Lee Miller’s Nude Bent Forward: phallic curves from a pioneering female surrealist
Bottom’s up ...
This suggestive upside-down image of a woman is all phallic curves: a marble-white, semi-abstract totem.
Bits and pieces ...
Surrealist photography is full of nude women, often headless and with their bodies arranged to suggest penises. True to Freud’s emerging theories, such images summon sexual undercurrents, while suggesting, implicitly, a straight male gaze.
Work that body ...
Lee Miller is clearly playing with that tendency here. Her lover at the time, Man Ray, was doing similar things in his series Anatomies, for which she collaborated with him and also posed.
Hard to swallow ...
Miller was interested in more than the sexual subtext, however. Just before her nude torsos, she had served up a disturbing comment on objectification: a severed breast fresh from a mastectomy.
Avant hard ...
As a lone woman within the surrealist scene, a sometime model and photographer for Vogue, when it came to female empowerment Miller was on the front line.
Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward, c1930. Photograph: Lee Miller Archives, England 2018.
Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain, The Hepworth, Wakefield, to 7 Oct