Grim and glorious

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Stay too long in the Lee Miller exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield and the metronome might drive you mad. Considerate curators will only set it swinging in stints to spare the gallery guards. Man Ray, who made the metronome ‘Object of Destruction’ (1923), meant it to infuriate. His assembled sculpture came with instructions. ‘Cut the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.’ Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Smash.

The eye on Man Ray’s metronome was Lee Miller’s, beautiful, blue, bewitching. It was an eye that had gazed unblinkingly from the cover of Vogue. Miller, a small-town girl from unpronounceable Poughkeepsie, born in 1907, was photographed from childhood by a too fond father, raped aged seven by an unnamed relative, treated for venereal disease as a teenager.