Whitney Scharer's The Age of Light: Lee Miller's Trajectory from Muse to Artist to the Forefront
by Kimberley Allen McNamara
The Artist and The Muse - What is it about the story of the muse and the artist that attracts us? Is it the desire to understand the inspiration behind a piece of art? Is this why novels, which seemingly infiltrate the intense bond between Muse and Artist and then offer us fictionalized versions of this actual relationship, attract us? If so then The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer is such a novel.
On February 5th 2019, the highly anticipated The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer hit books store shelves and my TBR pile. Two weeks later I took with me on a weekend getaway and I devoured it.
The Age of Light is, as Donna Rifkind of the Washington Post critiqued: “a slightly fictionalized, readily digestible account of the life of Lee Miller, an American photographer whose career was encouraged and then eclipsed by her mentor, the avant-garde artist Man Ray.” *
The novel follows Lee Miller, a fashion model, trying to make it as an artist in Paris. A chance meeting with famed artist, Man Ray changes her trajectory and it is this path Scharer so aptly explores. The rhythm and modulation of Scharer’s prose is mesmeric and is perhaps what renders it “digestible”. This blending of fact and fiction, centered on Miller’s relationship with Man Ray, gives life to the Lived experience the two shared and thus enriches the known facts of their dynamic and brings Miller to the forefront.
In a recent interview with NPR’s Robin Young, Scharer said what pulled her to Lee Miller was: "... her confidence and ambition. I just found her to be this incredibly modern woman,… But as I learned about her, what I was most taken with, was this fragility that was underneath the surface of her confidence, that came from all of these traumas that she endured in childhood and all of the subsequent objectification by men — her father, fashion photographers, Man Ray, and that I think is what makes her such a complex and interesting character." (NPR) **
It is the age of the avant-garde in Paris, the 1920s and 30s before WWII. Miller visits to Man Ray wanting to be his student, to learn photography as he does it. He is a highly successful studio photographer and visual artist involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Soon Miller is his assistant, his model, his lover, his muse, and finally, she becomes an artist in her own right. It is this last hat she wears, that of artist, an artist separate from Man Ray, that forces her to leave him. Later it is this expertise which fuels Miller to cover WWII as a photojournalist and ultimately to leads to her famous photo in Hitler’s bathtub.
Frances Prose, author of The Lives of Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired, states: “'Artists rarely create for the muse, to win or keep the Muse's love and admiration, ...but rather for themselves, for the world, and for the more inchoate and unquantifiable imperatives of art itself. Their muses are merely the instruments that raise the emotional and erotic temperature high enough, churn up the weather in a way that may speed and facilitate the artist's labors.'' ***
In short, the art created by the artist, although inspired by the muse, is done to satisfy the artist’s yearn and for the greater good of the art itself. The muse is just a necessary means to an end. Perhaps this why the blurring occurred between what art Man Ray believed was his versus what art Miller actually created alongside him but separately from him.
As Scharer told NPR, “They were constantly writing their names on prints that the other made. And both of them were quoted as saying, 'Oh, it didn't matter who took the pictures. We were working so closely together in the dark room that his work could have been my work, and her work could have been his work...except that Man Ray was the one who was getting most of the credit for that work, which I think is a little problematic.” (NPR)
And so when Miller, the Muse-Collaborator-Artist finds herself obscured by the Artist she originally fueled, what does she do?
Scharer explains Miller “became more and more frustrated throughout their relationship, both by being eclipsed by him and also by his increasing jealousy...he talked about how he wanted her to be young and free, and what he really wanted was for her to commit to being with him for the rest of her life, which she wasn't prepared to do." (NPR)
The Miller-Man Ray duo and subsequent dynamic were included by Veronica Kavass in a compilation of 29 Muse/Artist relationships she explored, entitled Artists in Love, From Picasso & Gilot to Christo & Jeanne-Claude A Century of Creative and Romantic Partnerships. Kavass, writes her intent with each pairing was “to present the way they, as partners, collaborated, influenced one another, or guarded their art from lovers’s influence, or how they used muse-manipulation to come into their own, or sacrificed their art for the other’s.” Her portal into exploring such scope of artists and their muses, was as she terms it: “my own white rabbit: Lee Miller. [because Miller was] the type of person you want to follow but not fall in love with.” (Kavass)****
The Age of Light is a rhythmic, captivating novel that explores the tumultuous relationship of Lee Miller and Man Ray. Set in Paris with characters such a Picasso, Claude Cahun, Hemingway, Kiki de Montparnasse, and Jean Cocteau among others who make entrances or are name dropped. It is at a time when D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Lover is considered risqué literature and Scharer captures the period well.
In The Age of Light, author Whitney Scharer, tells the story of a Muse-Artist relationship from the muse,Lee Miller’s, point view, which varies from a wide angle view to a close up. Scharer plays with the point of view lens much the way Miller may have with the camera; however, it is the rhythm and cadence of the novel that is hypnotic and enchanting. The Age of Light exposes what is often overlooked in non-fiction, in biography, that of the life-lived experience and in so doing brings Lee Miller into light.
The Age of Light is Whitney Scharer’s first novel. Whitney Scharer is a graduate of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator, holds an MFA from University of Washington, and lives in a suburb of Boston. For more on Scharer visit her website: whitneysharer.com
The Age of Light is available through Independent Bookstores, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Please support your independent bookstore. Personal favorites: Trident BookSellers Porter Square Books Newtonville Books
For more on Lee Miller, Scharer suggests in her author’s note, among others: Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke, The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose and Lee Miller’s War by Antony Penrose (Penrose is Miller’s son)
* Rifkind Review Washington Post
**NPR Interview with Robin Young
*** NY Times Review of The Lives of Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired
**** Veronica Kavass
Photo credit Attribution:
photo credit: oneredsf1 <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/112345594@N02/40111973593">Lee Miller 1907 - 1977</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <ahref="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>
