A pair of portraits by Lee Miller — the brilliant photographer who was the lover-muse of surrealist painter Man Ray and was famously pictured in Hitler’s bath in 1945 — is to be shown for the first time.
The portraits, taken in New York in 1933, show opera singers Bruce Howard and Edward Matthews as saints Teresa and Ignatius, in character for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by the United States composer Virgil Thomson.
The pictures, which will go on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Britain in February, were taken shortly before the work was premiered in Connecticut. The production made history as an opera with an all-black cast, a year before Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was staged.
According to Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, ”she deliberately manipulated only a few portraits, but with these she put a red filter in front of the camera to make the singers’ skin appear less black, a trick she’d picked up. I find it ineffably sad that they were pleased with this effect”.
The US-born Miller had just returned from Paris and her association with the surrealist movement, where she had modelled for Vogue and persuaded Man Ray to teach her photography.
”One of the reasons Lee was invited to take the pictures [for the production’s programme] was that she and the producer, John Houseman, were lovers, and she could be relied on not to press for payment until the show had opened and there was some box office income,” said Penrose.
The work was mounted at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, by enthusiasts called The Friends And Enemies Of Modern Music, which, according to a programme note, ”frankly recognised the valuable stimulating effect of controversy”.
The work’s libretto was written by Gertrude Stein. The opera is a surrealist drama based on the lives of the Spanish saints, but also a metaphor for the artistic life, so that St Teresa is based on Stein herself, and St Ignatius on James Joyce.
Of the singers who took the roles, little more is known of Bruce Howard. Edward Matthews went on to create the role of Jake in Porgy and Bess.
Richard Calvocoressi, who is curating the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, said he was keen to shift attention away from Miller’s colourful life and loves and on to her portraiture, which has been somewhat overshadowed by her photos of war-scarred Europe and the liberation of the death camps. ”What comes across is her interest in people, in what they said or thought — not just how they looked.” – Guardian Unlimited Â