Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism

The first exhibition to treat Man Ray and Lee Miller as collaborators rather than master and pupil, and to ask what each of them actually took from the other.

Phillip Prodger, then Curator of Photography at the Peabody Essex Museum, assembles roughly 115 photographs, paintings, drawings and manuscripts across 160 pages and some 100 plates, following the pair from Miller's arrival in Man Ray's Paris studio in 1929 through the solarisation experiments they made together and the decades of exchange that outlasted the affair. Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the museum's chief curator, and Antony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archives and Miller's son, contribute further texts. Merrell published the volume with the Peabody Essex Museum in 2011; the exhibition opened in Salem that June and travelled to the Montclair Art Museum and to the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 2012.

Man Ray (1890-1976) moved from New York Dada to Paris in 1921 and made the rayographs and solarised portraits that carried Surrealism into photography. Lee Miller (1907-1977), a Vogue model turned photographer, went on to shoot for British Vogue as a war correspondent, reporting from the liberation of Paris, Dachau and Hitler's Munich apartment.