Love Letters: Bound in Gold Handcuffs

In the pre-digital age, before email and cell phones, letters carried an importance that few who were not part of those times will understand. The words on these pages between Lee Miller and Roland Penrose carry the nuances and emotions of love and desire, passion and anger in a deeply confidential way.

In the pre-digital age, before email and cell phones, letters carried an importance that few who were not part of those times will understand. The words on the pages of a love letter carry the nuances and emotions of love and desire, passion and anger in a deeply confidential way.

The urgency and the intimacy of the writers can be clearly felt in this collection of letters between Lee Miller, Photographer, and Roland Penrose, Surrealist Artist, as they conduct their long-distance romance. It begins with their meeting in Paris in 1937 and runs to 1939 when Lee Miller left her Egyptian husband Aziz Eloui Bey in Cairo and joined Roland Penrose in London at the start of World War 2.

In this real-life romantic drama, the period and their connections give us a supporting cast that includes Dora Maar and Picasso, Nusch and Paul Eluard, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, Ady Fidelin and Man Ray.

The nearly 300 pages of love letters in this book show that as the relationship grew it produced and supported some of the world’s best loved art and photography. The letters have never been published before and have only been read by a handful of people since they were first written.

Lee Miller (1907 – 1977) entered the photography world in New York as a model to the great photographers of the day such as STEICHEN, HOYNINGEN-HUENE and GENTHE. In 1929 she went to Paris and worked with Man Ray quickly succeeding in establishing her own studio. Returning to New York in 1932, she set up her own studio. In 1937 she met Roland Penrose and in December 1942 she became a correspondent accredited to the US Army. She followed the US troops overseas and was probably the only woman combat photo-journalist to cover the front-line war in Europe. It is mainly for the witty Surrealist images which permeate all her work that she is best remembered. Sir Roland Penrose is best known as a Surrealist artist and for his biography of his friend Picasso, Picasso: his life and work (1958), followed by books on Joan Miró (1970), Man Ray (1975), Antoni TÃ pies (1978), and his autobiography Scrap Book, 1900 – 1981 (1981). He organized the highly acclaimed Picasso retrospective for the Tate Gallery in 1960, followed by other key exhibitions at the Tate and major galleries. He co-founded the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in 1947 but returned to painting in the last decade of his life, with exhibitions of his collages in London, Paris and Brighton.