Lee Miller de-husking corn, Farleys Garden, East Sussex, England c1960 by Roland Penrose [FF0981] © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
Chapter 1. Lee Miller
Antony Penrose (director of the Lee Miller Archives, photographer) recalled his mother’s style as impossible to reduce to convention. Lee Miller approached objects the same way she approached life: intuitively, fearlessly, and without concern for expectation.
Lee Miller de-husking corn, Farleys Garden, East Sussex, England c1960 by Roland Penrose [FF0981] © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
While developing the concept for Olexandra Galerie, I found myself repeatedly returning to LEE MILLER (1907 - 1977). She was one of the first figures I felt drawn to explore. Early in my Art History studies at university, I came across the famous photograph of her seated in Hitler’s bathtub, taken shortly after she and David E. Scherman arrived in Munich at the end of the Second World War. A striking and unsettling image that demanded a closer look, compelling me to understand the woman behind it. Her presence seemed to surface again and again. I would come across photographs by renowned artists like Man Ray or paintings by Picasso, only to later realize that it was her. Appearing, reappearing, shifting roles as both subject and muse.
She was a tall, striking woman, with short hair and a fiercely independent spirit. In the 1920s, she was celebrated as the embodiment of the modern woman: daring, stylish, and endlessly charismatic. A true flapper of her era. As I began to explore the many lives she lived, I was struck not only by the scale of her experiences, but by the strength, intelligence, and complexity with which she navigated them. Yet it is not only her extraordinary story that draws me in. It is the more intimate, easily overlooked details that continue to hold my attention. In archival photographs and fragments of her life, I find myself wondering about the textures of her daily world: the colours she gravitated toward, the jewelry she selected, the fabrics she wore, the objects she chose to keep near. These quiet elements begin to form a different kind of portrait, one that feels closer, more human, and more revealing. Instead of looking only at MILLER as a figure in art history, I became curious about her almost as one might become curious about a friend. About the habits, preferences, and peculiarities that shaped her daily life.
MILLER was a photographer, surrealist, Vogue contributor, model and one of the first female war photographers during the second world war. She was a muse to artists like Man Ray, Picasso, Edward Steichen, Jean Cocteau and many more. Yet her aesthetic legacy extends beyond the images she made or appeared in. It lives in her taste in the way she dressed, arranged her home, and surrounded herself with objects that were curious, humorous, and deeply personal.
Much has already been written about her. Books, exhibitions, and even a film have traced the outlines of a life that feels almost implausible in its intensity. While researching MILLER, there were moments when disbelief felt unavoidable. The scale of what she lived through and the fearlessness with which she moved through it is staggering. I kept imagining her moving through these moments with her Rolleiflex camera in hand. Quietly observing, documenting, and stepping into places few photographers, let alone women, had ever been. Understanding what LEE MILLER did is one thing. Understanding how she lived is another.
With the generous help of her son ANTONY PENROSE and her granddaughter AMI BOUHASSANE, I was able to ask questions that are rarely addressed. This conversation looks at MILLER through a different lens: her personal tastes, her humour, her contradictions, and the small choices that reveal the person behind the legend.
Do you remember a particular ritual to the way Lee Miller dressed in the morning?
Antony (Laughing): Not when I knew her! She had one or two outfits that she would simply climb into. Usually a pair of navy trousers and a loose-fitting navy blue top. We used to call it Lee’s uniform. She always dressed for comfort, especially when she was cooking or hosting one of her big gatherings in the kitchen. At home in Farley Farm (East Sussex), she never dressed to be glamorous.
In London, it was different. If they were going out to a cocktail party, she could look very smart. And when she needed to dress up, it became quite a performance. I remember big occasions like openings or events. There would be a great deal of fuss and commotion: trips to the hairdresser, painting her nails. I could never quite understand how, out of such a chaotic process, something so well-groomed and polished could emerge. But when she stepped out the door, she looked absolutely stunning. Lee rarely had clothes made especially for her; more often, she chose garments off the rack, unless they came from friends during her earlier years. She maintained a close friendship with Elsa Schiaparelli, and within the archive there is a dress believed to be by Schiaparelli dating back to the 1930s.
“Can you imagine going to the shops, and your mom is wearing a toilet seat cover on her head, and everybody knows it’s a toilet seat cover?”
There’s a photograph of Miller standing beside Henry Moore’s Mother and Child sculpture, she is wearing two large brooches in the shape of hands on her collar. They resemble the style of Schiaparelli, were they by her?
Ami: Lee had a large collection of objects in the form of hands, she was clearly fascinated by them. There were hands displayed in her study, she owned paperclips shaped like hands, and several hand shaped brooches, some of which are attributed to Schiaparelli. She also had a coral hand with a fake fly attached to it, worn as a kind of joke brooch. Hands were a real recurring theme for her. Unfortunately, the particular brooches in that photograph are not in the Lee Miller Archives, so they will remain unidentified.
Antony: She even had books about how a person’s character could be read through the shape of their hands. Hands mattered to her. And what she collected ranged from expensive pieces to absolute junk, but as long as it was in the shape of a hand and interestingly made, she wanted it.
You’ve just spoken about her fascination with hands, and of course that ties directly to her surrealist background. Especially the way she worked with fragmented or “severed” body elements, both in her own work and in collaboration with Man Ray. There’s such a strong sense of wit in those gestures. Do you think that same surrealist playfulness and sense of humor carried through into her personal style?
Antony: There was a craze for people buying these knit toilet seat covers with elastic around them that clipped over the toilet seat. And she bought several of these in different colours and used them as a hat. She would put them to cover her hair and the idea was that the knit would keep the cooking oils and the fats out of her hair. Deep down she was quite the scientist, she knew that there was a lamp that miners would use called the Davy safety lantern, that would prevent the gasses from exploding by having the flame in a cylinder of mesh, the mesh captured the particles. With her “hat” she thought she was using the same Davy principle to arrest the particles of oil and fat. But then it became a fashion statement and she would wear it wherever. She really loved the unusual side of things. But can you imagine going to the shops, and your mom is wearing a toilet seat cover on her head, and everybody knows it’s a toilet seat cover?
Were you embarrassed in that moment?
Antony (Laughing): Yes, I was embarrassed. But she couldn’t care about that. Embarrassing people was something she did quite naturally.
Do you remember a moment when clothing or a particular object expressed something essential about her as a person?
Ami: For a long time, Lee has mostly been recognized and recorded in history as a beautiful muse or model. It has taken us quite a while for her to be fully recognized for her work in her own right. Her practical, everyday clothes were also very much a reflection of who she was as a person. One of the pieces she often wore was a sleeveless sheepskin gilet. One of these was recycled from a First World War army jacket. She turned it inside out so that the wool lining, which would normally be hidden inside, was on the outside, while the red exterior of the jacket was on the inside. It shows her practicality and her dislike of waste. It’s also very much a sign of the time, since there were many shortages during the Second World War.
“When my mother looted Hitler’s apartment, there were objects she took. One of them was a beautifully made powder compact with face powder inside it... It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever touched.”
Miller worked for Vogue, and was deeply embedded in the world of fashion as a photographer, writer, model, and muse. Yet after the war, that aspect of her life seems to fade. I wonder if her relationship to dress was ever truly personal, or if it belonged more to that moment and context?
Ami: What is clear is that she knew fashion intimately. Even during the war years, she moved fluidly between worlds: reporting from battlefields and then returning to Paris to cover couture. With a shortage of fashion correspondents, she was often responsible not only for the photographs but also for the written descriptions sent to Vogue. Working in black and white, she had to translate garments into words. Describing colour, fabric, cut, texture, and silhouette with precision. These captions reveal a deep and practical understanding of clothing. Seen in this light, the deliberately unpolished way she dressed at Farley Farm feels less accidental and more intentional. It suggests a conscious decision not to perform fashion in her private life. A choice made by someone who understood its language perfectly, and knew when to step away from it.
Antony: She started modeling for George Lepape and Edward Steichen and by that time she was already introduced to the front edge of high fashion in America. And then she came to Paris and she started being a photographer in her own right using all the knowledge she had from America. She was modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene in Vogue and getting to know the designers, the seamstresses, getting to know all the backstage people that make a fashion show. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of fashion. But fashion never became something she wanted to be part of, except as a writer or photographer.
Ami: If you look at some of her photography in the early 30s and some of her sketches she challenges the whole idea of fashion and the objectification of women. There’s some drawings she’s made of a model who has daggers thrown around her and then there’s the protest image which she took of the severed breasts on a plate. In that particular period she is emerging from being a model and she’s frustrated that she’s not being recognized as a photographer and a woman in business in her own right. She’s really kicking back from being objectified and the way women were looked at in the fashion world.
We often associate people with a particular scent or fragrance. Do we know if Miller had any affinity for perfumes, or a signature scent she was drawn to?
Antony: She wasn’t particularly sophisticated about perfume. I remember her having very plain, ordinary eau de cologne, things like that. Occasionally people would give her beautiful scents as gifts, but it wasn’t something she was especially obsessed with. When my mother looted Hitler’s apartment, there were two objects she took. One was a beautifully made powder compact with face powder inside it. One half has a mirror, the other a compartment with an ostrich-feather puff. It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever touched. We normally keep it cold, and when it’s been out for an hour or so, the perfume starts to come off the powder. It’s the same scent that would have been on Eva Braun’s face…It’s so creepy and unsettling.
She also took a large perfume spray bottle from Eva Braun’s dressing table. It’s about twenty centimeters tall, with a heavy square base and a chrome top. Originally it had a tube and a bulb that atomized the perfume. For years it sat on Lee’s dressing table in London. As a child I was fascinated by it because it was such an extraordinary object, so large and heavy. I would ask about it and she would never say where it came from. She’d simply say, “It’s a perfume spray.” If I asked how it worked, she’d say, “It doesn’t work anymore, it’s lost its bulb.” And that was that. It was quite sculptural, and she kept it there. It’s a strange thing to choose as a souvenir.
Ami: It almost feels like it was as a reminder to her, that people who commit monstrous acts, or are involved in monstrous systems, can appear completely ordinary.
Antony: The banality of evil.
"LEE would wear Cartier and Calder rings with what most people might call ‘valueless jewelry.’ She would go to the kind of stores where young teenagers would shop, and buy pieces that were completely outrageous, odd in shape or color.”
I was wondering about the house at Farley Farm in East Sussex. When Miller and your (grand)father Roland Penrose moved there in 1949, were there particular rooms or objects that felt most like her?
Ami: The kitchen. She designed it herself, working with architects. It was inspired by the fitted kitchens she had seen in America, and everything about it is really her. The whole story of her learning to live with PTSD and cope with the traumas she witnessed during the war is bound up in that room. She reinvented herself there as a gourmet cook and spent the last twenty years of her life being celebrated for that, rather than as a war correspondent, a fashion photographer, or a model. It’s my favourite room in the house because everything in it feels like her. The design and the atmosphere. To me it represents how she learned to cope with a mental health struggle that nobody really understood at the time. Today we talk about triggers and PTSD, but back then she was very much on her own. The room is a monument to her strength and character.
Her study was another important space. She kept all her cookbooks there and would spend hours consulting them, planning meals while listening to really, really, loud opera music. If you go around the house, generally the wall colourings are down to Roland. But it’s the small details like the soft furnishings like the curtains the texture or like the blue glass sparkly doorknobs that she chose for her kitchen, she used the small details.
The house felt so bright and joyful to me. Penrose was known for his love of flowers and his appreciation for beauty, do the vibrant colours we see in the interiors reflect mostly his influence, or was that her choice as well?
Ami: My grandmother actually chose many of the colours herself. The sofa, which looks a bit faded now, used to be a very bright neon yellow. The curtains were a pea green colour, and the window cushions were in Shocking Pink, a nod to her friendship with Elsa Schiaparelli. There was also a rocking chair upholstered in patchwork felt in very bright colours, so when you walked into the room it was really vibrant. It may be that Roland chose lighter wall colours, like the pale pink, because with all those bright furnishings it might otherwise have felt overwhelming. But Lee definitely embraced colour.
Sitting Room, Farleys House, Chiddingly, England 2023 by Jim Holden [Media 6081] PRESS IMAGE
Did she have a favourite colour, and was colour important to the way she experienced the world around her?
Antony: Lee and Roland both seemed to be very fond of blue, if you look around the house.
Ami (laughing): When Lee talks about her taste in colour, she actually mentions Christmas. She felt there was far too much red and green involved, so she preferred to introduce blue and pink instead.
Antony: Colour was very important to her. She once wrote in a report about a siege in Malo-les-Bains: “I’ll never see acid yellow and grey again, like where shells burst in the snow, without seeing also the pale, quivering faces of replacements, grey and yellow with apprehension. Their fumbling hands and furtive, short-sighted glances at the field they must cross.” That sensitivity to colour was always present in her writing and observation. She described things in a way that was remarkably visual. It was simply part of how she saw the world. You can take the fashion model out of the studio, but you can’t take the fashion out of the model, you know?
Lee Miller was surrounded by some of the most important artists of the twentieth century, from Picasso to Miró. Your (grand)father, Roland Penrose, was also a remarkable artist and collector. Did Lee herself collect art as part of daily life?
Antony: She bought stuff in her earlier years. She owned paintings by Max Ernst, Georges Braque, Man Ray and so on. She also received many pieces as gifts from artist friends. Over time, she developed her own distinctive collection. What’s remarkable is that she was never focused on monetary value, what mattered to her was the intrinsic character of the work.
For example she had a beautiful ring made for her by Alexander Calder, it was probably very valuable, but that was not what appealed to her. It was the strange and chunky shape it was modeled on a vertebrae of a mammal, so it has these two big flanges sticking out of it. It was quirky, unusual, and somehow marvelous. For Lee, even something without conventional value could captivate her, as long as it expressed something extraordinary.
There’s this striking contrast in how Miller approached objects. Wearing pieces by Alexander Calder alongside what might be considered deliberately “valueless” or unconventional pieces. How should we understand that juxtaposition? What did she see in those combinations?
Antony: Lee would wear Cartier and Calder rings with what most people might call ‘valueless jewelry.’ She would go to the kind of stores where young teenagers would shop, and buy pieces that were completely outrageous, odd in shape or color. Things kids were wearing on the street and she would wear them too. In the ’60s, there was a craze for Dayglo colors, vibrant pinks and yellows, and she would have broad plastic bracelets in neon pink, maybe a nod to Schiaparelli pink. She never wore jewelry to signal status; diamonds held no interest for her. Even her classical pieces were quirky. One brooch she adored was a gold-alloy piece shaped like four horses: heads and legs separate, bodies fused into one, like four fingers of a hand. About six centimeters long, it would sit perched on her shoulder. Everything in the ’60s felt flamboyant, and Lee embraced it. She could walk into a Mary Quant shop and come out with a huge gold-tone chain. It was plastic, but to her, it was perfect.
Elizabeth Lee Miller on the deck of the SS Minnekahda starting for France, New York, USA 1925 by Theodore Miller [Media 5142] ©Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
There must have been so many artworks in the house, were there any that were clearly her favorites?
Antony: There were a couple. One was “Nu Sur La Plage” by Pablo Picasso from 1936. It was actually the first Picasso my father ever bought. It’s a really significant piece. It’s about the duality of Olga and Mary Thérèse: Olga is spiky, Mary Therese luscious. Lee loved it because, beyond those two personalities, she saw it as representing two aspects of women: the capacity to be forceful, even harsh, and the capacity to be sensuous and abundant.
There’s a story about my father, Roland, who was quite obsessed with the survival of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was planning to put that painting up for auction in 1960, and a woman came to collect it. Lee looked at her and said, “Where’s that going?” I’m taking it to Sotheby’s, the woman replied. Lee told her to put it down and that if the painting went, she went too. The poor woman fled. Right now, the painting is on loan to The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
Another favorite was a small painting by Roland called Flight of Flies, from 1949. Why she loved it, I really don’t know. A museum once approached Roland to buy it, and she simply said, “No. That’s my painting.”
You often hear about artists’ brilliance, but less about their humanity. How did Miller's moral and emotional compass show itself in her life beyond the art?
Antony: Lee was a singular individual with a profound care for those who were vulnerable. She loved gathering people around her and taking care of them. Think about the experiences that shaped her life. She had walked on the grounds of concentration camps, seeing people starving to death. After that, food became deeply important to her. Feeding others, cooking, hosting dinners, these were acts that came from a profound place of empathy.
Her protective instincts were also shaped by her own early trauma. When she was seven, she was raped, which gave her an inherent determination to safeguard particularly young people. I witnessed this myself once at an opening at The Institute of Contemporary Arts. I couldn’t fully see what was happening, but there was a young girl being pressured by a powerful man. Out of nowhere, Lee stepped in, gently pulled the girl away, and said, “Oh, how nice to see you! It’s been ages. There’s someone I’d like you to meet over there.” She removed her from the situation with such subtlety. I didn’t understand all the dynamics, but my wife Suzanna asked me afterward, “Do you understand what just happened?”
—
In her later years, the centre of Lee Miller’s life shifted. At Farley Farm, the urgency of war and the intensity of image-making gave way to something quieter, yet no less deliberate. She turned to cooking with the same instinct and curiosity that had shaped her photography, experimenting freely, often with a playful surrealist sensibility.
I have always been fascinated by the way objects can carry traces of a life. Researching Lee Miller only deepened that feeling. Through the photographs, clothing, interiors, and personal memories, a portrait slowly began to emerge: the colours she loved, the objects she kept close, the rooms she inhabited, the people she surrounded herself with. Her sense of style was never confined to what she wore, or even to the images she made. It extended into the way she lived. Her sensitivity to beauty never disappeared, even after witnessing the darkest parts of human history. It simply transformed, finding quieter expression in domestic life, cooking, collecting, friendship, and the atmosphere she created around herself.
I am deeply grateful to the Lee Miller Archives for granting access to their remarkable collection of images, and to Antony Penrose and Ami Bouhassane for generously sharing their memories, insights, and reflections. This interview would not have been possible without their time, warmth, and willingness to reveal the intimate details of Lee Miller’s life and legacy.
Homepage Image credits: Lee Miller (Mirror Series), Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London, England, 1946 by David E Sherman [Media 4643] © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
![Image: Picnic, Cannes, France, 1937 by Lee Miller [Media 3697] © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk](http://olexandragalerie.com/cdn/shop/files/Copyright_LeeMillerArchives_Picnic_Cannes_France_1937.jpg?crop=center&height=1228&v=1779369661&width=1024)