, it's not the reptilian part of her brain, but the fashion model part of her brain kicks in.
[47:24] She poses here and the pose is artful because clearly we are compelled to look at this image in part because it presents a beautiful woman in a bath.
[47:36] Beautiful nude women bathing have been since time immemorial a major subject of art history.
[47:42] But by scrubbing her left shoulder, she's covering her breasts and, instinctively or not, mirroring, as you have established, that pose of the classical statuette to one side, which, if you like, is an emblem of everything that the Aryans...
[48:00] supposedly loved.
[48:02] Yes.
[48:02] The kind of art that Adolf Hitler liked was neoclassical, quasi-classical, realistic, none of this modern degenerate nonsense.
[48:11] And here we sort of almost see Lee Miller...
[48:16] Riley looking at this emblem of that because she conformed to that Aryan stereotype as a very beautiful, healthy, blonde woman, I think blue eyed.
[48:25] But she's also perhaps it's a reflection on, again, that past that she had as a as a object of desire, an object of desire.
[48:33] Exactly.
[48:34] And look who's looking at both of them.
[48:36] Adolf Hitler on the left.
[48:38] That photograph has been placed on the left so that he is gazing at Lee Miller and beyond to the figure.
[48:44] I'm sure she is deliberately copying and aping that pose of the statue.
[48:49] I think she's actually in this photograph, she's looking at that statue.
[48:53] It's a very, very clear parallel of what's being made.
[48:56] I think it's worth touching on the fact, I know we mentioned this in the previous episode, but you can see the shower hose, which is on the wall.
[49:05] In the images, some of the photographs from the same series, and particularly ones with David Sherman in them, you see the whole shower.
[49:13] And we know that she knew, because she wrote a letter from Dachau that morning, which is recording how there were death chambers that were disguised as bathrooms,
[49:22] Sherman is a Jewish man.
[49:24] The significance of him sitting in that bath beneath that shower by Hitler's portrait is mind blowing.
[49:31] Yeah.
[49:32] There is something odd culturally maybe to reflect on the fact that, of course, the image that is famous isn't the one of David Sherman in the bathtub.
[49:41] It's the image of the beautiful Lee Miller sitting in the bathtub.
[49:45] But...
[49:46] Everything hinges on that muddy, soiled mess on the bath mat.
[49:51] That is a crucial bit, isn't it?
[49:52] The big boots, the sort of sense that they are... She's not literally just washing off the dirt of someone who's been on the road.
[49:59] She's metaphorically, on behalf of the Allies, washing off the dirt of the Nazi atrocities that she has just discovered.
[50:06] And her expression, I think...
[50:08] Signals that because maybe I said this before in the previous part, she doesn't seem triumphalist in this moment of triumph.
[50:16] This is a real F you to Hitler, isn't it?
[50:18] That's how I see it.
[50:19] You know, she's saying, look what you did in Dachau.
[50:22] Well, I'm going to bring the mud and the blood and the excrement of the concentration camp and I'm going to put it on your immaculate bath mat.
[50:30] This comes back to you.
[50:31] You know, she also has a nap on his partner Eva Braun's bed.
[50:36] Yes.
[50:36] While she's there in the apartment.
[50:38] And she also talks about the fact that, this I find interesting, Hitler had never really been alive for me until today.
[50:45] This is from the unpublished parts of her Munich text.
[50:49] he'd been an evil machine monster all these years.
[50:52] He became less fabulous and therefore more terrible, along with little evidences of his having some almost human habits, like an ape who embarrasses and humbles you with his gestures, mirroring yourself in caricature.
[51:05] And I think that's the great terror, isn't it, of the image, the relatability of Hitler doing what she's doing, having a bath in this tub.
[51:12] Yeah.
[51:13] So Hitler dies around the same time and the war finally comes to an end in 1945.
[51:20] How, Alistair, do you come back from something like that when you have witnessed what she has witnessed, when you have had actually the excitement that she experienced in the lead up to this?
[51:32] How do you readjust to life after war?
[51:34] I think, in her case, not well, not easily.
[51:37] She wants to carry on.
[51:39] She stays in Europe until early 1946.
[51:42] She's travelling.
[51:43] She still wants to publish stories in Vogue and for Condé Nast to be bankrolling that.
[51:47] Eventually they say, I'm sorry, we can't anymore.
[51:50] She increasingly becomes... She'd been reliant on amphetamines.
[51:55] She'd been reliant on alcohol.
[51:57] And in the second phase of her life...
[52:00] Following the war, she really becomes an alcoholic.
[52:03] Before we go into that, I do think we need a little bit of light to the shade.
[52:06] Yeah, OK. And one of the things that she does straight after the war is she goes to Eastern Europe.
[52:10] She goes to Romania and Hungary.
[52:13] And while she's in Romania, she suffers from what we today call fibromyalgia.
[52:17] She's got very painful, stiff back.
[52:19] And Lee Miller concludes that there is only one cure for this back.
[52:25] That is to be massaged by a bear.
[52:27] I saw an image of this.
[52:28] I mean, I'd love to do this.
[52:30] Yeah, sounds great.
[52:31] Anyway, so what she does, she goes on a search through Bucharest, looking for an appropriate bear.
[52:35] She eventually finds a bear in a village about 60 kilometres outside of Bucharest.
[52:39] She gets in a taxi.
[52:40] She goes over there.
[52:42] And this is what she writes.
[52:43] She says, I was invited to lie face down on a gaudy carpet they smoothed onto the frozen earth.
[52:49] Well, I'd asked for it and there it was.
[52:51] I caught sight of the beast's long paw nails and decided to keep on my coat.
[52:56] The bear knew her business.
[52:58] She walked up and down my back on all fours as gently as if on eggs.
[53:01] It was crushing and exhilarating.
[53:04] All my muscles clenched and relaxed to keep from being flattened.
[53:07] The gulp of air I snatched as she moved every inch was enough, like swimming the crawl in a lake of lead.'
[53:12] I felt marvellous afterwards.
[53:14] Racing circulation, flexible and energetic.
[53:17] I discovered I could move my neck and shoulders in patterns I'd forgotten.
[53:21] I think the sad thing is that this amazing relief, and I love the line about the gentle eggs that...
[53:27] It's obviously pretty temporary because she ends up back in London in early 1946.
[53:34] And it is clear to everyone around her that the war has marked her irrevocably.
[53:39] She's now pretty, she'd been reliant on amphetamines, sleeping pills.
[53:42] She's just drinking loads.
[53:44] There's that incident we've already described about with the frenzied cutting with the scissors of negatives of Dachau.
[53:50] She writes that she's feeling as rational as a scattered jigsaw puzzle and...
[53:55] Her brother, older brother John Miller, says she wasn't the same after the war.
[54:01] You know, I think even her son later, obviously he wasn't born until 1947, but his take, Anthony Penrose, is that she really did get lost.
[54:09] Yeah, she did.
[54:10] I mean, in 1947, she gets pregnant.
[54:12] She's 40 years old at this point.
[54:13] She's still a pretty young woman, really.
[54:15] She's younger than we are.
[54:17] But her life in some ways, her creative life is sort of over.
[54:20] She has a child, Anthony Penrose.
[54:22] Can we talk about The Child a little bit?
[54:24] Because I love, I think there are a couple of things.
[54:26] You've read the biography that the son, Anthony, Tony Penrose writes much later about his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller.
[54:32] And I've just always been quite, I've met Anthony Penrose.
[54:34] I've interviewed him, I think, a couple of times.
[54:36] We did an event together once.
[54:38] I find him a very intriguing personality and character.
[54:42] He completely is tending the flame of his mother and indeed his father, but is co-director of the Lee Miller archives.
[54:48] But the reality is that he had, I don't know how much he talks about this in that biography, a very, very difficult relationship with his mum.
[54:57] He's born in 47.
[54:59] This is a sign of just a quick aside, but her strength of character.
[55:02] She writes to Roland to reveal that she's pregnant.
[55:04] She says, there's only one thing, you know, like good news.
[55:07] There's only one thing.
[55:08] My workroom is not going to be a nursery.
[55:10] How about your studio?
[55:11] Ha ha.
[55:12] Very sarcastic.
[55:13] Ha ha.
[55:13] He eventually is born in 47, initially nicknamed Butch and then known as Tony.
[55:18] Um...
[55:19] But what he has said, as I understand it, over the years is, you know, I've come across these quotes where he said things like, I don't know what I represented to her, speaking about his mum.
[55:28] I may have reflected her self-loathing.
[55:31] And there's a recent documentary film capturing Lee Miller.
[55:34] He's interviewed in it.
[55:35] Excellent film.
[55:36] He says, I had known my mum as a useless drunk and hysterical, even catching a train in Lewis, because by then they're down in the countryside, was a major episode for her.
[55:48] I mean, yeah, I think that I mean, I think that his view is that she's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but she's also suffering from postnatal depression.
[55:58] She really, really struggles in the aftermath of having him in 1947.
[56:02] They try to solve the problem by moving out into the countryside.
[56:06] They buy this farmhouse called Farley Farm down, I think, in Sussex, quite near Lewis.
[56:10] Do you know what Roland pays for it?
[56:12] No.
[56:12] I mean, I don't, this isn't a podcast about intergenerational inequality, but he spends £22,500, which is less than £700,000 today, according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, for the farmhouse, 200 acres, three cottages, two barns, several sheds and a malt house.
[56:29] Wow.
[56:30] So they go and base, they totally change their life.
[56:32] Roland has this idea he's going to be this gentleman farmer.
[56:35] And I find this, again, a surprising, interesting move because the final phase of their lives together and for Lee Miller's life is based at Farley Farm, this 200 acre working farm down in East Sussex.
[56:46] But she doesn't seem like a very rustic, bucolic person.
[56:49] She's so urban and metropolitan.
[56:52] Is this good for her mental health?
[56:53] I think it's terrible, terrible for her mental health.
[56:55] Indeed, Anthony Penrose writes in his biography, he says, the only reason preventing her from drowning herself was that she knew Roland and Tony would be so happy without her.
[57:06] Ha ha.
[57:07] There you go.
[57:07] I mean, that's the sort of depths of a very complicated relationship.
[57:11] So she's suffering from depression.
[57:13] She's suicidal, really.
[57:15] She's smoking 50 cigarettes a day.
[57:17] She's drinking an enormous amount.
[57:19] She's taking drugs.
[57:20] She's doing very little creative work.
[57:22] But she is still at the centre of a social scene and avant-garde friends are coming to stay with them.
[57:30] Audrey Withers, the editor, comes.
[57:31] There's a lovely, tiny, very innocent little anecdote where she just goes for a little walk to a nearby woodland or copse.
[57:36] She comes back with a bouquet of bluebells and presents them to Lee Miller, who says, I mean, you know what, the truth is, I've never made it that far to that place.
[57:45] So her life becomes quite centred on the house and entertaining.
[57:49] Yes.
[57:49] All of these, I think Tony talks about life at Farley's being like a perpetual arts congress.
[57:54] And Picasso comes.
[57:55] And Picasso comes.
[57:57] Yeah.
[57:57] You see, I think we need a new spin-off podcast, which is these bizarre... We had Vincent in Brixton.
[58:03] Yes.
[58:03] We now have Picasso and Muddles Green in Chiddingley in East Sussex.
[58:06] It's quite niche, isn't it?
[58:07] But anyway, yeah.
[58:08] You know, Picasso comes, Alfred Barr comes, Saul Steinberg comes, Henry Moore.
[58:11] I mean, their people are coming constantly and being entertained by her.
[58:15] And as you have suggested, Alistair, she becomes very, very interested in entertaining.
[58:19] She becomes obsessed with food in particular.
[58:23] I mean, it's so bizarre.
[58:24] Her story, as we say, has so many different chapters to it, and they're all so different from each other.
[58:28] But I'd just like to briefly talk about her devotion to food in this final phase of her life.
[58:34] I think it begins quite soon after having Antony.
[58:38] Now, you know when you have a child, and I didn't realise this until we had children, that when you are heavily pregnant, well, our wives, heavily pregnant, they say, have you packed your bag?
[58:48] You know you have to pack your bag before you go to the hospital.
[58:50] You normally put a toothbrush in there, some paracetamol, the music you want to listen to during giving birth.
[58:55] Anyway, in 1948, Lee Miller made her own list of what a woman should pack for.
[59:01] in her bag when she goes into the hospital.
[59:03] And this is what she says.
[59:05] Tomato catsup, Worcester-type sauce, horseradish sauce, and real mayonnaise.
[59:10] Smoked trout, patty de foie gras, red or black caviar, a tin of Nescafé, evaporated milk, tins and tins of grapefruit juice or tomato juice, lump sugar, lemons, a pepper mill, homemade biscuits, a freshly washed green salad, matched with a bottle of French dressing, a standing order of ice cream from Selfridges with a jar of chocolate sauce, a constant supply of ice cubes in a large jawed thermos jug...
[59:29] Finally, unless you want all your visitors to tear off to the nearest pub at opening hours, don't forget the bottle of gin.
[59:35] I mean, I feel like I served Catherine very poorly before we went off to Homerton Hospital, if that's what you're meant to have packed.
[59:41] But she becomes fascinated by food.
[59:44] She attends a Cordon Bleu course.
[59:46] She amasses a library of thousands of cookery books.
[59:50] And she starts to create these remarkable, we could say, surrealist recipes.
[59:54] I think we must say surrealist recipes.
[59:56] They are surrealist.
[59:57] Have you got a favourite?
[59:58] Well, there are a few.
[59:59] There's Muddle's Green Green Chicken.
[1:00:01] There's goldfish.
[1:00:02] There's cauliflower breasts.
[1:00:04] So the breasts are once again returning to the plate.
[1:00:07] There's Persian carpet.
[1:00:08] The one I like the most is called Bon Surprise.
[1:00:11] Ah, yes.
[1:00:11] So this is when a really vituperative, withering English critic called Cyril Connolly had come to stay at Farley Farm.
[1:00:20] And while they're sitting for dinner, he's saying, these bloody Americans, he's saying...
[1:00:24] They've got the moral fortitude of a marshmallow.
[1:00:26] They're all going to drown themselves in that disgusting drink Coca-Cola.
[1:00:30] So Lee Miller quietly disappears into the kitchen and she makes a pudding from marshmallows and Coca-Cola and she feeds it to Cyril Conner.
[1:00:40] He likes it.
[1:00:41] Yeah.
[1:00:42] He actually likes it.
[1:00:43] So she's also doing competitions.
[1:00:45] There's a prize.
[1:00:46] There's a competition announced by the Norwegian Tourist Board for open sandwiches.
[1:00:51] She submits some sandwiches.
[1:00:53] She wins.
[1:00:53] The smorobrod is what I've got.
[1:00:54] Beautifully pronounced.
[1:00:55] OK. She wins first, second and third prize.
[1:00:58] Yeah.
[1:00:59] She also, in 1974, right towards the end of her life, she does a white banquet for Man Ray, if we can remember Man Ray.
[1:01:06] Church, I'll tell you what's lovely about the Man Ray story is because in 1930, she'd been involved in the so-called Ball Blanc.
[1:01:12] And this is in homage to that.
[1:01:14] And she and Man Ray had helped stage this particular event in 1930.
[1:01:17] So it's all white food as 100 guests.
[1:01:20] And then the next year, I think this following spring, they're spending time together in London, because that same exhibition has come to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which after the war, Roland Penrose had been instrumental in establishing major centre for avant-garde culture in London, in Britain.
[1:01:36] And there's this lovely remark from one of Man Ray's assistant who's noticing that between Man Ray at this point in the 70s, bear in mind that when was that first meeting?
[1:01:45] 1929.
[1:01:47] There was such tenderness between them.
[1:01:49] Still then.
[1:01:49] It's kind of a beautiful idea.
[1:01:51] He'd forgiven her, obviously.
[1:01:52] Yes.
[1:01:53] Eventually.
[1:01:53] Took several decades.
[1:01:54] But there we are.
[1:01:55] So she's cooking right until the end.
[1:01:57] I mean, even in 76, she's not seeing so many people.
[1:02:00] She's come up with elderberry flower ice cream.
[1:02:04] Someone comes to sample it and says that she's not the kind of cook of whom Swiss punctuality could be expected, but there were always endless Camparis and soda to pass the time.
[1:02:14] But eventually, it's summer of 1977 in July, she dies at Farley Farm, Farley's of pancreatic cancer.
[1:02:25] She whispers to her son, Anthony, and she says, I feel I'm on the edge of an abyss.
[1:02:30] And if I let go, I will drop and go on falling forever.
[1:02:33] And a few days later, I think it's the 21st of July, 1977, she did let go and she died.
[1:02:38] Was she 70 when she died?
[1:02:40] That's so interesting because she's used that abyss image elsewhere.
[1:02:45] She actually spoke about life in London during the Blitz and said that it was like hanging on dizzily as to the edge of a precipice.
[1:02:53] Right.
[1:02:53] I think she has these images which stick with her.
[1:02:55] Yeah.
[1:02:56] So, yes, 1977.
[1:02:57] She must.
[1:02:58] I actually don't know.
[1:02:59] Was she already 70?
[1:03:00] She was 70 years old.
[1:03:02] What a what a 70 years.
[1:03:03] What a what a life she had squeezed into that period.
[1:03:06] Well, the amazing thing is by the end, she's known as this great celebrity chef, like I said at the beginning, like this kind of very provocative version of Mary Berry, perhaps.
[1:03:14] And she never quite publishes.
[1:03:15] She had this idea that she was going to publish a cookbook called The Entertaining Freezer.
[1:03:20] She collected loads of cookbooks.
[1:03:21] But in a sense, her great heroic phase as both surrealist photographer and...
[1:03:27] portraitist of very famous people in the late 20s and into the early 30s, and of course her time as a war reporter, as a war photojournalist, slightly in abeyance.
[1:03:37] I find this so, so sad when I think about Lee Miller.
[1:03:42] You know, 1945, as she emerges from the end of the Second World War, she is a towering figure, really.
[1:03:49] And she could have gone in various directions.
[1:03:51] She could have become...
[1:03:53] Cecil Beaton.
[1:03:54] She could have become Henri Cartier-Bresson.
[1:03:56] And she basically just gives up.
[1:03:58] She just ceases to be as a major creative figure.
[1:04:01] I know some scholars have said that she funnels her creative energy into food, but it's not the same as what she was making before.
[1:04:09] I just think, really, when you think about it, the last 30 years of her life, she produces virtually nothing artistically of merit.
[1:04:18] And I can't think of many figures who you could say that of.
[1:04:22] Most artists, they work until they drop.
[1:04:24] There are some people who might argue that here is the patriarchy at work.
[1:04:29] Possibly.
[1:04:29] You know, as a woman and as a photographer, she was doubly marginalised.
[1:04:33] And Roland persuades her to move to the country.
[1:04:37] And supposedly there's a quote where she says she gets so sick of it, fuck living in the countryside.
[1:04:42] Even though clearly she spends a great deal of time there.
[1:04:45] I wonder, though, whether it is just testimony to the absolute extent of how hard everything she experienced in the war.
[1:04:54] I mean, it did just profoundly change her.
[1:04:57] She no longer was interested, clearly.
[1:04:58] And, you know, her son said, very strange relationship with fashion.
[1:05:02] I mean, she didn't seem to care what she looked like at all.
[1:05:05] And she was obviously haunted, traumatised.
[1:05:09] Not haunted is too weak a word, isn't it?
[1:05:11] Properly traumatised by what she'd experienced in...
[1:05:14] in those moments in the war, which in a sense were her greatest moments as well, paradoxically, as an artist.
[1:05:20] She never came back from it, really.
[1:05:22] She never came back from those traumas, maybe traumas that started in her childhood, actually.
[1:05:27] Do you have a sense of how she then comes back onto the map?
[1:05:32] Well, I think no one really knows.
[1:05:33] When she dies in 1977, no one really knows what she's done.
[1:05:36] I mean, Tony Penrose, who wrote the great biography of her...
[1:05:40] He talks about having no clue whatsoever about what she had done.
[1:05:44] She kept it very quiet.
[1:05:45] She was almost ashamed of it.
[1:05:46] She wanted to leave it behind.
[1:05:48] It had caused her so much pain and suffering that she didn't really want to have anything to do with it.
[1:05:52] And it was only when he went into the loft in Farley Farm... Well, I think his wife found it, yeah.
[1:05:56] Yeah, and discovered this extraordinary cache of photographs and realised that actually his mother, the drunk, had actually been one of the great cultural figures of the 20th century.
[1:06:06] And her reputation has been growing really ever since.
[1:06:08] Yes.
[1:06:09] I mean, I think one of the things that I feel with her, and certainly I felt going around the Tate Britain show, which was seen by hundreds of thousands of people, is part of her interest is just the...
[1:06:21] I mean, it's so riveting, the biography.
[1:06:24] But she also, there's such a sense of, with her, like...
[1:06:28] just simple strength of will and character that is so compelling in addition to the images themselves, which reflect clearly that charisma and are amazing artistic works of right in many cases themselves.
[1:06:41] But she has this sense of courage, emancipation, liberation.
[1:06:48] She's a proper original.
[1:06:50] There's actually, there's just one little tiny little quote that I quite like to distill for me what I feel is her great legacy or the importance of her as a figure for the culture.
[1:07:03] And that was just in later life, a friend, someone she cooked with, described her as a genuine original and said that she, very short, abhorred manacles.
[1:07:12] Yeah.
[1:07:12] And I think that is true.
[1:07:14] You know, in so many ways, she could have been straightjacketed or been forced to conform.
[1:07:20] She flouted all expectations.
[1:07:22] And I think that is, in many ways for people today, wildly intoxicating and exciting, don't you?
[1:07:27] I think that's a great place to finish it.
[1:07:29] And Alistair, how thrilling it has been to talk through this remarkable life.
[1:07:33] Goodbye.
[1:07:34] Goodbye.
[1:07:40] Next week, we'll be delving into the weird and wonderful world of one of art history's true oddballs, Hieronymus Bosch.
[1:07:50] Next week, we'll be delving into the weird and wonderful world of one of art history's true oddballs, Hieronymus Bosch.

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