Lee Miller's photo of Picasso foreshadows selfie culture
This week: Lee Miller - Friends at Farleys at VG&M, Nunnery Norheim & Jeff Young in Thornton Hough, Sale Arts Trail, Keep Hoping Machine Running at Bridewell Studios, The Whale Revisited in Whitehaven
“Photographer, surrealist, war correspondent, model and gourmet cook” are the five nouns singled out to describe Lee Miller on her archive’s website. She is gloriously hard to pigeon-hole - a woman who stepped away from the camera’s gaze to control it, an artist’s muse who became part of the Surrealist avant-garde, a wartime photojournalist who witnessed horrendous atrocities who made a home for her family in the quiet Sussex countryside.
Yet so often she is described in relation to the men in her life, her husband Roland Penrose and their many friends, who were of course brilliant, talented and celebrated but with whom she could hold her own.
Dr Amanda Draper, curator of art and exhibitions at Victoria Gallery & Museum in Liverpool, is hoping that visitors to a new show of Miller’s photography will be left with an idea of the singular woman she truly was.
She says: “Lee Miller was so extraordinary during her whole life. Because of her extraordinary beauty she was funnelled into being a model, and was immediately successful, but broke out of that to forge her own way - and I think not take no for an answer.
“She basically did what she wanted to do and I think there’s a message there for anyone who feels restricted in their own life.”
The VG&M exhibition, which focusses on Miller’s time at Farleys House, arose out of a happy coincidence. The Lee Miller Archive, which houses more than 60,000 images and documents, offered to lend a few pictures to galleries around the country to mark the 75th anniversary of Miller and Penrose buying Farleys. As there was a gap in the VG&M’s exhibition programme, Amanda asked if they could have more.
Lee Miller - Friends at Farleys features 35 pictures she took of the couple’s friends when they came to stay. Their names read like the answer to a dream dinner party parlour game: Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Richard Hamilton and Reg Butler and many more.
Miller posed them around the farm, carrying out menial tasks such as shelling peas or unfurling a hosepipe. They are charming and funny, and show a different side of some of art history’s most famous names.
Amanda says: “I wanted the exhibition to look at the 1950s when she was in Farleys House. She was more or less coming towards the end of her public career. She was still doing some Vogue shoots and fashion shoots, but she was very much a homebody, interested in cooking. She was a gourmet cook.
“She had a whole roster of creative friends that visited - artists, writers, people from the theatrical realm. Farleys is really out in the wild. There was a nearby railway station so I'm presuming people came by train or they got picked up from London. But it would have been an epic trek, which is I suppose why the guests stayed over. They made themselves at home, and I think that's the flavour you get from photographs.
“From the images I've looked at, Lee Miller comes across as the dominant personality. It's her personality that formed the mood of the house.”
Picasso appears posing next to a way-sign in a picture that could almost be a holiday snap. In another, New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg wrestles with a hosepipe in a that could either be a scene from an old horror movie (is it trying to strangle him?) or a work of abstract sculpture.
Amanda’s favourite is entitled Slug Death - in which publisher and art patron Peter Gregory is “kneeling in the garden with this big can of horrible noxious stuff”.
“I just found that very, very funny,” she says. “He was so well known in his field, very eminent, but he wasn’t beyond making a fool of himself.”
Amanda is keen for visitors to be motivated by Miller’s photographs when creating their own for social media: “Photographic imagery is so important these days as a means of communication. I hope they will take inspiration particularly from the way Lee Miller poses her friends and sends them up using just everyday household items and in an everyday household setting,
“You don't need to go and pose on a Caribbean island, or against somebody else's front door to make interesting photographs that say something about you and the people you love.”
Lee Miller - Friends at Farleys is at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool, until November 30.
Tales of the city from different perspectives
It’s fascinating how a place can shift its identity depending on who is experiencing it. A shortcut down a dark street can be relaxing or worrying according to who is treading it. The burst of karaoke from a pub doorway is either a welcoming hug or the signal to hurry by.
Duo Nunnery Norheim’s and author Jeff Young’s impressions of Liverpool seem to be on each other’s wavelength - they both capture the sense of a city built on layers of history, and embrace its scrappy, defiant edginess more than its tamed facade.
The two came together in a gig at Thornton Hough Village Club last week - a venue that incidentally has recently added theatre to its regular programme of music, quizzes and comedy - transporting their audience to a place both familiar and unsettling.
Young’s childhood impressions of Merseyside opened the show, in a reading from his book Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadow Play, sharing his first encounters with a character that he has felt compelled to repeatedly write about. “Elsie Barmaid”, whose night time trysts in the street beneath his bedroom window he mistook for the whispers of a floating dead woman draped in veils, has remained a poignant memory. In one incarnation, she haunted a hidden garden near Hope Street in Young’s one-woman play Rag and Bone for the Liverpool Everyman’s unforgettable Anthology season in 2010 (in which Lizzie Nunnery also had a work).
Then it was off to Amsterdam for a series of excerpts from his upcoming book Wild Twin, the “hallucinogenic” story of his escapades in early-adulthood - a whirl of words and unexpected anecdotes that form vivid pictures in your mind as you listen. A mantra to live by offered in the pay-off of one extract: “Don’t fuck with goldfish owned by retired nuns.”
The pictures painted by Nunnery Norheim’s lyrics are perhaps less unconventional, but as just as evocative. Their newest album, I Saw the City, released last autumn, could be taken as a love song to Liverpool, though in many cases the place featured in its lyrics remains anonymous. But if that’s the case then it’s a bittersweet romance, with hints of loss and regret.
Magical Times, a soaring piece that could be the keynote ballad in a musical, is at first uplifting with its imagery of dancing wild and free under a sky filled with the ghosts of stars, but shifts its tone as singer and playwright Lizzie Nunnery almost whispers the question: “And where am I?”
They paid tribute to their place in Liverpool’s long literary heritage with the album’s title track, inspired by Adrian Henri’s vision of the city, conjuring images of discarded fish and chip papers and explosions of seagulls to a soundtrack of bells. And, in Moving to the Sticks, told the humorous tale of a city dweller who fully plans to escape to the countryside but will probably never get around to it.
There were other pieces too - songs from previous albums and the duo’s theatrical collaborations, including their folk drama Narvik, which toured the UK and Norway in 2017.
Nunnery is very much the front woman of the duo, her soft yet powerful voice filling the room as she beats the rhythm with her arm. Meanwhile, Vidal Norheim creates a rich soundscape on a range of instruments, including a scene-stealing vibraphone, that, along with their narrative lyrics, makes their music so distinctive.
“This old town won’t hold me down,” Nunnery sings determinedly. Yet the combination of their performance and Young’s reading was proof that you can never cut the bonds that tie to the place that formed you - and that can very often be no bad thing.
Nunnery Norheim will be performing at The Narrative songwriter showcase and networking night at The Arts Bar, Liverpool, on May 9. More details and a link to their new album here.
Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadow Play by Jeff Young is published by Little Toller. His new book Wild Twin will be released in September.
We’re Also Buzzing About…
Sale Arts Trail: One for the diary as it’s not taking place until September, but you’ll want to start saving your pennies now. This year marks the trail’s 10th anniversary of opening up artist studios and showcasing indie makers and businesses. Keep an eye on its Insta for updates, and mark the date - September 14-15.
Keep Hoping Machine Running: Bridewell Studios’ latest exhibition is named for one of Woody Guthrie’s 1943 New Year’s resolutions, which also included “Dance better” and “Help win war - beat fascism”. I have re-read those four words over and over with different stresses and love how you can interpret them in a whole variety of ways, so I’m intrigued to discover how the work of eight painters from the UK, France and Spain tie in. They include Lara Davies, David Horton, Sumuyya Khader, Gareth Kemp and Henry Miller. It’s on for this weekend only: March 30 to April 2, 12-4pm.
The Whale Revisited: In 2022, David Gaffney was writer-in-residence for The Whale project, an interactive live theatre installation in Whitehaven, Cumbria, that created “a strange real-but-imagined encounter with a beached whale”. He is now launching a collection of short stories inspired by the whale and people’s interactions with it, at the town’s Beacon Museum on April 13.
Thank you for reading this week’s Stored Honey. Paid members should look out for their April cultural highlights email dropping into their inboxes early next week.
If you’d like me to write about your arts event, you can get in touch on X/Twitter, in the comments or by dropping me a line at tostoredhoney@gmail.com.
Have a great week and enjoy the bank holiday weekend,
Laura
