The Art Institute of Chicago is hosting a major exhibition titled Lee Miller: Fearless.
This is the first exibit of Miller's photographs in over 25 years, featuring 150 works spanning her extraordinary and varied career.
Dates: August 29, 2026 – December 7, 2026
Lee Miller experimented with surrealism in 1930s Paris, and went on to unfiltered photojournalism on the frontlines of World War II.
Until this exhibit in Chicago I knew nothing about her, but have since learned of the biographical film titled Lee (2024), starring Kate Winslet in the title role
I intend to watch it very soon.
Rather than covering her entire life, the film focuses heavily on the decade between 1938 and 1948—tracing her transition from a former fashion muse into a fearless, trauma-scarred World War II combat photographer for British Vogue.
Here is the complete text transcribed from the museum wall plaque:
Lee Miller
American, active France and England, 1907–1977
David E. Scherman
American, 1916–1997
David E. Scherman in Hitler’s Bathtub
Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub
May 1, 1945
Munich
Gelatin silver prints
United States forces had requisitioned Adolf Hitler’s private apartment. Miller and David E. Scherman entered as well and, in an astonishing gesture, the pair collaborated to stage images of themselves washing away the dirt of Dachau in Hitler’s bathtub.
In her image of Scherman—who was Jewish—Miller included the shower head, a distinct reminder of the gas chamber the two had just seen at Dachau. In the image taken of herself, Miller’s filthy boots loudly soil the mat; her military coat lies mounded on a stool. Soaping up, Miller hunches her once famously statuesque body while turning to counter the absurd pose of a pseudo-classical statuette on the nearby dressing table.
Hitler’s suicide was announced later the same day.
Lee Miller Archives
These two side-by-side photographs are companion pieces taken on April 30, 1945 inside Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, Germany, on the exact day Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.
Left Image (Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub): Photographed by David E. Scherman. It depicts Lee Miller bathing in Hitler's bathtub. On the bathmat in the foreground sit her combat boots, caked with dirty mud from her visit to the liberated Dachau concentration camp earlier that day. To the left sits a framed portrait of Hitler alongside a small classic sculpture.
- Right Image (David E. Scherman in Hitler's Bathtub): Photographed by Lee Miller. Miller turned the camera back on her professional partner and LIFE magazine photojournalist David E. Sherman, capturing him in the same bathtub from a matching perspective.
-The photograph on the left became one of the most famous and symbolically potent images of World War II. Beyond capturing a moment of personal hygiene after days on the front line, the staged composition served as a sharp, surrealist act of visual defiance—symbolically washing off the filth of Nazi atrocities in the dictator's personal sanctuary while he died in his Berlin bunker.
Because Scherman was Jewish, both photographers sitting in Hitler's tub added an additional layer of profound historical irony and victory.
For a deep dive into how she reached Hitler's Munich residence and the impact of her WWII photography, you can watch Stories of Art: Lee Miller - Witness to the Holocaust,
which discusses these bathtub portraits and her reporting on the liberation of the concentration camps.
YouTube Video
All photos are from my family albums
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