This first time I traveled to San Francisco I saw the most amazing exhibit of artwork at the Legion of Honor by Man Ray and Lee Miller called Partners in Surrealism. It piqued my curiosity about the woman who was both muse and artist. She was a most intriguing woman going by a biography of her I read. She was a complex woman with a complicated past. An interesting woman whose life has also inspired novelist Dana Gynther to write a novel about her life beginning with her work as a model in 1920s Montparnasse--her relationship as muse, student and lover of Man Ray and coming into her own as an artist in her own right.
Simon and Schuster has kindly passed along a copy of Dana Gynther's novel, just out today, The Woman in the Photograph to give away here. I'm afraid I can only offer this to US readers, so if you leave a comment below I'll drop your name in the hat for a chance to win. I'll toss all the names together and pull one out on Saturday, so check back to see if you won. Until then here is a little teaser from the novel:
"Lips pressed together in concentration, Lee sat under a gas lamp at a wooden table, tracing over a penciled design in India ink. With deliberate strokes, she colored in the dark spaces around a stylized artichoke, the central detail of a High Renaissance hat. She was finishing off her first batch of fashionworthy patterns--sketches made in the dim light of the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace, then inked over at the pensione--and was eager to send it to New York and be rid of it."
You can read a longer excerpt at Simon and Schuster. Check out Dana Gynther's website here.