Farley House

Farley House was the home of Lee Miller and her husband Roland Penrose, and is maintained by volunteers as a sort of living time capsule, exhibition space and a local surrealist centre in East Sussex.

Artistic influences converge at the house. Penrose painted but is perhaps best known for his writing, for example on Picasso who visited Farley and was photographed by Miller (who was his lover as well). A Picasso tile hangs above the cooker that Miller (who was also a gourmet cook who specialised in surrealist dishes) won in a competition – the tile is regularly scrubbed clean, following the belief in the house that art is to be used as part of, a way of, life. The visitor encounters many such objects around the house, including work by Penrose and Miller, although this would not have been on display while they lived there. The dining room is painted the same shade of yellow as Penrose’s beloved Farmers’ Weekly and chance relationships were celebrated by the surrealists. Pieces are playfully combined, King Kong dinner plates resting next to sculptures by famous artists.

Miller’s own story is almost too dramatic to be believable. She obviously had a very difficult childhood, since she was raped at 7 and then had to endure painful treatment for VD. She saw a psychiatrist and was encouraged to see sex as a purely physical act and our guide suggested she may have believed she could not get pregnant, although her son is now very involved with her archive.

She was discovered as a model when Conde Naste pulled her out of oncoming traffic in New York, saving her from being run over. She would go on to the cover of Vogue, becoming Steichen’s favourite model. He introduced her to the work of Man Ray, whom she sought out in Paris and became his model, assistant and lover. Miller is belatedly credited with discovering solarisation as a happy dark room accident, although Man Ray developed the process as his own.

Fig. 1 Glass Tears (1932)

Miller went on to be a Vogue cover photographer herself, and was an accredited war photographer and journalist for the magazine for whom she broke the story of the concentration camps with images from Buchenwald. Afterwards, controverially, she had her photograph taken (some sources say self-portrait, although she was with the photographer David Scherman and it seems generally accepted that they took a photograph of each other) cleaning the camp dust off in Hitler’s bathtub in nearby Munich.

Fig. 2 Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub (1945)

After the war Miller suffered from depression and drank to excess. This could be attributed to a various course, including her difficult childhood, PTSD from her war experiences and the struggle to adapt to rural life in a small cottage in East Sussex.

Also exhibited were a series of Trümmerfotographie pictures – rubble or wreckage photography originally used to describe images of bombed cities such as Dresden. Here Miller’s war images were hung opposite photographs by Giles Duley of Mosul and more lately Ukraine. Duley’s use of black and white emphasises the similarity with Miller’s images – nothing has changed. Don McCullin gave up war photography in exasperation at humanity’s continued capacity for violence, although unlike him I do believe that photographer’s can make a difference in a specific cause, although perhaps asking them to change the human condition is a step too far.

Fig. 3 A British Soldier in Camouflage (1941)

In addition was an exhibition of the work of the Camouflage Services Unit, a suitably surreal outfit set up by Penrose and friends to contribute to the war effort. Actually Penrose is credited with getting the army to take camouflage seriously, and drew on surrealist deception techniques and cubist disruption patterns to help develop his ideas. Art was the surrealist way to fight fascism.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Man Ray (1932) Glass Tears. At: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/from-the-cover-of-vogue-to-the-bathtub-of-hitler-lee-millers-fierce-and-fascinating-life-as-a-war-55960 (Accessed 14.8.2022)
2. Scherman, D. (1945) Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub. At: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/from-the-cover-of-vogue-to-the-bathtub-of-hitler-lee-millers-fierce-and-fascinating-life-as-a-war-55960 (Accessed 14.8.2022)
3. Lee Miller Archives (1941) A British Soldier in Camouflage. At: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/from-the-cover-of-vogue-to-the-bathtub-of-hitler-lee-millers-fierce-and-fascinating-life-as-a-war-55960 (Accessed 14.8.2022)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Duley, G. Trümmerfotografie. At: https://www.thestoryinstitute.com/trummerfotografie (Accessed 14.8.2022)
2. Abrams, L. (2019) From the Cover of Vogue to the Bathtub of Hitler: Lee Miller’s Fierce and Fascinating Life as a War & Fashion Photographer. At: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/meet_the_artist/from-the-cover-of-vogue-to-the-bathtub-of-hitler-lee-millers-fierce-and-fascinating-life-as-a-war-55960 (Accessed 14.8.2022)
3. Blume, L. (2022) The Art of War: How the Surrealists Helped Upend Camouflage and Redefine Modern Battle. At:https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a39367835/wwii-surrealist-camouflage-lee-miller-roland-penrose-salvador-dali/ (Accessed 14.8.2022)
4. https://www.farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk/ (Accessed 14.8.2022)
5. BBC. Great Lives – Lee Miller, War Photographer and Model. At: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000c4qc (Accessed 14.8.2022)