Lee Miller’s Dialogues with the Avant-Garde

Abstract

In 1937 Lee Miller, who is best known for her intersectional double career as model and photographer, produced Collage, a 28 × 21.5 centimeter work that makes use of modernist collage techniques using cutup elements deriving from Miller’s own photography and other materials and thus a product of a problematized biographical documentation and its interaction with other products associated with the artist’s milieu (Figure 10.1). Collage has rarely been discussed by scholarship on Miller’s work, seemingly being anomalous in an oeuvre which is regarded as principally photographic. The lack of critical engagement with this work seems to conform to conventional Western conceptions of oeuvre and canon and also reaffirms a tendency in criticism of Miller’s work to restrict oeuvre and canon to a limited and repetitively addressed selection of works. This chapter argues that Collage maps out an intricate network of dialogues and situates Miller in relation to several avant-garde traditions.