Surrealist Lee Miller

Surrealist before she knew of the movement Lee Miller was ‘caustically brilliant, yet totally loyal, unpretentious, human and intolerant of sham. She was a consummate artist and a consummate clown; at once an upstate New York hick and cosmopolitan grande dame; a cold, soignée fashion model and a hoyden… She was a mechanical ‘tinker’, in the sense that her friend [the artist] Alexander Calder once called himself ‘just a tinker’. She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman’ described David E. Scherman, LIFE photographer and her very close friend. Lee Miller was one of the most original photographic artists of the 20th century, her Surrealist eye informed everything she did. Her work presents the world in a way that encourages us to view it in a different manner.

A Surrealist before she even knew of the movement, Lee Miller was one of the most original photographic artists of the twentieth century. David E. Scherman, LIFE photographer and Miller's close friend, described her as "caustically brilliant, yet totally loyal, unpretentious, human and intolerant of sham. She was a consummate artist and a consummate clown; at once an upstate New York hick and cosmopolitan grande dame; a cold, soignee fashion model and a hoyden. . . . She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman." The Surrealist eye informed everything Miller did, and her work presents the world in a way that encourages us to view it in a different manner. Written and collected by her son Antony, Surrealist Lee Miller amasses more than one hundred full-page images from throughout the artist's life as an attestation to her wonderful way of seeing.