fundación pablo ruiz picasso
Lee Miller y Picasso: Evocación y Recuerdo
08.10.08 - 11:16 -
Pablo Ruiz Picasso with Anthony Penrose, Lee Miller's son, on his knee. / LEE MILLER
The exhibition
Lee Miller (1907, U.S.A. - 1977, U.K.) was a woman of many facets - a Surrealist artist, who collaborated with Man Ray, a beautiful model, a fashion photographer, a war photojournalist, and an exceptional portrait photographer. In addition to that, during the thirty-six years of their friendship, Miller took over a thousand photographs of Picasso.
Miller and Picasso might well have met in Paris in 1929, where she worked with Man Ray, or in 1930 when she had the lead role in Jean Cocteau's movie, Le Sang d'un poète. As chance would have it, it wasn't until August 1937 that the audacious American photographer and Pablo Picasso finally became acquainted. Their enduring friendship began when Miller went to Mougins on the French Riviera with her lover Roland Penrose, During that stay in Mougins, Picasso painted six portraits of Miller dressed as an Arlésienne.
This exhibition contains some of Lee Miller's intimate photographs of Picasso and the world that surrounded him. Some of these images have become so well-known that they are etched onto the popular imagination, even if very few people are actually aware that it was Lee Miller who took them. There are also photographs she took after World War II of her husband Roland Penrose's visits to Picasso, as documentation for his acclaimed 1958 biography, Picasso: His Life and Work. It was in preparation for that book that they travelled together to Malaga to immerse themselves in Picasso's childhood. The Miller-Penrose collaboration continued with numerous other publications on Picasso as well as books on the Spanish painters Miró and Tápies.
