The Many Faces of Lee Miller Head to Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago will present a survey of the model-turned-Surrealist and then war photographer Lee Miller's extraordinary career.

Aptly titled Lee Miller: Fearless, the show runs from August 29 to December 7 in Chicago, having opened at Tate Britain in London and then traveled to Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne where it closes on August 9. She arrived aged 20 as a model, soon met Man Ray and became his assistant and lover, and then became into an artist in her own right.

The exhibition features around 250 prints and archival materials, many from the Lee Miller and Roland Penrose Archive. Miller and Penrose, an artist and later Picasso biographer, toured the US in 1946, visiting old friends from their Paris days, including Man Ray in California and Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Arizona. While they made their way west on trains via Chicago, the Second City did not feature in any of the photographs they took on their cross-country trip, however.

Interest in Miller’s many lives and photographic achievement has been growing steadily since her only child, Anthony Penrose, began curating his mother’s archive after her death in 1977. He discovered boxes of her photographs and negatives in the attic at Farleys House, the family home in the Sussex countryside, which became a Surrealist bolt hole.

Earlier this year, CAMERA, the Italian Center for Photography, presented a show of her work, and in 2025 the images she took in Romania formed an exhibitioin at The King’s House in Viscri. She visited the country twice, once in 1938 with Penrose and again immediately after WW2 as a correspondent for Vogue.