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Work of pioneering photographer showcased
23.04.07
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The Victoria & Albert Museum has announced an exhibition on the New York-born photographer Lee Miller, 30 years after her death.
The Art of Lee Miller will feature some works that have never been exhibited before, as well as her celebrated portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Picasso.
Miller's images of the Second World War will also go on display at the V & A showcasing her work as the only official female photo journalist in combat areas.
Miller started her professional life at the age of 20 in front of the camera rather than behind it - as a Vogue cover girl.
She became muse to many of the period's greatest photographers, including Man Ray, who would become her lover.
The show, which opens in September and marks the centenary of her birth, will also focus on her work as one of the most remarkable Surrealist photographers of the early 1930s.
Miller established her own photographic studio in 1932, after leaving Ray and focussed on portraiture, fashion and advertising work.
She documented The Blitz for her first book Grim Glory while living in London.
Later, as a freelance war correspondent for Vogue, she captured the liberation of Paris as well as the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps and Adolf Hitler's Munich flat.
Life Magazine photographer David E Scherman photographed Miller in Hitler's own bath.
The Art of Lee Miller curator Mark Haworth-Booth said: "Lee Miller's life has been described as a jigsaw puzzle, now a hundred years after her birth (in 1907), this exhibition finally weaves together her many arts and tells the tale of one of the 20th century's most creative woman."
Antony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archives and Miller's son said: "It's wonderful that the V & A is holding an exhibition of such breadth to mark the centenary of my mother's birth."
Miller died in 1977 in Sussex, where the artist, who suffered from depression and alcoholism in the 1960s, lived for almost 30 years after marrying the English surrealist painter and poet Roland Penrose.
She did not live to see the rediscovery of her portraits, which were shown in a New York exhibition in the same year as her death.
The Art of Lee Miller runs from September 15 to June 6.
