OUT OF THE DARKNESS EVEN LEE MILLER'S SON DIDN'T KNOW THE EXTENT OF HIS MOTHER'S PHOTOGRAPHIC ACHIEVEMENTS.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

The woman pictured in the bathtub has weary eyes - the look of someone who has seen a lot, perhaps too much.

Toward the end of World War II, Lee Miller (1907-1977), the only accredited female photographer in the European combat theater, photographed the liberation of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald and sent some of the first gut-wrenching pictures of the atrocities back to the States under the heading ``Believe It.'' It was a devastating experience for Miller.

A few days later, the former fashion-model-turned-war-correspondent found herself billeted at Adolf Hitler's former residence in Munich, which had been captured by the U.S. Army.

The house was still filled with the Nazi dictator's personal effects, including an autographed copy of ``Mein Kampf.'' Now she saw a chance to make a statement. But Miller, who had gone from being in front of the camera to behind it, was not a simple documentarian. With the help of Life photographer David Scherman, she created a portrait of herself in Hitler's bathtub.

Though Scherman is often given credit for the photo, which appeared in Life, it was taken with Miller's camera on a tripod, and she retained the film. Miller had Scherman climb into the tub first to set up the shot. Then she posed herself, her clothes on a chair, combat boots by the tub, Hitler's image on the bath's ledge, a small nude statuette on a table nearby and Miller holding a cloth to wash away the dirt of the war - her arm angled out in a similar fashion as the nude.

The photo is part of the exhibition at the Getty called ``Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Man Ray.'' The title seems a bit of misdirection. You know of the surrealist Ray, with whom Miller lived for three years in the early '30s and with whom she made the move from model to artist. You may know of Penrose, the artist who later became Miller's husband and head of the Tate Museum in London. Yet it's hard to walk through the exhibit and see the extraordinary artistic composition and wit of Miller's works and not wonder why you haven't heard of her before.

``She was hugely talented, very brave and easily bored, and that's a lethal combination,'' notes Francine Prose, whose book ``Nine Muses'' (HarperCollins) has a chapter on Miller, who was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., but at a young age became an art student and then a model in New York City. Tall, leggy and beautiful, Miller's slightly androgynous look seemed made for the camera. Eventually she moved to Paris, where she became friends and at times a subject for artists such as Picasso and Cocteau.

``She is a baffling enigma in terms of the multiple layers of her personality,'' adds Weston Nauf, who curated the exhibit at the Getty, which includes both the works of Miller and those of her as a model.

When you ask her son, Anthony Penrose, if his mother was a mystery to him, he laughs a bit. ``Well, I had a set idea of her from 30 years of living with her as an alcoholic,'' he says.

In fact, Penrose - who is very candid about his life with Miller - admits growing up knowing very little about his mother, remembering ``tremendous mood swings from excoriatingly cruel to affectionate and funny.''

As for her own work, Miller was ``very self-deprecating,'' he says. ``Supposed friends of the family were quite keen to put her down.'' (In the Getty exhibit, only five photos are signed.) And as for the war, ``They thought she just looked glamorous and went around in a jeep. She never bothered to deny this.''

Even her husband, says her son, never knew what horrors Miller had seen or gone through. As a correspondent for Vogue, her copy was first subject to censors, and then the fashion magazine often cut it down, and many of her photos weren't used. If Miller and Anthony Penrose ever talked about it, their son doesn't know.

There is probably no easy explanation why Miller drifted into obscurity after the war. The first 40 years of her early life, though, is the stuff of a potboiler. In fact, Nicole Kidman is planning to star in a film about Miller written by David Hare. Hare told an English newspaper that he and Kidman - who's been collecting photos by Miller - are both fans of the photographer.

As a girl of 7, Miller was sexually molested by a older cousin with a venereal disease. Hoping to spare the young girl grief, her parents consulted a psychiatrist who advised them to convince Miller that ``love and sex were dissociated.''

As an adult, she posed nude for numerous artists, which is not unexpected. But part of the exhibit are portraits of her naked (including in the bathtub), taken by her father, Theodore, an amateur photographer. It's rather mind-boggling in today's terms. But as you follow Miller's life through her time as a glamorous model, to her time with Ray, to that of a studio photographer in New York City, to wife of a rich Egyptian, to her time with Penrose, to the war, to her post-war life as Lady Penrose, the more of a mystery she becomes.

``The more I found out about her,'' says her son, ``the less I wanted to say that any one thing made her the way she was.''

It was only after she died that Penrose began to piece her life together. While on a hunt with his wife for baby pictures of him, he found boxes of photographs and writings by Miller. The first thing he read was about the battle at St. Malo in France. Penrose found the writing vivid and alive, as Miller described a futile charge at an old fort held by the Germans.

``He raised his arm,'' wrote Miller about a man who nearly reached the fort. ``The gesture of cavalry officer with sabre waving the others on. He was waving to death, and he fell with his hand against the fort.''

Miller's photos also captured the intensity of the battle in which napalm was used for one of the first times.

``This is not the woman I knew - the drunk, the dissolute,'' Penrose says. ``I kept going until I got a completely new view of this person.''

What Penrose found was the unedited materials that hadn't come out in Vogue. Eventually he published a book on his mother called ``The Lives of Lee Miller'' (Thames & Hudson, 1985), but the art world was still relatively unaware of her.

``She was considered somewhere between an amateur and a dilettante,'' says Nauf. But all those years before the camera had an impact. She learned a lot from the photographers she was around and ``absorbed it like a sponge,'' he adds.

And her reputation is being rethought.

``Margaret Bourke-White was considered the most prominent woman photographer of that generation who was also a journalist,'' notes Nauf, ``and now it seems that Bourke-White's achievement during the war years is considerably less than Lee Miller's.''

Consider the photos of the same suicide scene of a German official, his wife and daughter that Miller and then Bourke-White took a short time later. If you put them side by side, Bourke-White's photo appears more as a document, while it's hard to take your eyes off of Miller's photo. First of all, says Nauf, there is Miller's choice of light - very soft, very gentle light. Then there is the perspective you see of the young woman where she appears to be in a state between sleeping and waking, life and death. She has a serenity about her that really follows through that dream state that the surrealists so admired.

Indeed, it is Miller's sense of composition that is so striking about the war photos, especially considering the conditions. ``She was a surrealist and ... in the middle of these nightmare situations, she was always composing. It was amazing,'' notes Prose. Through much of the conflict, Miller kept a sense of ``humor and irony.'' A shot of a statue misshapen by artillery fire is called ``Battered Bronze Apes Picasso.'' But the horrors of battle and the concentration camps eventually took their toll. She was in a rage by the end of the war, says Prose. ``And when you compare her looks with 10 years earlier,'' she adds, ``you can see that she had really been through something.''

Miller's letters also showed a bitter sense of disillusionment, says her son. She felt it was a pity that the war was fought and brave young men died for nothing, because so little had changed in the end. There was no brave new world.

Like many other war veterans, Miller had trouble adjusting. During the war, she relied on the alcohol and the stimulant Benzedrine to get her through. Back in England, she fell into a depression.

``Nothing had quite the same meaning,'' says her son. ``How can you go back to taking pictures of handbags and frocks after you see what she has seen?''

Penrose managed, thanks to his wife, to reconcile with Miller during the last two years of her life. (``We never became mother and son, but we did become friends.'') Today he runs her archives and a Web site dedicated to her, www.leemiller.co.uk.

``It's a crime that she isn't a world-famous photographer,'' says Prose.

That may change someday. A touring exhibit of Miller's work is being readied for next year, says Penrose, who in finding his mother's pictures and writings ``discovered a mother I didn't know existed and in the process discovered a photographer that the world had forgotten.''

SURREALIST MUSE: LEE MILLER, ROLAND PENROSE, AND MAN RAY.

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles.

When: Through June 15. The Getty is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Tickets: Admission is free. Parking is $5, and reservations are required except for Saturdays and Sundays or after 4 p.m. weekdays. Call [phone] for reservations or information.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) When the U.S. Army put her up in Hitler's Munich residence in 1945, Lee Miller took the opportunity to make this self-portrait in his bathtub. Note Hitler's portrait on the left and the combat boots at the foot of the tub.

(2) Lee Miller, in uniform, shot this portrait of herself with Picasso in 1944 after the liberation of Paris.