In this week’s blog post, Costume Society News Editor Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the Lee Miller in Print exhibition at the innovative space Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Opening on 21 November 2023, the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is currently showing an in-depth exhibition of ground-breaking fashion model and photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977).
Hosted in one large, modernist room, ten glass cases are used to tell Miller’s journey. These cases are separated into several key cities, mirroring her own global travels, including her early career as a model in New York City and her life in Cairo. Kampen-Prein’s extensive research into Miller’s published oeuvre saw her delve into the pages of Surrealiset periodicals and lifestyle magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Items on show in the exhibition include original photographs, magazines and documents andare sourced from global collections including the Lee Miller Archives.
Miller appeared in print as a model, photographer and writer over more than five decades and her exciting and eclectic career from the 1920s as a model fronting Vogue covers, a photographer, a muse, Surrealist to a war correspondent in Europe and then a Sussex based Surrealist chef, are all covered in this exhibition.
From 1927, Miller made the rare move from in front of the camera to behind the camera establishing herself as a successful photographer pioneering the use of innovative techniques such as solarisation. As the exhibition pointedly notes, today’s audiences are often used to seeing Miller’s work as individual framed images hung on a wall in a gallery space. But during Miller’s time, these images would often appear in magazines, surrounded by text, other images, sometimes even cropped to suit a print layout. “When viewing Miller’s original prints, it is easy to forget that most of them, ranging from solarized portraits to fashion and war photographs, were commissioned by commercial and avant-garde magazines. And presented in magazines such as Vogue,” says Saskia van Kampen-Prein, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
A particular highlight is the easily recognisable original 15 March 1927 US Vogue paper cover image showing an illustration of Miller by Georges Lepape as well as Miller’s own camera. Photographs are blown up and decorate several of the walls, and there is an interactive photo frame where visitors can become a model for the day and secure their own cover images.
The depot itself is an interesting destination, a large bowl-shaped building covered in mirrored panels with a large open atrium at its core. This futuristic space is pointedly not a museum, but instead it is the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility. There are no permanent exhibitions on show and artifacts are exhibited according to their climatic requirements rather than by a specific era or art movement. More than 154,000 objects are housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates. Visitors can wander throughout the building and get up close to curators’ studios.
Lee Miller in Print runs until the 18 February 2024 and there is an extensive book of the same name published by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. A symposium on 27 January 2024 will see an international panel of speakers discuss how her life and work were reflected in lifestyle magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and relatively unknown Surrealist magazines published during Miller’s lifetime.
