Arte is showing a new documentary by Teresa Griffiths on Lee Miller. I'm a fan of Lee Miller's work but the documentary is feminist in that awful kind of way, reducing everything Lee Miller did to being a woman - an "exceptional" woman, of course (with "fire in her eyes").
Central topic of the film is not so much Lee Miller's artistic work. As usual with women artists (think Frida Kahlo), it is about how she defied all the conventions of womanhood in the 1930s and 40s, being a liberated woman as a model, a muse, a fellow artist among the surrealists in Paris, and then a photographer in war. "What a woman!" ("krasse Frau!") were the comments (by men) on social media.
In the documentary, the comments were also interesting. Artist Jessie Mann, for instance, commented how there is nothing wrong about Lee Miller's father taking naked pictures of his teenage daughter (only at the end of the film we learn that Lee Miller was sexually abused as a kid while on vacation in New York, something her family was aware of, which makes these naked pictures by the father in her teenage years not less bizarre).
And then there is the famous picture of Lee Miller sitting with naked torso next to Man Ray and Roland Penrose (both buttoned up) at a picknick. Everyone is looking very happy. Somehow this leads to a discussion of sex (I wonder if that would be the case if men had a naked torso and not women). Jessie Mann comments: 'I'm so proud of all the sex she had. Way to go! Makes me so happy that in a moment in history at least one woman had a good time.'
Isn't it funny how we seem to think that sex must have been awful in the past? Sex is just one big success story of progress that culminates in our times. How restricted sex must have been in the 1930s! Except then for the sex of the surrealists, which obviously was avant-garde.
Also, Lee Miller apparently looses her good looks after the war, so the documentary (I couldn't see that in the pictures, she looked great as always). But I guess that fits with the tragic storyline of Lee Miller, depressed from the war, being dragged by Roland Penrose from the city to the country. The drinking started, the kids came, the dull country life... to be described as beautiful in all that mediocrity is just not feasible, isn't it.