ART REVIEWS : The Adventure and Artistry of Lee Miller’s Lens : Photography: She could have became an accomplished fashion and portrait photographer, but she signed on as a war correspondent in 1942. Her masterpieces were taken at Nazi death camps.

Lee Miller must have been some piece of work. Just a kid from Poughkeepsie, she became a queen of Paris’ Lost Generation. Hemingway could have invented her. Beautiful, both draped and bare, she ravished the lenses of photographers from Steichen to Horst.

She was Man Ray’s mistress and pupil, starred in Jean Cocteau’s film “Blood of a Poet,” married a wealthy Egyptian for a time, excited a string of lovers and admirers from Picasso to Dylan Thomas and finally settled down as Sir Roland Penrose’s Lady, dying at 70 in 1977.

She could have dwelt in narcissistic idleness, instead, rather surprisingly she became an accomplished fashion and portrait photographer. She knew everybody from Conde Nast to Gertrude Lawrence. With such contacts all you have to do is point the camera at your famous friends and your career is assured. Isn’t it?

Well, no. You have to be good, too. As we see from “Lee Miller Photographer,” a traveling survey at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, she was good. She learned glamorous solarization techniques from Man Ray. Horst himself might have admired her shots of Marlene Dietrich or Colette. But to her credit she never got so slick as to squeeze the humanity out of her subjects. A shot of Picasso in polka-dots tells us why women found him irresistible. When she caused a model to look like a window mannequin we know it was done with humor aforethought. Formally unoriginal she was personally unique.

There are hints of trouble under Lee Miller’s panache. She was sexually molested at age 7 and given a venereal disease. A rather too-admiring catalogue essay by Jane Livingston suggests her relationship with her father may have been unhealthily intimate. She was restless, fickle and fitful in her work habits. But when she got down to it her range was remarkable. A vignette of the tail-ends of Parisian rats is slyly witty. She had knack for finding the real in the surreal. A hand on a boutique doorknob appears to be exploding but the blast effect is nothing but a lot of scratches etched on the glass door by customers’ diamond rings. Miller was metaphysical in a shot of the Egyptian desert taken through a broken screen and healthily hedonistic at an artist’s picnic that modernized Giorgione’s “Concert Champetre.”

She could have made a career as an art and fashion photographer but with the spirit of real adventure she signed on as a war correspondent in 1942. Images of London under blitz are unforgettable. Two French soldiers chatting through a blasted wall are as jaunty as Jean Gabin. After the Allied victory she mordantly posed for a mate as she bathed in Hitler’s bathtub.

But her real war masterpieces were taken in the Nazi death camps. Liberated Dachau prisoners murdered a guard whom we see floating in water with poetic tranquillity. Guards beaten bloody by their former victims beg for mercy while another hangs, suicided before they could reach him. It was Miller’s genius to put us in the moral dilemma of feeling pity for men who had acted like monsters.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St. to Nov. 4 .

Simply Mysterious: New Yorker Richard Artschwager remains one of the most compellingly enigmatic of contemporary artists as seen in a 20 year survey of prints, drawings and objects at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica.

Like much other art, its mystery grows from simple frankness. A former furniture maker, Artschwager seems obsessed with the point at which furniture becomes sculpture or visual sensations become thoughts. He likes to make abstract signs real as when he turns quotation marks and exclamation points into sculptural objects. He makes functional things into abstractions as in a conceptualized mantle clock.

A graphic representation of the American Embassy in Moscow takes on a dreamy John Le Carre aura of threat when Artschwager views it through sworls that look like water spots. It asks how the sight of a thing is affected by what we already know about it.

Artschwager works like a metaphysical carpenter, factual and philosophical, humorous and melancholy. He puns on the grammar of drawing like Saul Steinberg but avoids his virtuosity in favor of a terse shorthand that confesses how his means affect our feelings. An image of some smiling sailors admits that smudging equals nostalgia. A formal living room takes on musty sadness by being divided and rendered in shattered, blotchy line. Images in broken-dash showers of strokes give things a dippy, distracted air that the New Yorker cartoonist Mankoff uses to humorous effect.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica to Nov. 3.