In the 1920s, Lee Miller was among the most glamorous women in the world: a Vogue magazine cover girl, a muse for artists like Picasso and Man Ray, and even the star of a Jean Cocteau movie.
She then moved behind the camera, setting up a photography studio, before making an extraordinary career shift during the Second World War as a fearless war correspondent who photographed some of the most remarkable images from the conflict.
Her story is portrayed in ‘Lee’, a biopic starring Kate Winslet that is released in Belgian cinemas today, following Miller from her childhood in Poughkeepsie to her final years in Sussex.
However, it skips over her time in Brussels, where Miller had a happy spell after its liberation in September 1944.
Left: Lee Miller at the Vogue offices. Right: British soldier Hardy Aimes at the Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels, taken by Miller.
Miller had joined Allied soldiers after D-Day and saw combat in war-torn Saint-Malo – the combat scenes in the movie are amongst the most visceral – before heading to Brussels.
She photographed the return to life in the city for the February 1945 issue of British Vogue, the magazine whose cover she once adorned. Her long feature article was titled ‘Brussels - more British than London’.
While photography was her passion, Miller also wrote extended picture captions and, as in this case, an entire accompanying article that evoked the spirit of resilience in the recovering city. Indeed, her opening line captures the character of the locals: “Deep in the atavism of the Belgians is Resistance.”
Miller, who had been part of the Surrealist set before the war, had visited Brussels six years previously. “Naturally I grabbed a phone book and tried to look up old friends.” That included artists René Magritte and Paul Delvaux – who she also photographed – and Paul van Hecke.
Magritte and Miller were already connected through art: the painter’s 1938 picture, Le Baiser, borrowed directly from a Miller photo, Portrait of Space, taken in Siwa, Egypt, in 1937.
Magritte and his dog taken by Lee Miller
Elsewhere, Miller wrote about aristocrats like the Countesses Madeleine and Therese d'Ursel, and Prince Bernhard of Holland. At one dinner, they all sign a tablecloth. Miller scribbled: "Je revois la Belgique avec les yeux d’amour" (I see Belgium with loving eyes).
Miller was struck by the British presence in Brussels: "Burly figures with accents of Manchester, Glasgow, and London." And she wrote about the enduring Anglo-Belgian bond: "The traditional Belgian love and admiration of the English is tangible and audible." Her own time in the city included a visit to Cinquantenaire Park to take pictures of Savile Row tailor Hardy Amies, who had spent the war as a secret agent, notably working with Belgian resistance groups.
Miller later rejoined the Allies as they pushed into Germany: her harrowing pictures of the Dachau concentration camp brought the horrors of the war to a wider public. She continued her photography after the war, but it trailed off after her only son was born. She later suffered from depression and alcoholism, and largely withdrew from public life.
But Miller’s time in Brussels – at least in her telling – represented a moment when she had a joyful purpose.
