Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition maintains, for art history. If the latter is true, it is not least for emphasizing that artists are people, and that it is out of their (often flawed) natures, relationships, and communities of influence that some of the most vital art emerges.

It can be claimed that both Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976) and Lee Miller (1907–1977) deserve to be even better known. On Man Ray’s part, perhaps the mercurial quality of his endeavor over so many years makes it difficult to bring him into focus. He was a painter, photographer, sculptor, and designer; a mischief-maker and self-promoter; a proto-Conceptual artist; and a creator of images of classical beauty malgré lui. Miller is another story altogether, and a comparatively shorter one. A cover girl turned artist, she followed her time in Paris with a peripatetic career as an art, fashion, portrait, and, finally and definitively, intrepid wartime photographer. In the early 1950s, suffering post-traumatic stress that manifested as acute depression following the war, she retreated from her professional life as an artist to live on a farm in England with her husband, the British Surrealist painter Roland Penrose.

When spoken about at all outside of photography circles, Miller is habitually referred to as Man Ray’s muse. The exhibition’s title attempts to jettison that canard up front: if they were mentor and student at the start (she moved to Paris to seek him out, at Edward Steichen’s suggestion, and moved right in), the two artists very quickly became partners, engrossed in discovering radical approaches to photography. The most famous of these were their experiments with the affects of solarization in portraiture, as shown in Miller’s Solarized Portrait of Unknown Woman (thought to be Meret Oppenheim) and Man Ray’s Solarized Portrait of Lee Miller (both ca. 1930).

Other paired photographs—such as Man Ray’s well-known La Prière (The Prayer) and Miller’s little-known Nude Bent Forward (both ca. 1930)—would lead viewers to the conclusion that, if anything, these artists were mutually influential. But even this is a complicated statement, as the exhibition subtly demonstrates at every turn. For, in a way, they could not have been more different. Of the nudes just mentioned, La Prière is a witty take on supplication that depends for its impact on the fact as much as the shapes of the buttocks, not to mention the anus, it depicts; it is a Surrealist object of visual semantics and almost incidental elegance. In Miller’s far more abstract and Modernist nude the buttocks are minimized while the model’s heaving shoulders mirror in form and size La Prière’s buttock cheeks. Or was it the other way around?

Two juxtaposed portraits of Miller further show off their disparate approaches and visions—and perhaps portend the breakup of their union. Man Ray’s Lee Miller Nude with Sunray Lamp (ca. 1929) is a light-infused, one imagines love-infused, picture in which the subject’s face, eyes downcast, is delicately all but hidden in shadow; a lock of her hair falls forward, her gently arched body is relaxed into its natural perfection and alignment. In Miller’s Self Portrait (ca. 1930) she sits naked from the waist up, her posture erect, her raised arms held like an Amazon’s bow and arrow behind her perfectly turned head in profile. Because of the angle of her right arm, her right breast is higher than her left by a good measure, something that would never occur in Man Ray’s pictures of her. (By 1930 and Shadow Patterns on Lee Miller’s Torso, he crops out her head altogether, leaving only the perfect torso as a backdrop for his projections.)

Together these his-and-hers portraits enact the uneasy dualities that women in Surrealism embodied for men, if not for themselves: the dichotomies of subject and object, mother and whore, partner and muse. The two images of Miller immediately brought to my mind Luis Buñuel’s 1977 film Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire), in which a middle-aged man’s unattainable love object is portrayed interchangeably by two actresses, one hot, one cool. As if to bring this comparison full circle, the poster for the film happens to be a cartoon of the famous lips—Miller’s lips—in Man Ray’s circa 1931 painting A l’heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux (Observatory Time—The Lovers). (In the film poster, the lips are stitched closed like a chastity belt.) Middle-aged Man Ray’s sexual and emotional fixation with Miller as she grew apart from him finds its apotheosis in this monumental painting of red lips floating like a body in Surrealism’s cloud-dappled sky. He claimed to have added to the canvas little by little each morning, fresh from his dreams. One of his many large-scale color photographic reproductions of A l’heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux, a signed example from 1964, is the centerpiece of the present exhibition, along with the undated Untitled (Gold Lips) , whose medium is in fact gold. The sculpture Indestructible Object, also known as Object to Be Destroyed—a metronome with a photograph of Miller’s eye attached to it, originally from 1932—is another such multiply reproduced work. The vulnerable eye is a Surrealist fetish (Buñuel again, with Salvador Dalí, in Un Chien Andalou (1929)), but in this context it also harks back to Miller’s vulnerable neck in Man Ray’s Neck (1930)—a picture to which he took a razor when the two argued over its authorship. In choosing a metronome, with its programmable repetitions, Man Ray effectively chose obsessive fixation: this would be his art. In spite of herself, Miller became an object of artistic desire for Man Ray.

Even while they were together, even while she loved him, Miller got around—pining letters from Man Ray, wondering where she had got to and with whom, are among the many spirited artifacts included in this exhibition, which is so full of personality it almost overshadows the art. But art there is. In addition to fascinating vintage prints of Miller’s studio work in which a bell jar features repeatedly, we see her Surrealist-inflected street photographs taken in Paris and, later, New York. In leaving one city for the other, Miller was conscious of leaving behind her role as muse—not just for Man Ray but for men. She had been furious to learn that her breasts were to be used as a model for the shape of French-manufactured champagne glasses. On assignment at a hospital, she managed to obtain a breast that had been removed in surgery, and deposited it at the offices of Vogue. She photographed the grim thing before being thrown out.

Freed from the relationship that continued to define Man Ray—as shown in works like Larmes (Tears, ca. 1934) and La Couture (1936), among others—Miller had her moment in the years before the war, when she thrived both as a photographer and a member of an artistic circle that included Pablo Picasso (who painted her some six times) and her future husband, Penrose. The traveling exhibition—curated by Phillip Prodger at the Peabody Essex Museum, and drawing on the Penrose archives and collection—presents numerous works from this group of artists. But San Francisco’s Legion of Honor had the inspiration and the opportunity also to include Miller’s late war photographs, such as her eerily sensitive pictures of a suicided German family, the floating body of an SS guard at Dachau, and shaved-headed women in Rennes, France, accused of being collaborators. The latter she annotated, “I was kissed and congratulated while the victims were spat on or slapped.”

Photography, Miller wrote, “is perfectly suited to women as a profession. . . . They have an intuition that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men” (quoted in exhibition wall label). For these same reasons, she never recovered from what she understood through her wartime lens: humanity’s personality. But if a story such as hers can be said to have a happy ending, it is in part owing to Man Ray. Reconciled within the decade following their split, the two were great friends thereafter—marking a giant step for Man Ray. During her depression his mission was to bring her a measure of joy, as shown in such objects as the 1974 cigar-box-with-peephole, Consoler for Lee Miller (If She Needs One), an artifact of a pure love.