““Another Form of Her Genius””: Lee Miller in the Kitchen

Abstract

Lee Miller was a Vogue cover girl in New York in the mid-to-late 1920s. In the early thirties she was Man Ray's muse, student, and lover in Paris, where she also worked as both photographer and model for Paris Vogue, as well as for numerous courtiers, including Patou and Scheperelli. The mid-thirties found her with her own successful photographic studio back in Manhattan. In WWII she served as British Vogue's official war correspondent and was one of the first photographers to enter liberated Dachau and Buchenwald. In 1957 Miller passed the Cordon Bleu course at their Paris school. Generally overlooked, if not overtly dismissed, Lee Miller's gourmet phase in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed in this article as ““another form of her genius.”” Always ahead of her time, Miller was a mezza maven and a tapas enthusiast. The home she shared with her husband, Roland Penrose, in the English countryside was frequently filled with weekend guests drawn from the international modern art world. For many of them she created ““food pictures,”” some inspired by their own works of art. She collected and invented recipes, often based on her extensive travels and sometimes as practical jokes and rebukes.