Miller's elegant eye
Lee Miller's place in the history of photography is based on her diversity of styles, the celebrity of her subjects, and - as one of few female war photographers - her heroic coverage of the Second World War.
Her work stretches from stylish Thirties Vogue fashion shoots and portraits of key early-20th-century European artists to the first images from Dachau concentration camp. The 120-something photographs exhibited in this small but broad-ranging show reveal an enduringly sharp and elegant eye, and an underlying attraction to startling incongruities, like the self-portrait in Hitler's former bathtub.
Eight years after Miller's death in 1977, her son Antony uncovered negatives at their Sussex home, and began printing (he appears there, aged three, in a tender 1950 photograph with Picasso). His mother's celebrated social circle is represented in intimate portraits of Picasso's fashionably bohemian contemporaries, the friends she made after moving to Paris from New York, in 1929.
But the two opening images - an elegant self-portrait for a 1932 Vogue feature about Alice bands, and the eerie 1930 portrait "Tanja Ramm" of a friend's head encased in a bell-jar - encapsulate her early swing between fashion and art photography - from Beaton's Mayfair to Man Ray's Paris, where the classy, former Condé Nast model landed, aged 22.
A newly surreal eye and pioneering photo-techniques learned from her former teacher and lover, Man Ray, transform fashion shoots with shadows, solarised halos, and reflective surfaces, in the double images of Man Ray and her husband, Roland Penrose (1946), caught in a mirror, and sculptor Lesley Henry (1943) shot into a teapot's distorting glaze.
For several decades, Miller immortalised friends like Picasso, Arp, Ernst, Miró, Magritte and Cocteau, at work and play, and in England, turned her lens on contrastingly conservative writers and artists (T S Elliot, Stephen Spender, Alec Guinness), and dramatically changing images of women - from the Edwardian formality of Ivy Compton-Burnett taking tea, to the trouser-clad writer Martha Gellhorn and Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White.
Lee Miller: Portraits runs concurrently with a small, moving exhibition of mostly monochrome photographs documenting the life - and death - of Mexico's iconic artist, Frida Kahlo. Both are foretastes of major summer retrospectives: Lee Miller at the V&A Museum, and Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern.
Until 30 May. Information:020 7306 0055
