Peter Miller (1913-1996)

Peter Miller, born Henrietta Myers (1913-1996), was an American Surrealist painter. Myers took an interest in art at a very early age and, upon graduation from the Arlington Hall Junior School for Women, Washington, she applied for study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. On her application form, she wrote that she wanted to study art because she "would rather fail at painting than succeed at anything else."

It was while at the Academy that Henrietta met her future husband, C. Earle Miller, who studied sculpture and printmaking. In 1934, during her last year at the Academy, she traveled to Europe for the first time, where she met Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and, most notably, Joan Miró, the great Catalan Surrealist painter whose work would have a profound influence on her throughout the 1930s and beyond. In 1935, the artist began using the name "Peter Miller," for she felt collectors and critics would take her paintings more seriously if she were identified as male.

Miller is increasingly being recognised as a pioneering American Modernist. The artist held solo exhibitions at the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1944 and 1945; a gallery that was at the time the premiere showcase for Surrealist painting in America, with exhibitors including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Frida Kahlo. After Miller's first show ended, Louise Bourgeois sent her a press clipping from the Art Digest, wherein the reviewer, a critic named Margaret Breuning, summarised her work as a 'translation of fantasy and symbolism'.

Furthermore, Miller was included in The Women, one of the century's most important surveys of women artists held at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, New York, in June of 1945. She was one of thirty-one artists selected, and appeared alongside other female painters and sculptors who would become prominent in the years to come. These included Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo. Although Miller received a great deal of critical acclaim from these shows, she slowly withdrew from the New York art world, preferring instead to spend more time communing with nature at her homes in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. In 1935, Miller and her husband bought five-thousand acres of land in Española, near Sante Fe, and built a ranch for themselves to live. This land adjoined the San Ildefonso Reservation, and set in motion an intimate, lifelong relationship between Miller and the indigenous people of Tewa Pueblo. The cultural tradition, crafts, and religious beliefs of the Tewa inspired her, and Miller witnessed many performances and rituals that were closed to visitors outside of the Pueblo community.