The muse steps off the pedestal
In the pictures on the walls, certain images recur. The line of a woman's neck, the curve of her side from breast to hip, the lovely wide and still mouth. Some of the images are photographs, some are paintings barely recognizable as portraits. They are the work of several men but depict only one woman. Lee Miller, according to the title of the exhibition that will be at the Getty through June 15, was the "Surrealist Muse."
In other eras, in other rooms, the face of the muse is clearer. In the statuary of ancient Greece, she is one of nine demi-goddesses able to bestow genius on the deserving. At the Tate Gallery in London, she fills an entire room of Pre-Raphaelite paintings -- their creators had many models, but it was Elizabeth Siddal's face, framed by her famous flowing hair, that dominates the early work, now as Beatrice, now as Ophelia. Thousands of miles and a century away, in Chadd's Ford, Penn., a square-jawed woman with braids and an unreadable gaze appears, filling the canvases and sketchbooks of Andrew Wyeth.
Nor do painters own the muse. The words of Dante and Poe and Fitzgerald repeatedly evoke and pay homage to the one woman who mattered, the one woman who could ignite art with a glance. For Dante, she was Beatrice, glimpsed when still a child; for Poe his young cousin-wife, Virginia; for Fitzgerald, the doomed Zelda. The muse was not always young or kind; Norah Joyce famously thought little of husband James' chosen career even after he'd immortalized her as the ecstatic Molly Bloom. But for many artists, mostly male, the muse was both woman and ideal. More than an object of desire, she was that which inexplicably stood between them and the yawning, empty dark.
"Give all to love," wrote Emerson.
Obey the heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse,
Nothing refuse.
For Emerson, the muse was more ether than flesh, the intangible spirit found in nature, or art itself, that made creation possible. Lee Miller would come to adopt a similar attitude when, in her mid-20s, she traded one end of the lens for the other. The second and third rooms of the Getty exhibition chronicle her shift from subject to artist, and while her early work echoes Man Ray and the surrealists, Miller quickly shook off the shadows of the muse to become, perhaps, the last of her kind.
"The muse never really reinvented herself," L.A. artist Eileen Corwin says. "But Lee Miller did."
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