When Lee Miller met Picasso

During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins, where she was greeted with a wide-eyed grin. ‘This is wonderful – the first Allied soldier I’ve seen, and it’s you!’ the artist exclaimed, reaching up to place his hand affectionately around her neck.

Miller had just escaped house arrest for breaching the terms of her press accreditation by entering a combat zone. The PR office of the US Army had dispatched her – one of just four American female photographers they granted an official commission – to Saint-Malo in the mistaken belief that the fighting there was over. As bombs fell, Miller stood by with her camera and, according to her son Antony, caught the use of napalm on film; her negatives were later seized by the censors. She spent her four-day confinement sleeping it off and writing a 10,000-word article on the siege for Vogue.

The choice of publication seems unlikely unless you know that Miller had begun her career as a fashion model. The New Yorker was picked up by Mr Condé Nast himself as she strolled idly into the path of a car but became better known for posing in Hitler’s bathtub as an up-yours to the Nazis following her visit to Dachau. As she made her way surreptitiously through Paris for the liberation, her eye turned only too naturally to the celebratory clothes worn by the other women – the ‘full floating skirts’, the ‘tiny waist lines’. She, for her part, was still dressed in shirt and slacks.