Carolyn Burke

Lee Miller's life embodied all the contradictions and complications of the twentieth century: a model and photographer, muse and reporter, sexual adventurer and domestic goddess, she was also America's first female war correspondent. Carolyn Burke, a biographer and art critic, here reveals how the muse who inspired Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso could be the same person who unflinchingly photographed the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau. Burke captures all the verve and energy of Miller's life, from her early childhood trauma to her stint as a Vogue model and art-world ingenue, from her harrowing years as a war correspondent to her unconventional marriages and passion for gourmet cooking. A lavishly illustrated story of art and beauty, sex and power, modernism and surrealism, "Lee Miller" illuminates an astonishing woman's journey from art object to artist. This title is National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.

_______________________ THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH BIOGRAPHY OF LEGENDARY PHOTOGRAPHER LEE MILLER _______________________ ‘Lee Miller was an astounding woman, brought memorably to life in this astounding book' - Daily Telegraph ‘Does its perplexingly complicated subject more than justice, adding welcome depths and nuances to the familiar legend' - Sunday Times 'A serious and gripping biography from Carolyn Burke' - Boyd Tonkin, Independent _______________________ Lee Miller was one of the most extraordinary photographers of the twentieth century, famous for her portraits and devastating photographs of World War Two, as well as for her legendary beauty. An art student and a Vogue model, she was a close friend of artists such as Picasso, Cocteau, Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, and became a muse of Man Ray and the Parisian surrealists. One of the few female photographers to enter Hitler's Germany, she was the first to access his Munich home and among the first to document the liberation of the concentration camps. Carolyn Burke captures Lee Miller in all her complexity, unveiling the glittering art world of the thirties and forties of which she was a central figure. Meticulously researched, beautifully written, this is an enthralling account of one of the most fascinating women of her era.

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism--in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism--and one woman's important contribution to it.

A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art. New York, 1921: acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz celebrates the success of his latest exhibition--the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of his soon-to-be wife, the young Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibit acts as a turning point for the painter poised to make her entrance into the art scene. There she meets Rebecca Salsbury, the fianc of Stieglitz's prot g , Paul Strand, marking the start of a bond between the couples that will last more than a decade and reverberate throughout their lives. In the years that followed, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz become the preeminent couple in American modern art, spurring on each other's creativity. Observing their relationship leads Salsbury to encourage new artistic possibilities for Strand and to rethink her own potential as an artist.

__________________________A FASCINATING BIOGRAPHY OF SINGING LEGEND EDITH PIAF__________________________‘This engaging life of the diminutive French singer makes you appreciate anew what a magician she was' - Sunday Times‘Fascinating ... Burke vividly depicts the rollercoaster of Piaf's life' - Mail on Sunday'Concise and compelling ... poised, persuasive and powerful - like the sparrow herself' - Daily Telegraph'A clear-eyed portrait of an unflinching artist' - New Statesman__________________________Edith Piaf was one of the most greatly loved singers of the twentieth century. From the start of her exceptional career in the 1930s, her waif-like form and heart-wrenching voice endeared her first to the French, then to audiences around the globe. As she moved from her youth singing in the streets to the glamour of the Paris music-halls, Piaf formed lasting friendships with such figures as Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau and Marlene Dietrich; she wrote many of her own songs, aided the Resistance in the Second World War, and mentored younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. Yet her path to stardom was full of tragedies - the death of her daughter in infancy; the death of Marcel Cerdan, her greatest love, in a plane crash; her many illnesses, affairs and addictions, all of which nourished her passionate performances and strengthened her enduring bond with audiences. In this mesmerising, definitive new biography Carolyn Burke gives us Piaf in her own time and place, illuminating through sympathetic readings of sources hitherto unavailable both the charm and the pathos of the ‘Little Sparrow' who enchanted generations and still enthralls us today.