Richard Calvocoressi, a curator and author, has challenged the notion that Tate Britain’s current Lee Miller exhibition is “overdue”. In a letter to the editor, he points out that since 2000, there have been four major exhibitions of Miller’s work in UK national museums, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2001, the National Portrait Gallery in 2005, the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007, and the Imperial War Museum in 2015.
Calvocoressi also notes that regional venues such as Modern Art Oxford in 2004 and Hepworth Wakefield in 2018 have hosted Miller shows. He describes the 2001 Scottish exhibition as “almost as big as the current Tate show”.
Additionally, he corrects the claim in a recent review that a photograph of Irmgard Seefried singing in the ruins of the Vienna Opera House was “newly discovered”. Calvocoressi states that he reproduced the image in his 2002 book Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life and included it in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition he curated.
