Discovered by Condé Nast when he pulled her from the path of a truck barreling down a New York City street, the unpretentiously beautiful model Lee Miller gazed back at readers with sultry eyes from Vogue covers throughout the 1920s. She left the fashion world for France and an art apprenticeship in 1929, and in Paris, under the tutelage of modernist Man Ray, Miller was taken—both with photography and with her mentor. From 1929 to 1932 they worked in artistic and romantic symbiosis, with Miller frequently appearing as muse and subject of Ray’s work. “He rarely made very emotional pictures,” says Phillip Prodger, curator of “Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism,” opening Saturday at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. “His paintings were mostly like thought puzzles. But when he and Lee were working together, he opened up a little more. The pictures that he made of Lee—there’s one where she seems to be flying through space, and there’s one where she’s sleeping—are among the most touching he ever made.”