Lee Miller, photographed by *Life* magazine’s David E. Scherman in Hitler’s bathtub in Munich in 1945. The bath mat beneath her combat boots is smeared with dirt from the Dachau concentration camp.

*Portrait of Space,* photographed by Miller in Al-Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt, in 1937.

*Piano by Broadwood,* photographed in London in 1940.

Leonora Carrington, photographed in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, France, in 1939.

Irmgard Seefried sings an aria from *Madama Butterfly* in the bombed-out Vienna State Opera in 1945.

Artillery spotters in the Hôtel Ambassadeurs direct fire in Saint-Malo, France, in 1944.

*Picnic,* photographed on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, in Cannes, in 1937.

Margaret Bourke-White, of the 97th Bombardment Group, 8th Bomber Command, photographed in Northamptonshire, England, in 1942.

Auxiliary Territorial Service searchlight operators in South Mimms, in North London, in 1943.

Jean Cocteau, photographed in the Palais Royal arcade, in Paris, in 1944.

Edward Matthews as Saint Ignatius in *Four Saints in Three Acts,* photographed in New York in 1933.

A model, photographed for Pidoux in the *Vogue* London studio in 1939.

The performer Nusch Éluard, photographed in Mougins, France, in 1937.

A parachute packer, photographed in Somerset, England, in 1941.

Twentieth-Century Woman

A new book collects 100 images taken by Lee Miller, the intrepid photographer, war correspondent, and Surrealist muse, played by Kate Winslet in an upcoming film

By Celia McGee

This hasn’t yet been declared the year of Lee Miller, but it’s getting there. A Jazz Age cover model by accident and arresting beauty—and the subject of nude studies by her father during her tempestuous coming of age—Miller changed course with the announcement “I’d rather take a picture than be one.” The headline-making career she forged for herself absorbed Surrealism in concert with Man Ray and Elsa Schiaparelli, and took on more avant-garde ideas knocking about with Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau. She flashed through an early society marriage (to the Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey) and took traumatizing close-ups of combat during World War II that never left her haunted mind.

To commemorate this singular track record of achievements, and Miller’s inescapable glamour, next month the Gagosian gallery on New York’s Madison Avenue will mount “Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends,” a show that puts her in the company of Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Picasso, and the English Surrealist Roland Penrose, her second husband, who proposed to her with a poem and a pair of gold handcuffs. Their granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane, was heard from this week, with the publication of Love Letters: Bound in Gold Handcuffs, a book compiled from a stash of passionate letters between Lee and Roland that she discovered recently.