Marlene Wagman-Geller

Oct 03, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

   

(Being a great photojournalist is) “a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.” –Lee Miller 

 

Farleys House & Gallery (opened 2006) 

East Sussex, England 

 

William Shakespeare in his play As You Like It wrote, “One man in his time plays many parts….” And one woman who played many parts was Lee Miller whose intrepid spirit lives on in her country retreat, a music box that recalls its chatelaine and the era of surrealism is a Sussex setting.   

       

An extraordinary woman was born in an ordinary town referenced in Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw said, “Charlotte Poughkeepsied in her pants.” Her father, Theodore, was an engineer; her mother, Florence, was a nurse from Canada who struggled with her mental health. Theodore’s hobby was photography such as December Morn that revealed the seven-year-old standing in the snow wearing only bedroom slippers. A family friend raped Lee shortly before her eighth birthday leaving her with gonorrhea that entailed agonizing treatments. Several private schools expelled Lee; a teacher described her as, “an idle student and an active rebel.” Another issue the family faced was in the 1960s when John, Lee’s brother, began to cross dress. Always supportive, Lee would send him clothes such as a fur coat. Lee proved a supportive sister and sent him clothes and a fur coat. In 1964, policed arrested John-also known as Felicity-near his home in New York state for violating a vagrancy law that prohibited people disguising themselves in a manner that would conceal their identities. Consequently, he lost his job as a pilot with Eastern Airlines.

       

After a stint at Vassar College, Miller enrolled at The Art Students League of New York. While crossing a street, she literally stumbled onto her professional modeling career when Condé Nast, the founder of Vogue, pushed her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. Due to her ethereal beauty, Lee made her debut on Vogue’s 1927 cover. Her image of the sexually liberated flapper with the blond bob launched dozens of plum photoshoots. She became a fixture on the social scene and partied with luminaries such as Josephine Baker and Dorothy Parker. Initially thrilled with being the It Girl of Manhattan, disillusionment set in, and she departed for the bohemia of Paris.  

       

Montparnasse was the neighborhood of surrealist photographer, the Jazz Age’s rendition of Andy Warhol, Man Ray, who had started life as Emmanuel Radnitzky from Brooklyn. Lee showed up at Ray’s favorite café, Le Bateau Ivre, where she introduced herself as his new apprentice. Dumbstruck, he told her, “I’m leaving for a holiday in Biarritz.” “I know you are, and I’m coming with you,” was her response. The thirty-nine-year-old Ray and the twenty-year-old Lee embarked on a road trip the next day. The Americans in Paris developed a strong bond, and Lee served as Man’s protégée, muse, collaborator, and lover. 

      

Dozens of celebrities had posed for Ray–Wallis Simpson, Coco Channel, Virginia Woolf; however, his most magnetic muse was Miller. He delighted in concentrating on various parts of her anatomy and produced Lee Miller’s Legs with Circus Performer, Miller’s Lips, Observatory Time, La Priere that showcased her backside. Jean Cocteau, a flamboyant member of the Paris avant-garde, coated her body in butter and transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet. A glass manufacturer sold champagne flutes modeled after her breasts. One of her lovers, Pablo Picasso, painted six portraits of her; the most memorable portrayed her with a green mouth and a vagina resembling an eye. The celebrity and fashion photographer, Cecil Beaton, altered her gender to dovetail with his homosexual proclivities, and only lusted after the model by convincing himself that she resembled a “sun kissed goat-boy on the Appian Way.” Theodore Miller arrived in Paris from Poughkeepsie and took pictures of his nude daughter.   

      

After years of posing for men: her father, Vogue photographers, the Surrealists, Lee decided “she would rather take a picture than be one,” and she obtained a position at French Vogue. Her subjects included Charlie Chaplin, Colette, Marlene Dietrich, and Maurice Chevalier. On vacation in Paris, she met railroad magnate Aziz Eloui Bey who left his wife to marry Lee. Man’s reaction to Lee’s desertion was a self-portrait where he portrayed himself sitting in a chair, noose around his neck, gun in hand. As the mistress of a beach house in Alexandria, a mansion in Cairo, she oversaw a fifteen member staff. Her hobbies were snake-charming lessons, camel racing, and desert safaris. Another past time was scandalizing the stuffy Cairo bourgeoisie, and she announced, “If I have a letch for someone, I hop into bed with him.” When not using her camera to capture the Pyramids, Sphinx, and the desert near Siwa that René Magritte used as inspiration for his 1938 painting, Le Baiser, she had to keep her demons at bay.  She described her interior landscape as, “a water-soaked jigsaw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design.”  

       

To escape the heat and her husband, Lee took a solo trip to Paris; at a party, she met the artist and art collector Roland Algernon Penrose whose right hand and left foot had been dyed a vibrant blue-colored to match surreal artist’s Max Ernst’s blue hair. At the time, Penrose was separated from poet Valentine Boué, and shared Lee’s bed. Her betrayal of her husband, Bey, led to her confession, “My ‘always’ don’t seem to be much, do they?’” Despite respective spouses, the couple summered in a Cornish farmhouse with pal Henry Moore and joined Picasso outside Cannes.   

       

The idylls of the surrealists ended the day Hitler invaded Poland, and the lovers departed France for Hampstead, London. British Vogue commissioned her to document war chic, and she snapped shots of women in factory overalls and turbans. In frustration, she wrote her parents, “It seems pretty silly to go on working for a frivolous paper like Vogue, tho it may be good for the country’s morale it’s hell on mine.” The war became her muse, and Lee turned her lens on Blitz-ravaged London. Upon earning accreditation as a war correspondent–and, after ordering a uniform from the pricey Savile Row, she followed the Allied armies, “What’s a girl to do when a battle lands in her lap?”  

         

Her lens captured the bizarre family portrait of the Nazi treasurer of Leipzig surrounded by his wife and daughter, all dead from suicide, while another photograph was of an SS prison guard floating underwater in a canal. Besides capturing the customary carnage of battle such as the D-Day aftermath, she took shots of civilians such as French female collaborators with shaved heads and the corpse of a German woman. The war photographer trailed the Allied advance throughout Europe; the blonde Venus huddled in a foxhole shocked the soldiers. The GIs liked her as she was intrepid under fire, could match them swear word for swear word.   

        

After trudging through the newly liberated concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, Lee wrote, “I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.” The day Hitler and Eva committed suicide, Lee was in Munich where the Army’s 179th Regiment had established headquarters in the dictator’s apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz. Lee wiped her boots, thick with the cremated ash of Dachau, on the bathroom mat. Lee and photographer David E. Scherman placed a photograph of the Fuhrer in the bathtub beside the soap dish. Scherman then photographed Lee in the tub. She remarked, “Mein host was not at home.” Another image captured Lee smoking in Eva Braun’s bed in her nearby home. Tormented by what she had witnessed, Lee holed up in the Hotel Scribe in Paris to process the horror of the Holocaust, the terror of the foxholes.  

      

On a train headed for an assignment in Switzerland, at age forty, Lee discovered she was pregnant, a situation she regarded as scarier than the Front. The bohemian Miller and Penrose took the bourgeoisie road of marriage to legitimize their son, Antony. Her trepidation of impending motherhood is reflected in Penrose’s painting of his pregnant wife with her fetus portrayed as a green lizard.  In 1947, the couple purchased Farley Farm that proved their forever home.  

 

After Penrose’s knighthood, Lee became Lady Penrose; she referred to herself as Lady Penrose of Poughkeepsie. Suffering from postnatal depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, she self-medicated with alcohol. Placing her yesterday under wraps, she tried to distance herself from her mine-laden past. Nevertheless, she remained in contact with Man Ray, who was often a guest at Farley House. In 1975, she attended her old friend’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The meeting was bittersweet for the former first couple of the Paris Surrealists. Lee’s’s beauty had diminished; Ray was in a wheelchair.  

          

Fighting her demons, Lee was not always the perfect parent, and Antony was embarrassed by his outspoken mother. He remarked that what was on her mind was what was in her mouth. Cooking provided a creative outlet, and Lee earned a Cordon Bleu diploma and created culinary oddities: blue spaghetti, green chicken, pink cauliflower. Dinner guests were luminaries such as Henry Moore, Sonia Orwell, (George’s widow), Picasso, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gilot. Post dessert, guests indulged in communal baths. After his mother’s passing from cancer in 1977, Antony said of her, “She was way, way beyond difficult. I mean, God, she was impossible.”   

       

 By the time of her passing, there had been a mother and child reunion; their bond strengthened when Antony’s wife, Suzanna, discovered Lee’s wartime mementoes in the attic. The photographs served as a diary that helped Antony make peace with his mother’s memory. The epiphany changed Antony from a dairy farmer to the curator and chronicler of Lee’s life. He had gained insight into his mother’s tortured memories that she referred to as her “winged serpents.”  

        

Farleys House & Gallery: Peering through the keyhole of Farley Farms, in the hamlet of Muddles Green, Sussex, is to partake of a surreal world nestled in the British countryside. The museum’s guest book is a whos who of twentieth century artists; a page holds Picasso’s signature with the date of his visit: 11th November 1950. The farm is a curiosity shop where a Picasso gravy jug rests alongside mugs by local artists and thrift store finds such as stuffed owls. A cabinet holds a mummified rat that Penrose discovered on a hot water pipe alongside a 2,000-year-old Mayan sculpture. The dominant feature of the dining room is the fireplace that Penrose painted with the protective deity of Farley Farms: a surreal sun with human attributes that matches the hue of the walls. The kitchen still retains Lee’s mixing bowls, cookbooks, and recipes. The backdrop to the stove is a Picasso painted tile, a glazed colorful fac. Docent Antony Penrose commented of the tile, “It has survived 60 years of bacon fat.” The house also holds another Picasso title where a man fondles a woman’s left breast. Unique Farley Farms bric a brac is a figure of a wooden lady, painted by Penrose, that used to be the figurehead of a ship, a transplant from a Cornish shipyard. What might have proved disconcerting for Antony was his home’s large nude photograph of his mother.  

     

Inscribed on the stairs is a poem by surrealist poet Paul Eluard. In the ground-floor sitting room are mementoes of the war years: a gunner’s binoculars, a fabric star of David, the Hermes Baby typewriter still holding a paper, and Rolleiflex camera.  The most startling photograph is of Lee in Hitler’s bathtub, her boots bearing the filth of Dachau.  

     

The garden holds the sculpture The Fallen Giant that appears to be the remnants of a man buried in the perfect English garden. Antony scattered the ashes of Sir and Lady Penrose in the grounds–on the giant, the vegetable patch, and under an ancient chestnut tree. In the fairy tale, the miller’s daughter spun straw into gold. The twentieth century Miller’s daughter, through her photographs, created black-and-white gold. 

 

The Window of Her World: A favorite sight was the Long Man of Wilmington, 227 foot chalk giant lying on the South Downs, holding two walking sticks. Penrose reproduced the image on his fireplace, adjacent to the sun god.

 

 

 

 

 

  

       

An extraordinary woman was born in an ordinary town referenced in Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw said, “Charlotte Poughkeepsied in her pants.” Her father, Theodore, was an engineer; her mother, Florence, was a nurse from Canada who struggled with her mental health. Theodore’s hobby was photography such as December Morn that revealed the seven-year-old standing in the snow wearing only bedroom slippers. A family friend raped Lee shortly before her eighth birthday leaving her with gonorrhea that entailed agonizing treatments. Several private schools expelled Lee; a teacher described her as, “an idle student and an active rebel.” Another issue the family faced was in the 1960s when John, Lee’s brother, began to cross dress. Always supportive, Lee would send him clothes such as a fur coat. Lee proved a supportive sister and sent him clothes and a fur coat. In 1964, policed arrested John-also known as Felicity-near his home in New York state for violating a vagrancy law that prohibited people disguising themselves in a manner that would conceal their identities. Consequently, he lost his job as a pilot with Eastern Airlines.

       

After a stint at Vassar College, Miller enrolled at The Art Students League of New York. While crossing a street, she literally stumbled onto her professional modeling career when Condé Nast, the founder of Vogue, pushed her out of the way of an oncoming vehicle. Due to her ethereal beauty, Lee made her debut on Vogue’s 1927 cover. Her image of the sexually liberated flapper with the blond bob launched dozens of plum photoshoots. She became a fixture on the social scene and partied with luminaries such as Josephine Baker and Dorothy Parker. Initially thrilled with being the It Girl of Manhattan, disillusionment set in, and she departed for the bohemia of Paris.  

       

Montparnasse was the neighborhood of surrealist photographer, the Jazz Age’s rendition of Andy Warhol, Man Ray, who had started life as Emmanuel Radnitzky from Brooklyn. Lee showed up at Ray’s favorite café, Le Bateau Ivre, where she introduced herself as his new apprentice. Dumbstruck, he told her, “I’m leaving for a holiday in Biarritz.” “I know you are, and I’m coming with you,” was her response. The thirty-nine-year-old Ray and the twenty-year-old Lee embarked on a road trip the next day. The Americans in Paris developed a strong bond, and Lee served as Man’s protégée, muse, collaborator, and lover. 

      

Dozens of celebrities had posed for Ray–Wallis Simpson, Coco Channel, Virginia Woolf; however, his most magnetic muse was Miller. He delighted in concentrating on various parts of her anatomy and produced Lee Miller’s Legs with Circus Performer, Miller’s Lips, Observatory Time, La Priere that showcased her backside. Jean Cocteau, a flamboyant member of the Paris avant-garde, coated her body in butter and transformed her into a plaster cast of a classical statue for his film, The Blood of a Poet. A glass manufacturer sold champagne flutes modeled after her breasts. One of her lovers, Pablo Picasso, painted six portraits of her; the most memorable portrayed her with a green mouth and a vagina resembling an eye. The celebrity and fashion photographer, Cecil Beaton, altered her gender to dovetail with his homosexual proclivities, and only lusted after the model by convincing himself that she resembled a “sun kissed goat-boy on the Appian Way.” Theodore Miller arrived in Paris from Poughkeepsie and took pictures of his nude daughter.   

      

After years of posing for men: her father, Vogue photographers, the Surrealists, Lee decided “she would rather take a picture than be one,” and she obtained a position at French Vogue. Her subjects included Charlie Chaplin, Colette, Marlene Dietrich, and Maurice Chevalier. On vacation in Paris, she met railroad magnate Aziz Eloui Bey who left his wife to marry Lee. Man’s reaction to Lee’s desertion was a self-portrait where he portrayed himself sitting in a chair, noose around his neck, gun in hand. As the mistress of a beach house in Alexandria, a mansion in Cairo, she oversaw a fifteen member staff. Her hobbies were snake-charming lessons, camel racing, and desert safaris. Another past time was scandalizing the stuffy Cairo bourgeoisie, and she announced, “If I have a letch for someone, I hop into bed with him.” When not using her camera to capture the Pyramids, Sphinx, and the desert near Siwa that René Magritte used as inspiration for his 1938 painting, Le Baiser, she had to keep her demons at bay.  She described her interior landscape as, “a water-soaked jigsaw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design.”  

       

To escape the heat and her husband, Lee took a solo trip to Paris; at a party, she met the artist and art collector Roland Algernon Penrose whose right hand and left foot had been dyed a vibrant blue-colored to match surreal artist’s Max Ernst’s blue hair. At the time, Penrose was separated from poet Valentine Boué, and shared Lee’s bed. Her betrayal of her husband, Bey, led to her confession, “My ‘always’ don’t seem to be much, do they?’” Despite respective spouses, the couple summered in a Cornish farmhouse with pal Henry Moore and joined Picasso outside Cannes.   

       

The idylls of the surrealists ended the day Hitler invaded Poland, and the lovers departed France for Hampstead, London. British Vogue commissioned her to document war chic, and she snapped shots of women in factory overalls and turbans. In frustration, she wrote her parents, “It seems pretty silly to go on working for a frivolous paper like Vogue, tho it may be good for the country’s morale it’s hell on mine.” The war became her muse, and Lee turned her lens on Blitz-ravaged London. Upon earning accreditation as a war correspondent–and, after ordering a uniform from the pricey Savile Row, she followed the Allied armies, “What’s a girl to do when a battle lands in her lap?”  

         

Her lens captured the bizarre family portrait of the Nazi treasurer of Leipzig surrounded by his wife and daughter, all dead from suicide, while another photograph was of an SS prison guard floating underwater in a canal. Besides capturing the customary carnage of battle such as the D-Day aftermath, she took shots of civilians such as French female collaborators with shaved heads and the corpse of a German woman. The war photographer trailed the Allied advance throughout Europe; the blonde Venus huddled in a foxhole shocked the soldiers. The GIs liked her as she was intrepid under fire, could match them swear word for swear word.   

        

After trudging through the newly liberated concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, Lee wrote, “I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.” The day Hitler and Eva committed suicide, Lee was in Munich where the Army’s 179th Regiment had established headquarters in the dictator’s apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz. Lee wiped her boots, thick with the cremated ash of Dachau, on the bathroom mat. Lee and photographer David E. Scherman placed a photograph of the Fuhrer in the bathtub beside the soap dish. Scherman then photographed Lee in the tub. She remarked, “Mein host was not at home.” Another image captured Lee smoking in Eva Braun’s bed in her nearby home. Tormented by what she had witnessed, Lee holed up in the Hotel Scribe in Paris to process the horror of the Holocaust, the terror of the foxholes.  

      

On a train headed for an assignment in Switzerland, at age forty, Lee discovered she was pregnant, a situation she regarded as scarier than the Front. The bohemian Miller and Penrose took the bourgeoisie road of marriage to legitimize their son, Antony. Her trepidation of impending motherhood is reflected in Penrose’s painting of his pregnant wife with her fetus portrayed as a green lizard.  In 1947, the couple purchased Farley Farm that proved their forever home.  

 

After Penrose’s knighthood, Lee became Lady Penrose; she referred to herself as Lady Penrose of Poughkeepsie. Suffering from postnatal depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, she self-medicated with alcohol. Placing her yesterday under wraps, she tried to distance herself from her mine-laden past. Nevertheless, she remained in contact with Man Ray, who was often a guest at Farley House. In 1975, she attended her old friend’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The meeting was bittersweet for the former first couple of the Paris Surrealists. Lee’s’s beauty had diminished; Ray was in a wheelchair.  

          

Fighting her demons, Lee was not always the perfect parent, and Antony was embarrassed by his outspoken mother. He remarked that what was on her mind was what was in her mouth. Cooking provided a creative outlet, and Lee earned a Cordon Bleu diploma and created culinary oddities: blue spaghetti, green chicken, pink cauliflower. Dinner guests were luminaries such as Henry Moore, Sonia Orwell, (George’s widow), Picasso, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gilot. Post dessert, guests indulged in communal baths. After his mother’s passing from cancer in 1977, Antony said of her, “She was way, way beyond difficult. I mean, God, she was impossible.”   

       

 By the time of her passing, there had been a mother and child reunion; their bond strengthened when Antony’s wife, Suzanna, discovered Lee’s wartime mementoes in the attic. The photographs served as a diary that helped Antony make peace with his mother’s memory. The epiphany changed Antony from a dairy farmer to the curator and chronicler of Lee’s life. He had gained insight into his mother’s tortured memories that she referred to as her “winged serpents.”  

        

Farleys House & Gallery: Peering through the keyhole of Farley Farms, in the hamlet of Muddles Green, Sussex, is to partake of a surreal world nestled in the British countryside. The museum’s guest book is a whos who of twentieth century artists; a page holds Picasso’s signature with the date of his visit: 11th November 1950. The farm is a curiosity shop where a Picasso gravy jug rests alongside mugs by local artists and thrift store finds such as stuffed owls. A cabinet holds a mummified rat that Penrose discovered on a hot water pipe alongside a 2,000-year-old Mayan sculpture. The dominant feature of the dining room is the fireplace that Penrose painted with the protective deity of Farley Farms: a surreal sun with human attributes that matches the hue of the walls. The kitchen still retains Lee’s mixing bowls, cookbooks, and recipes. The backdrop to the stove is a Picasso painted tile, a glazed colorful fac. Docent Antony Penrose commented of the tile, “It has survived 60 years of bacon fat.” The house also holds another Picasso title where a man fondles a woman’s left breast. Unique Farley Farms bric a brac is a figure of a wooden lady, painted by Penrose, that used to be the figurehead of a ship, a transplant from a Cornish shipyard. What might have proved disconcerting for Antony was his home’s large nude photograph of his mother.  

     

Inscribed on the stairs is a poem by surrealist poet Paul Eluard. In the ground-floor sitting room are mementoes of the war years: a gunner’s binoculars, a fabric star of David, the Hermes Baby typewriter still holding a paper, and Rolleiflex camera.  The most startling photograph is of Lee in Hitler’s bathtub, her boots bearing the filth of Dachau.  

     

The garden holds the sculpture The Fallen Giant that appears to be the remnants of a man buried in the perfect English garden. Antony scattered the ashes of Sir and Lady Penrose in the grounds–on the giant, the vegetable patch, and under an ancient chestnut tree. In the fairy tale, the miller’s daughter spun straw into gold. The twentieth century Miller’s daughter, through her photographs, created black-and-white gold. 

 

The Window of Her World: A favorite sight was the Long Man of Wilmington, 227 foot chalk giant lying on the South Downs, holding two walking sticks. Penrose reproduced the image on his fireplace, adjacent to the sun god.

 

 

 

 

 

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