Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist 9781474414517

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Roland Penrose

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Roland Penrose working on The Dew Machine. 1937

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Roland Penrose The Life of a Surrealist

James King

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © James King, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/14 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Press A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1450 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1451 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1452 4 (epub) The right of James King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface: The Inner Light

xii

Acknowledgements 1. ‘Born a Quaker’ (1900–1913)

xxii 1

2. ‘This Fascinating Horror’ (1914–1918)

20

3. A Heretic in Training (1919–1922)

27

4. Born Again (1922–1931)

37

5. Insoluble Questions (1932–1935)

73

6. ‘Let’s Do Something’ (1935–1936)

94

7. The Modern Colossus (1936–1938)

108

8. Aphrodite in Blue (1936–1938)

120

9. On the Brink of War (1937–1939)

129

10. Grim Glory (1939–1945)

152

11. Post-War Blues (1945–1947)

171

12. Re-defining Modernism (1946–1953)

184

13. A Pastoral Retreat (1949–1953)

207

14. Life with a Virtuoso (1954–1966)

224

15. The Uninvited Guest (1966–1984)

259

Notes

282

Bibliography

309

Index

317

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For Linda Craig & Dave Will

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List of Illustrations

Figures Frontispiece: Roland Penrose working on The Dew Machine, 1937. Thea Struve. Figure 1. James Doyle Penrose, Self-portrait, c. 1893. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 2. The North Brink, Wisbech, with Bank House on the left. Figure 3. The wedding of Elizabeth Josephine Peckover and James Doyle Penrose. Figure 4. 44 Finchley Road. Scrap Book. Figure 5. Elizabeth Josephine Penrose with Roland, 1900. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 6. Oxhey Grange. Scrap Book. Figure 7. James Doyle Penrose, Portrait of Roland, c. 1905. Oil. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 8. Penrose family group, 1908. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 9. Roland in First British Ambulance Unit uniform. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 10. Roland as a torch-bearer in The White Devil. Scrap Book. Figure 11. George Rylands in 1935, photographed by Ramsay & Muspratt. National Portrait Gallery. Figure 12. Roger Fry, photographed by Ramsay & Muspratt. National Portrait Gallery. Figure 13. Yanko Varda. Scrap Book. Figure 14. Georges Braque. Figure 15. Cassis. Figure 16. Valentine. Scrap Book.

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ii 3 6 8 9 11 13 15 17 23 29 30 34 40 42 43 46

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Figure 17. André Breton, 1924. Figure 18. Paul Éluard. Figure 19. Galarza, Vicomte de Santa Clara. Scrap Book. Figure 20. Max Ernst, Punching Ball or The Immortality of Buonarroti, 1920. Photomontage, gouache and ink on photograph. Arnold Crane Collection, Chicago. Figure 21. Max Ernst, Célèbes, 1921. Oil. Tate Gallery. Figure 22. Joan Miró. Figure 23. Roland and Valentine at Le Pouy. Scrap Book. Figure 24. Le Pouy. Scrap Book. Figure 25. Valentine in India. Scrap Book. Figure 26. Ronald Nixon (Krishna Prem). Yogi Sri Krishnaprem. Figure 27. Alice Paalen and Valentine Penrose. Nancy Deffebach. Figure 28. Roland, Paris, 1932, photographed by André Rogé. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 29. Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, David Gascoyne. National Portrait Gallery. Figure 30. Downshire Hill. Figure 31. Herbert Read. Figure 32. Small Room 5, International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 33. André Breton at the International Surrealist Exhibition, photographed by Bill Brandt, 1936. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 34. Sheila Legge, the Surrealist phantom, at Trafalgar Square, 1936. Look at Me. Figure 35. Group photograph of some of the organisers, International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936. Figure 36. Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée au soleil sur la plage, 1932. Oil. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Figure 37. Max Ernst, La Joie de vivre, 1936. Oil. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Figure 38. Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937. Oil. Tate Gallery. Figure 39. Roland looking at De Chirico’s The Two Sisters (1915), photographed by Lee Miller in 1939. Lee Miller Archives.

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51 51 61

62 63 64 71 72 75 78 89 93 95 96 97 102

103 104 105

112 114 117

118

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List of Illustrations

Figure 40. Lee Miller, Self-Portrait, 1932. Lee Miller Archives. Figure 41. Roland and Lee on the beach at Juan-les Pins, 1937. Look at Me. Figure 42. Éluard and Picasso on the beach at Juan-les-Pins, 1937. Look at Me. Figure 43. Roland and Picasso at Mougins, 1937, photographed by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives. Figure 44. Roland Penrose looking at Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman at the London Gallery, 1937. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Figure 45. Cover of one issue of the London Bulletin. Scrap Book. Figure 46. Peggy Guggenheim in New York, 1942. Associated Press. Figure 47. Two pages from The Road is Wider than Long. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 48. Guernica installation at New Burlington Gardens, 1938. Scrap Book. Figure 49. Siwa. Figure 50. Man Ray, 1934. Carl Van Vechten. Figure 51. Scherman, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Hampstead, 1942. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 52. Reunion in France in Picasso’s studio, 1944. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 53. Roland and Lee in Arizona, 1946. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 54. Douglas Cooper with Picasso at La Californie, 1961, photographed by Edward Quinn. Edward Quinn Archive. Figure 55. Roland and Ewan Phillips in 1948, with Demoiselles. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 56. Exterior of Farley Farm. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 57. View from Farley Farm, photographed by Lee Miller. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 58. The sitting room, Farley Farm. Scrap Book. Figure 59. Picasso and Tony Penrose. Lee Miller Archives. Figure 60. Diane Deriaz. La Tête à L’Envers. Figure 61. Picasso and Roland, photographed by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives.

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ix

121 125 125 127

131 132 134 140 143 147 152 167 170 177

192 195 209 209 210 215 221 240

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Figure 62. Roland, Picasso, Lee and Jacqueline with The Three Dancers, 1960. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 63. Roland at his London flat, 1960. Roland Penrose Estate. Figure 64. Diane Deriaz with Roland. La Tête à L’Envers. Figure 65. Roland in his study at Farley Farm, 1983, photographed by Antony Penrose. Roland Penrose Estate.

249 258 278

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Colour Plates To be found between pages 168 and 169. Except where noted below, the paintings by Roland Penrose are courtesy of A. and R. Penrose and the Roland Penrose Trustees. Plate 1. Roland Penrose, Monsters, 1925. Oil. Plate 2. Roland Penrose, Atterissage, 1926. Oil. Plate 3. Roland Penrose, Conversation between Rock and Flower, 1928. Oil. Plate 4. Roland Penrose, Eclipse of the Pyramid, 1929. Frottage drawing. Plate 5. Roland Penrose, Oasis, 1936. Oil. Plate 6. Roland Penrose, Valentine with Cat, 1932. Oil. Plate 7. Roland Penrose, Winged Domino, 1938. Oil. Plate 8. Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 1936–7. Mixed media object. Tate Gallery, London. Plate 9. Roland Penrose, La Méditerrané-Etude artistique, 1937. Collage. Plate 10. Roland Penrose, The Conquest of the Air, 1939. Oil. Southampton Art Gallery. Plate 11. Roland Penrose, Seeing is Believing, c. 1937. Oil. Plate 12. Roland Penrose, Night and Day, 1937. Oil. Plate 13. Roland Penrose, Beacus Penrose at the Wheel, c. 1937. Oil. Plate 14. Roland Penrose, Octavia, 1939. Oil.7 Plate 15. Roland Penrose, Black Music, 1940. Oil. Plate 16. Roland Penrose, First View, 1947. Oil. Plate 17. Roland Penrose, Unsleeping Beauty, 1940. Oil. The Sherwin Collection.

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List of Illustrations

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Plate 18. Roland Penrose, Abstract Composition (Portrait of Lee Miller), c. 1950. Oil. Plate 19. Roland Penrose, The Third Eye, 1950. Oil. Plate 20. Roland Penrose, Self-Portrait, c. 1948. Oil. National Portrait Gallery, London. Plate 21. Roland Penrose, Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads?, 1947. Oil. Plate 22. Farley Farm. Roland Penrose Estate. Plate 23. Roland Penrose, East-West, 1983. Collage. Fundacío Joan Miró.

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Preface: The Inner Light

This book is the first biography of Roland Penrose (1900–84), one of the great English-born practitioners of modernism in the twentieth century. As an artist, a promoter of surrealism, an organiser, a promoter, a biographer, a gallery owner and a collector, he is a significant figure in the study of art in England from 1920 to 1984. In his existence, many of the most fascinating strands in English cultural life of the last century are brought together in a way not yet sufficiently examined in any of the scholarship on English visual modernism. This narrative tells an individual’s life history, but the story related here is of how that individual helped to redefine modernism. In essence, this book uses the platform of biography to write about aspects of English visual culture that have never been amply elucidated. Most accounts of English modernism in the arts emphasise its Bloomsbury roots, discuss its neo-Romantic aspects, its experiments with abstraction or concentrate on various other aspects of its rich formalist inheritance. These are all worthy lines of inquiry, but they leave a key part of the story untold. Penrose’s embrace of modernist art was far-reaching and catholic, and the Continent dominated it. Moreover, he admired abstract, cubist and figurative art. But, as this book demonstrates, his passion for surrealism was unbounded. As a young man, Penrose adopted surrealism as a style of art and as a mode of life. He never looked back after his conversion to that movement. Surrealism was strongly espoused in England by David Gascoyne, Paul Nash, and Herbert Read as well as by Penrose. Gascoyne, who partnered with Penrose to mount the Great Surrealist Exhibition, wrote on surrealism; the movement inspired his verse. In addition to his activities as a painter, Paul Nash, who died in 1946, authored articles on surrealism and produced the best English works of art

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inspired by it. Herbert Read passionately defended the campaign to promote this form, but he remained unconvinced of its power.1 Penrose’s desire to make surrealism a cornerstone of English modernism, it must be emphasised, was not in the long run – despite his search for English surrealists to be included in the 1936 exhibition – so much an attempt to transform English artists into surrealists as it was to make English artists and their audiences aware of the power of this movement. Roland Penrose was the only Englishman who fully embraced surrealism over a long period of time, and only in his life can the various threads of that movement and its influence in Britain be seen. He promoted it, he collected it, he wanted it to find a home in England with other contemporary works of art. More importantly, he allowed it to infuse and transform his own existence. In his own right, he merits a full-length biography; as a person who helped mould the art of twentieth-century England, he is even more deserving. However, Penrose is not a surrealist in the way that André Breton was. For Breton, surrealism was a political movement that found expression in works of art; for Penrose, it was a style of life that he attempted to encapsulate in his art. Specifically, through surrealism Penrose became aware of the randomness of all human endeavour; through it he became cognisant of the inconsequentiality and sheer meaninglessness of experience. When confronted with these glaring facts, he began to live in a fundamentally different way. He became interested in cultivating his feelings, no matter how illogical they might seem. What he did with his existence, he followed in his art. He put this matter in context when he remarked that the aim of true modernists was ‘to overthrow the tyranny of the then fashionable academic salon and to create an attitude towards the arts based on the reality of human desire’2 [emphasis mine].

1 David Gascoyne is a major character in the present narrative. In Interior Landscapes: A Life of Paul Nash (1986), I discuss Nash’s interest in surrealism and how he incorporated it into some of his major paintings. Herbert Read wanted to like and approve of surrealism. He even suggested that earlier English artists such as William Blake were proto-surrealist. However, I demonstrate in The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (1990) that Read preferred abstract art as practised by Ben Nicolson and Barbara Hepworth, and attempted to ‘tame’ or ‘domesticate’ surrealism.

2

Man Ray (London: 1975), 11.

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Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist

Penrose did many things, and he did those things extremely well. His life took many directions. He abetted the creation of a key institution that challenged English ideas of what constituted contemporary art; he went against the grain of much English art in his own practice as an artist; he collected significant contemporary European artists well before it was fashionable to do so; he wrote a seminal life of Picasso in which he resolutely conjoined the subject’s life experience to his artistic expression in a biographical modality not usually practised at that time. Above all, Penrose believed in the power of art to change people’s lives. To be fully human, he felt passionately, a person had to be engaged with contemporary works of art. He felt that most members of his society were not so inclined, and so he tried to rouse them from their slumbers. A man of considerable charm, poise and charisma, he worked well with others – and had the ability to inspire them. Penrose was born at the outset of the twentieth century, and in his life of eighty-four years are reflected some of the most important turning points in the history of English art during that period. In him, the struggle for the modern is animated and brought to life. Roland was the son of the traditional but gifted Irish-born painter James Doyle Penrose and his wife Josephine Peckover, who came from a wealthy banking family. Both parents were devout Quakers. Roland attended Quaker boarding schools before going up to Cambridge; he took a first in architectural studies, but, largely under the influence of Roger Fry, he decided to become a painter and live in France. While studying at André Lhote’s academy in Paris and then largely on his own at his home at Cassis, Penrose became acquainted with Max Ernst; that close friendship with Ernst ensured that he became familiar with other surrealists, especially André Breton and Paul Éluard. In October 1925, he married the Gascon poet Valentine Boué. In 1928 he held his first one-man show at the Galerie Van Leer in the rue de Seine, Paris. In Paris, Penrose met the young English poet David Gascoyne, who shared his enthusiasm for surrealism. In 1935 Penrose returned to England to organise the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition, which took place in the summer of 1936. The onset of the Spanish Civil War a fortnight after the exhibition closed did not prevent him from working with Christian Zervos in Spain on a book

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called Catalan Art (1937). He raised money for Spain and put pressure on the British government to back the republican cause. During the inter-war years, Penrose lived in Hampstead, a centre of avantgarde activity and a place where many refugees from Nazi Germany settled. His politics remained overtly pacifist, but he found ways in which to use his commitment to art to undermine Franco and Hitler. Penrose remained tireless in the promotion of surrealism. In 1937 he established the London Gallery in Cork Street under the directorship of the Belgian surrealist E. L. T. Mesens, and in the following year launched the London Bulletin, acting as assistant editor to Mesens. Penrose was never narrowly sectarian in his promotion of modernism, although he retained his commitment to a surrealist way of life and a surrealist way of making art. While continuing to produce his own surrealist art, Penrose ensured that Picasso’s Guernica (1937) toured several British cities after the Paris international exhibition had finished (he and Picasso had first met in the summer of 1936). Penrose also began to assemble a distinguished collection, including Picasso’s Weeping Woman. In 1937 he met the American photographer Lee Miller. They toured the Balkans together by car in summer 1938, and Penrose dedicated his experimental book The Road is Wider than Long (1939) to her. Following his divorce from Boué on 19 June 1939, Miller moved permanently into Penrose’s house at Downshire Hill, Hampstead. They were married on 3 May 1947 and their only child, Antony, was born in September that year. Although Penrose staged a one-man show in London at the Mayor Gallery in 1939, the war interrupted his art. He served as an air-raid warden in Hampstead and then as a camouflage instructor, but as soon as hostilities finished he resumed all his old activities. In 1947 he was one of the founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, of which he became the first chairman. Dedicated to promoting the adventurous spirit of modern art on an international scale, the ICA quickly established itself as an important meeting place for anyone with innovative ideas. The post-war period also saw the emergence of Penrose as biographer and art historian. His biography of Picasso (Picasso: His Life and Work), published in 1958, is outstanding, and he followed it with studies of Miró (1970), Man Ray (1975) and Tapiès (1978). Penrose also organised an impressive sequence of retrospectives at

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the Tate Gallery. They began with a vast survey of Picasso’s work in 1959, and continued with Ernst (1961), Miró (1964) and Picasso’s sculpture (1967). His close friendship with each of these artists enabled him to select the shows with great authority, and his services to art in Britain were recognised by appointment as CBE in 1961 and a knighthood in 1966. To the end of his life Penrose delighted in making inventive collages, and during his last years he produced some of his most exuberant images. He died at his home, Farley Farm, Chiddingly, Sussex. Like Roger Fry, Penrose was born and raised a Quaker. In large part inspired by Quaker doctrine concerning the pursuit of the individual’s inner light, both men were tireless advocates for change in the visual arts. Fry advocated the doctrine of ‘significant form’, whereby he meant that the integrity of a work of art is understood by an examination of its various parts. For him, a good work of art had a coherent organic configuration. In contrast, Penrose from about 1925 was a defender of surrealism. He considered that movement a response to the chaos of modernity, in that it recognised the unconscious as a vast storehouse of images from which the artist could draw. In Penrose’s view, the artist had an obligation to use his own dream imagery as the subject matter for works of art, and Penrose saw no problem in placing images side by side that directly contradicted each other. Closure and coherence have little import in such an aesthetic system. Quakerism was central in Penrose’s intellectual and artistic formation – and in creating a divide within him. He once said, ‘I don’t think I would ever have become a Surrealist in the ardent way I did if I hadn’t been born a Quaker.’3 This reflection, providing a vital clue to understanding Roland, is the cornerstone of this book. Unlike the Church of England, Quakers paid special attention to the inner light that they felt God bestowed upon all human beings. The central Quaker belief that an inner light resides in each person is based on John 1:9, which claims that there is a ‘true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.’ From this assertion

3

Radio interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, 14 October 1980.

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follows several essential components of early Quakerism: there are no ministers; there are few rituals; there is an emphasis on each person – male and female – discovering his inner light. As a consequence, individuality – as opposed to collectivity – is espoused. Moreover, the Quakers did not stress hierarchy in their religious practices; rather, they felt every person had the obligation to cultivate his own inner world. Roland’s parents may have been, as he claimed, ‘strict and puritanical’, but their religious beliefs stressed individuality and, as a consequence, the central role of the imagination. Quakerism promotes the individual’s response and, in so doing, it eschews hand-me-down beliefs and opinions. It encourages self-evaluation and innovation. It breeds experimentation. In 1938, Penrose made another key observation: ‘If we are to move towards a wider consciousness we need constantly to experiment and to understand the experiments of others. That is why I am a surrealist. To experiment with reality.’ For Roland Penrose, born to Quaker parents who encouraged him to exploit his imagination – to experiment – but who also steered him in the direction of assistance to others, his inner light was central to every aspect of his life. Throughout this book, I remind the reader of this central fact. It is the denominating fact of his life. The license to experiment – and to become a surrealist – was an integral part of him from childhood. There is, however, a major paradox at work, one that complicates all of Penrose’s life. Quakerism may have liberated him, but it also hindered him. A fundamental building block in Quaker theology is the importance of performing good deeds: such works should be undertaken, not to bring merit to those who performed them, but because Christ plainly called for such actions as an essential part of his gospel. Such acts should be done in a spirit of charity with due regard to the fact that those being assisted are of inestimable value to God. For Quakers, this found expression in a tendency to work with others rather than merely doing good deeds for them. The importance of helping others was ingrained into Penrose at a very early age. In this scheme of things, the quest for personal salvation was activated in a commitment to the salvation of mankind. In Roland Penrose’s life, there were these two kinds of redemption – one personal, one public – and he attempted to amalgamate them. And yet there was never an easy relationship between these demands.

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Ultimately, Penrose became a divided person in his attempts to unite essentially conflicting claims. His attempt to reconcile these contraries is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of his personality. Bravely, resourcefully and imaginatively, he sought to merge the roles of Creator and Apostle. This was a difficult task, and this conflict is a central theme of this book. Despite the inner struggles that beset him, Penrose touched and influenced many areas of English cultural life. Foremost in this regard, he was very much involved in the setting up of a key public institution: the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), an organisation central to any understanding of English visual modernism. Together with Herbert Read, Penrose was anxious that modern art, including surrealism, have a permanent home in England. Plans for such an institution were well in place before World War II, but the scheme only got off the ground in the late forties. Even then, there was a great deal of acrimony about the form such an institution should take. Penrose favored using the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a model (the director, Alfred Barr, was a good friend of his), but there was much resistance to using this institution as a prototype. Finally, the ICA came into being. Rather than housing a permanent collection, it would become a meeting place and a venue for exhibitions. Even within this narrow mandate, the ICA sparked numerous controversies, in many of which Penrose was involved. Some early ICA exhibitions, especially ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art’ and ‘Growth and Form’, were enormously influential in establishing a new intellectual climate in post-war England. Even though I was able to reveal some new information about the formation of the ICA in my biography of Herbert Read (1990), there is much new information in the Penrose archive and in the ICA archive that is examined in this book. Although Penrose ultimately decided against pressing for a museum of modern art in England, he was an important collector. When it was assembled in the 1930s, his collection embraced a plurality of modernisms, obviously dominated by surrealism. Unlike Douglas Cooper, whose collection was largely limited to cubism as practised by Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger, Penrose purchased significant works by surrealists and cubists, and his collection contained strong examples of work by English artists. The collection

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itself demonstrates how Penrose tried to integrate English modernist expression with its continental equivalents. Penrose was also anxious that major contemporary works enter the national collections of England. In this regard, he persuaded Picasso to sell the important painting The Three Dancers to the Tate – the only instance in which Picasso sold a painting to a museum. Penrose was a great advocate of Picasso in all his stylistic expressions, and produced the first full-length life of him. Although Picasso worked in the surrealist tradition in a limited way, there was no artist Penrose admired more than Picasso. When he was invited to write the life, Penrose responded with alacrity and produced a narrative that is both accurate and vivid in recounting the Spaniard’s existence. The book may suffer a bit from its reliance on the ‘great man’ approach to biography, but it holds its own even when compared to the multi-volume Richardson biography (still in progress), because Penrose tried to show Picasso’s career from Picasso’s perspective. He captured the artist’s subjectivity, rather than simply objectifying him. In order to write about Picasso and to promote modernism, Penrose ultimately sacrificed his career as an artist. Since his art is derived from his unconscious, it can, if used carefully and sensitively, yield important insights about his inner life. For instance, Penrose did six paintings of Lee Miller, his second wife. These canvases reveal a great deal about his love for Miller, a woman now justifiably recognised as an important photographer, but they also highlight the differences that divided them. In this book, I examine some of Penrose’s major works of art to elucidate his inner life. In assessing Penrose the artist it is important to remember that he never earned his living as an artist, and that this fact sets him apart from many of his artist friends. On its own, however, I would argue, Penrose’s work as an artist is worthy of more serious attention than it has received, and I therefore comment in detail on some of his most significant accomplishments. His reinvention of Farley Farm in Sussex as a surrealist habitation was one of his greatest achievements as an artist. At Farleys, he and Lee Miller established a rural modernist surrealist environment that stands in marked contrast to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Charleston and its Bloomsbury-inspired aesthetics.

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As part of its agenda in exploring an area of visual modernism in which there is comparatively little scholarship, this biography contains further information about the interactions between continental modernism and its English equivalent since – unlike most other English modernists, as argued above – Penrose’s attention remained fixed on France and Spain. He embraced those two places because, in his opinion, they produced the most exciting, revolutionary examples of visual modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. Moreover, France was the birthplace of surrealism. More specifically, as a result of the above research, this life contains new, unpublished information on many aspects of Penrose’s life – for example, on the history of the Penrose and Peckover families, and the particular form of Quakerism practised by both families; on Valentine Penrose’s correspondence with her husband and his replies to her; on the mysterious Count Galarza; on Penrose’s conflicted relationships with E. L. T. Mesens and Douglas Cooper; on Penrose’s camouflage activities during World War II; on Penrose’s first meeting with Picasso; on Penrose’s homoerotic attraction toward Picasso; on Penrose’s correspondence with Lee Miller, and his subsequent marriage to her; and on the complicated history of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This book becomes the story of a man who devoted himself to a number of causes, all in the hope of transforming his native land into a true bastion of modernism. His is a name often mentioned in the accounts of others, and this book differs from much of the previous literature by foregrounding him. As a man, Penrose perceived his existence as both shattered and incomprehensible. If that were so, he saw no reason to promote a form of modernism that espoused formalist beliefs that tied everything into an organic whole. Surrealism spoke to his deepest concerns and anxieties. He was relentless in exploring that which was novel, exciting and transforming. All modernists are insurgents against the status quo. Penrose found a way, using his Quaker upbringing, of mounting his rebellion through surrealism. Without meaning to do so, however, Penrose fragmented his existence. Biography becomes a particularly good way to unite all the pieces of the jigsaw that was Roland Penrose because, in such a format, his

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unique but diverse contributions can be discussed, evaluated and ultimately assessed. Overall, this biography offers a reading of Roland Penrose as a man who struggled valiantly to reconcile the contradictory forces that confronted him. Very much a man of the twentieth century, he wanted to know what it was to be its child. Ultimately, he helped change the face of English modernism.

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Acknowledgements

Roland Penrose’s autobiography, Scrap Book, is of indispensable value in constructing his life history. However, like many memoir writers, he sometimes omits or distorts key events when it suits him. I have often followed my subject’s leads in Scrap Book, but I have taken into account his blind spots and call them to the attention of the reader. I often point out to the reader when Penrose’s reflections are distorted or inaccurate. Penrose had many sides to his personality. Some of his friends saw him as a kind, straightforward person. Others were aware of him as a man who experienced a great deal of self-doubt. In interviews about Penrose, some saw him in an extremely idealised way, others as a conflicted individual. There is, for example, a considerable difference between how Terry O’Brien and Diane Deriaz perceived him and how Bettina McNulty and Georgina Murray Erskine experienced him. The simple truth is that the assessment of one friend can be just as accurate as that of another, even though those opinions differ markedly from each other, because the person observed is a mixture of contraries. Of paramount importance in understanding Penrose are his marriages to Valentine Penrose and then Lee Miller, and his complicated dealings with his mistress, Diane Deriaz. In recent years a great deal has been written about Lee Miller, but my book contains the fullest description available of the turbulent relationship between Miller and Penrose. On this score, the testimony of Lee and Roland’s friends is conflicted: some saw the marriage as a successful one, others as a disaster. There is no easy way to make a definitive statement on this issue because, on its own terms, the Penrose union survived. Antony Penrose has written of his father in several key books, especially in The Friendly Surrealist. This book is especially valuable

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for the information given by Roland to Antony, for which there is no archival source. Keith Hartley has written a magisterial essay on Roland Penrose’s career, and, more recently, Elizabeth Cowling has provided a great deal of new evidence on the research and writing of Penrose’s biography of Picasso in her invaluable Visiting Picasso. Michel Remy’s Surrealism in Britain is stimulating. I have learned much from Carolyn Burke’s insightful Lee Miller: A Life. I am indebted to these writers in researching this book, and I have attempted to expand, explore further, and thus build on their insights. I am indebted to the following for either meeting with me, or answering email requests for information: Elizabeth Cowling, Nancy Deffebach, Martin Gibson, Anna Golodnitsky and her colleagues at the Tate Gallery Library and Archive, Keith Hartley, Ray Johnson, Thomas Cummins Kennedy, Anne Massey, and Kirstie Meehan, Neil Ogg and their colleagues in the archives at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. My research assistant at the Scottish National Gallery, Thibaut Clamart, did invaluable work. At Farley Farm, Kerry Negahban and Lance Downie provided much appreciated assistance. I am deeply grateful to the peer reviewers who made many useful suggestions for improving this book. At Edinburgh University Press, Jackie Jones has been an enthusiastic champion of this project. Adela Rauchova and Rebecca Mackenzie have provided editorial guidance, and Camilla Rockwood has copy-edited the manuscript with considerable precision and grace. In my research I have tried to exploit fully the Roland Penrose Archives now housed at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh; I have also made use of the transcripts of a series of interviews conducted by Michael Sweeney in 1997–8 with friends and associates of Penrose. Michael graciously urged me to make full use of his work. Although most of Roland’s friends were dead by the time I began work on this book, I have interviewed, in addition to Antony Penrose, the following: Rosamond Bernier, Georgina Murray Erskine, Julian Fellowes, Roz Jacobs and Bettina McNulty. Twenty-five years ago, while researching lives of Paul Nash, Herbert Read, and Virginia Woolf, I met with and discussed Roland with Eileen Agar, Dorothy Morland, Frances Partridge, George Rylands and Audrey Withers.

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In preparing and writing this book, I have benefited enormously from the kindness and generosity of Antony Penrose. He has assisted me in understanding his father’s character, and, through him, I have come to a much fuller appreciation of Roland.

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Chapter One

‘Born A Quaker’ (1900–1913)

‘I was born in a cloud smelling strongly of oil paint, honest banking and piety.’1 That was Roland Penrose’s whimsical but accurate description of his genealogy. His Irish-born father James Doyle Penrose was a painter, very much a traditional, proficient and popular Royal Hibernian Academician, specialising in portraits and religious and historical themes; his mother Josephine was the daughter of Lord Peckover, an eminently successful East Anglian banker. Piety linked Josephine and James: they were devout Quakers. The ‘piety’ associated with Quakerism was central to Roland’s existence, and his life history must begin with looking at that religion, which by the early part of the twentieth century had undergone several major transformations from its origins three centuries earlier. A great many dissenting religious groups emerged during and after the English Civil War (1642–51). All of these sects rebelled against the Church of England, but these insurrections took many different forms. The young George Fox, the son of a Leicestershire weaver, as a result of a revelation, came to believe that it was possible to worship God and have a direct experience of Christ, the second member of the Trinity, without the assistance of ordained clergy. He travelled widely espousing this conviction and quickly gathered together a number of followers who, like him, believed that they were restoring the true Christian church. In particular, he reported hearing a voice that told him, ‘There is one, Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.’ In 1650, when Fox was brought before two magistrates on the charge of blasphemy, he and his followers were labelled Quakers because Fox bade the judges to tremble at the word of the Lord.

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The term Quaker was obviously meant to ridicule Fox, but it soon became widely accepted by the scorned. Since all men were equal before the Lord, the Quakers (the group’s formal name is the Society of Friends) put egalitarianism into practice: they did not doff their hats to persons supposedly their betters; they addressed everyone as ‘thee’ or ‘thou’, a form of address previously reserved for children and servants; there were no holidays or special days of the week set aside for religious observance; there were no sacred spaces such as churches. Quaker belief systems also embraced pacifism – since the lives of all men were sacred, no one should bear arms against one another. For their adherence to this conduct of non-conforming behaviour, the Quakers were widely disliked and persecuted. In the eighteenth and throughout most of the following century, Quakers entered a quietist phase whereby they attempted to fit into and thus conform to mainstream British society. Many of the external marks of being a Quaker – and thus being genuine dissenters – had ceased to be practised. For example, in 1740, Friends were exhorted to avoid ‘instrumental means’ of changing society and to ‘wait in silence with reverence and singleness of heart.’2 The movement was in danger of eradication. Despite this development, to be a Quaker at the beginning of the twentieth century was to be someone who rebelled against the Church of England and all the orthodoxies with which it was associated. Quakers remained outsiders, and their religious system emphasised individualism. James Doyle Penrose was born on 9 May 1862 at his family’s home, ‘Michelstown’, Castleknock, County Dublin. His father, James Doyle Penrose Senior, was a landowning farmer who moved his family to Norfolk in 1874; his mother was Ann Bowles (Fig. 1). James was a pupil at the long-established private Quaker school, Stramongate, in Kendal.3 He then studied art at the National Art Training School at South Kensington (which became the Royal College of Art from 1986), at St John’s Wood Art School and at the Royal Academy Schools, where he was awarded a silver medal. By the age of twenty-seven, James had exhibited at the major London galleries and at the Royal Academy. In 1904 he was elected a Royal Hibernian Academician (Dublin).

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Figure 1. James Doyle Penrose, Self-portrait, c. 1893.

Like many successful artists of his time, James was a proficient portrait painter who also took on grander historical subjects, such as Queen Philippa Interceding for the Burghers of Calais. Roland put it this way: his father’s work had a moral purpose, ‘more righteous than the works of his more celebrated contemporaries such as Alma-Tadema, Herkomer and Swan and others whose studios he visited’.4 Roland’s words have to be weighed carefully, because he did not admire the work of either his father or the generation of painters from which he came. For example, the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema, in part influenced by the bright colours of the Pre-Raphaelites, made stunning historical recreations of ancient Rome and even travelled to Pompeii to study the excavations there. The English-born Sir Hubert von Herkomer, like James, was an extremely successful portraitist, but his best works are genre paintings of the poor. The painter and sculptor John Macallan Swan specialised in depictions of lions and

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tigers. James was not a member of the St John’s Wood Clique (active 1863–1900), but he shared their interest in painting British historical scenes rather than depicting scenes from Greek and Roman history and mythology. Roland did not approve of the commercialisation and compartmentalisation of art these dedicated professionals represented. Many of these painters were exceptionally skilled craftsmen who had divided the picture-buying public among themselves. They may have been exceptional technicians, but they lacked what Roland considered true imaginative vision. They were, for him, businessmen, members of the haute bourgeoisie. Although born to this class and enjoying many of its privileges, Roland never admired it. He did feel, however, that he had inherited from his father ‘a romantic love of the arts.’5 Elizabeth Josephine Peckover (always known as Josephine), who was born on 27 April 1859 at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, was the daughter of Alexander Peckover (1830–1919), created 1st and last Baron Peckover in 1907, and his wife, Eliza Sharples (1831–62). Alexander Peckover was born at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the son of Algernon Peckover (1803–93). His mother was Priscilla Alexander, daughter of Dykes Alexander, a banker, of Ipswich, Suffolk. Alexander was educated at Grove House School in London, a Quaker boarding school. Josephine had two younger sisters: Alexandrina (1860–1948) and Anna Jane (1861–1928). These two women never married. Josephine and Alexandrina were educated at Longmaid’s School in Kendall and then at Westfield College, London, then an all-female institution.6 Since their mother died in 1862 when the Peckover daughters were extremely young, the three were raised by their maiden aunts, Susanna (1832–1903), Jane (1837–1909), Katherine Elizabeth (1839–70), Algerina (1841–1927), Wilhelmina (1844–1910) and especially Priscilla Hannah (1833–1931) Peckover. The Peckovers were a wealthy Quaker banking family. The founder of the dynasty was Jonathan (1755–1833), who was born to fourth-generation Quakers. He was descended from Edmund Peckover, who served as a foot soldier in Cromwell’s army before converting to Quakerism. Edmund, who was once imprisoned for his beliefs, eventually settled in Fakenham, Norfolk.

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By the end of the seventeenth century Quaker businessmen were especially conspicuous in banking, especially in London. The reasons for this are difficult to establish. One possibility is that a large percentage of Quakers may have been more substantially better off than the normal run of society because members of this group depended upon – and assisted – each other.7 They were barred until well into the nineteenth century from entering Cambridge and Oxford, the legal profession, the army and the church. The result may have been that the Quakers established a strong system of collective behaviour: ‘Quakers took their commitments to each other seriously and the ever present threat of disownment was a powerful one to men who participated in Quakerism’s total lifestyle.’8 As a mercantile group, Quakers were the first to display fixed prices for goods (they saw bargaining as based on falsity). Quaker banks – like other banks – began issuing more notes than they had gold on deposit. To protect themselves in the event of a run on gold, they formed alliances with each other. Banking was a congenial and lucrative profession for this small minority, and the Peckovers were one of many Quaker families who became wealthy in following this calling. At the age of 22, in 1777, Jonathan left Norfolk and moved to Wisbech, where he established a grocery store at 25 High Street. Known as an extremely successful entrepreneur, Jonathan was sometimes asked by customers to hold money for safe-keeping. This was the beginning of his involvement in taking care of other people’s money. In 1782, he opened ‘Peckovers Bank’. Ten years later, in partnership with another Quaker family, the Gurneys, Jonathan founded a local branch of the Wisbech and Lincolnshire Bank. When Jonathan died in 1833, his sons William (1790–1877) and Algernon became partners in the bank. Alexander, Algernon’s son, became a junior clerk in 1848: he took his seat on a stool and worked as an ordinary bank clerk. He received no special treatment and worked alongside his father, uncle and his younger brother, Jonathan (1835–82). Alexander was particularly effective in steering a run on the bank in 1866, and soon afterwards he was made a partner. In 1893, at the age of sixty-three, having inherited over half a million pounds from his father, he retired. He was the last member of his family to work

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as a banker, and his firm was one of twenty local banks that merged with Barclays in 1896. In his retirement Alexander devoted himself mainly to meteorological studies and the collection of ancient manuscripts. A man of endless curiosity, he was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Linnean Society of London; he was also a member of the Hakluyt Society and the British Numismatic Society. In 1893, the year he left banking, he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, a mainly ceremonial post he held until 1906. In carrying out his official duties he wore ordinary business clothing, because his adherence to Quakerism meant he could not dress in any kind of military uniform. His sisters had felt he should not, as a good Quaker, have accepted such an earthly honour.9 Alexander also lavished his attention on transforming his residence, Bank House, a spacious Georgian house on the North Brink of Wisbech on the Isle of Ely, into a magnificent example of a late-Victorian country establishment. The refined façade still modestly conceals an exuberant forty-eight-acre Victorian garden containing a “wilderness walk”, a pool garden, glasshouses and an orangery (Fig. 2).10 Bank House (now known as Peckover House) was built in 1722 by the Southwell family, and was rented in 1794 by Jonathan Peckover, Alexander’s grandfather. Sometime before 1800, he purchased it. Jonathan and his sons William and Algernon housed their bank

Figure 2. The North Brink, Wisbech, with Bank House on the left.

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‘Born A Quaker’ (1900–1913)

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there until 1878 (they added a wing for this purpose), at which point the addition became too small for their thriving business. From Bank House, as Roland put it, his grandfather ran his family ‘by remote control’.11 The Peckovers retained the house’s refined mid-eighteenth-century look, including the elaborate plasterwork above its doors and fireplaces. William Peckover, Alexander’s bachelor uncle, lived at Bank House until his death in 1877. At that time Alexander, a widower since 1862, moved there with his sister Priscilla Hannah and his three daughters. Before that the five had lived at nearby Harecroft House, designed by Algernon, an amateur architect. The North Brink in Wisbech on the Nene remains one of the great streetscapes of Georgian England, and the Peckovers dominated it. In addition to Bank House and Harecroft House, they owned Wisteria House and Sibald’s Holme. (Algernon lived at Sibald’s Holme, as did his daughters Algerina and Wilhelmina; at some point, Priscilla Hannah was at Wisteria House and Jonathan, Alexander’s brother, at Harecroft House.) Next door to Bank House was the Friends Meeting House. Alexander’s sisters and daughters, whom Roland dubbed the ‘unworldly ladies’, were central figures in Wisbech society and, as such, they made one considerable concession to the modern word: they dressed fashionably, rather than clothing themselves in the plain grey of many Quaker women.12 Nevertheless, stiffly corseted, they practised the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ common in the language of their religion. For these wealthy Quakers, endogamy became a way of preserving their religious values and style of life, and so the marriage of James and Josephine would have been welcome to both their families. Josephine and James knew each other for a considerable time before they wed. When she was a student at Westfield Josephine began to attend the Westminster Monthly meetings, at which members of the Penrose family were also present. Her diary records that she went to dinner with the Penrose family on 14 June 1885 and visited a Royal Academy Exhibition with them on 25 June that year, and again in 1891. James spent Christmas 1891 at Wisbech. He proposed to her on 26 May 1892, and they became formally engaged on 17 October.13

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Josephine and James married on 19 April 1893. Her father chided her gently that he was ‘greatly amused at your going [on your honeymoon] to the most fashionable & expensive hotel in London. The Savoy! After all your plans for care and economy!’ (Fig. 3).14 The couple purchased Orwell Lodge, a house and studio at 44 Finchley Road in St John’s Wood, London.15 Named after its fourteenth-century owners, the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, this section of London retained a rural charm well into the twentieth century. There were an assortment of Italianate villas and Victorian Gothic houses, the air was pure and the proximity to central London was enticing. Sir Edwin Landseer, the great Victorian painter, lived there, as did J. J. Tissot and Alma-Tadema (Fig. 4). Roland’s parents, especially his mother, were part of a new breed of Quaker that came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century. This group was determined to restore Quakerism to its radical roots. John Wilhelm Rowntree, the chocolate and confectionery manufacturer, spearheaded the revival. He wanted the Society of Friends to shake free of its long slumber by taking an active part

Figure 3. The wedding of Elizabeth Josephine Peckover and James Doyle Penrose.

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Figure 4. 44 Finchley Road.

in the modern world. In particular, he wanted Quakers to become engaged in important social issues such as temperance and pacifism.16 Rowntree emphasised that some important fundamentals had been neglected. A basic building block of the older Quaker theology had been the importance it placed upon the performing of good deeds: such works should be undertaken not to bring merit to those who performed them, but because Christ plainly called for such actions as an essential part of his gospel. Such acts should be done in a spirit of charity with due regard to the fact that those being assisted are of inestimable value to God. For Quakers, this found expression in a tendency to work with people to improve themselves, rather than merely doing good deeds for them. Rowntree renewed this commitment. Even before Rowntree’s reforming hand, the Peckover family was concerned with abandoning all semblances of Quaker quietism. Jonathan, Alexander’s brother, founded the Working Men’s Institute on Hill Street in Wisbech. In 1879, Priscilla Hannah Peckover, Roland’s great-aunt, started the Local Peace Association, a nondenominational Christian pacifist organisation for women. Josephine followed in her aunt’s footsteps in her strong support of the peace movement. In 1902, she published Talks about Peace and War: For

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the Young, a forty-seven-page tract divided into five chapters: ‘Love Your Enemies’; ‘The Other Side of the Picture’; ‘Stories of Peaceable Men’, ‘A Better Way than Fighting’’ and ‘True Heroes’. The book’s opening paragraph sets the tone for the entire pamphlet: Several years ago, when the English were at war with a nation of South African savages, a little boy was writing in a copy-book the text ‘Love your enemies.’ He glanced up at his teacher with such a puzzled look, and said, ‘I don’t think our soldiers loved the poor Zulus very much when they went to kill them.’ This little boy was puzzled because he did not understand why the English people who call themselves Christians should fight their enemies instead of following Christ’s command to love them. And he was right; it is unchristian and contrary to the teaching of Jesus to fight and kill our fellow-men, though a great number of people too, cannot see how wrong it is.17

Since the Peckover family enjoyed great material success, Josephine felt an obligation to show gratitude by performing good deeds.18 Her commitment to the pacifist movement was a strong one, and it may well have absorbed attention that Roland felt she should have given to her children. In any event, Josephine and James ingrained in their four sons that helping others was an essential part of their birthright. Josephine’s philanthropic concerns so dominated her time that she was divorced from the facts of life. She was so ill-prepared for the ordeal of childbirth that she locked herself in a bathroom at the outset of her first labour, refusing to open the door to anyone. She survived, but her child was stillborn. Alexander (Alec), the couple’s first surviving child, was born in 1896 and was followed by Lionel in 1898. Roland was born at teatime on 14 October 1900, the 834th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. Roland took a special pleasure in the date of his birth and the fact that he was named after the protagonist of Ludovico Ariosto’s sixteenth-century Italian epic poem, Orlando Furioso. Alexander Peckover was delighted: ‘Roland Algernon seems to settle itself down as the name. The Algernon is much approved of course, and, as Roland, or Orlando, as he is called in Italy, was one of my favourite heroes in my boyish days, it is amusing to have a grandchild . . . named after him.’19 Bernard (‘Beacus’) was born in 1893. The name Beacus came from Baby Beak, a character in a children’s story. As a child, Roland was often called ‘Roly’ (Fig. 5).

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Figure 5. Elizabeth Josephine Penrose with Roland, 1900.

Roland’s first memories were, as to be expected, vivid: ‘There were rooks in the elm trees beyond the garden wall that I believed were ravens come to carry me away and an ivy-covered lamp-post called Jack-in-the-Green in front of the Gothic house.’20 Like many wealthy women of her generation, Josephine’s days were so filled with performing good deeds outside her home that she did not have much time to spend with her offspring. As befitted children of their status, the Penrose boys had a nurse, in their case an especially well-trained one in the Norland mode (graduates of Norland College, which was founded in 1892, were considered the finest providers of childcare). As Roland recalled, Edith Ellis ‘was the

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daughter of an old sea captain. In childhood he had taken her with him under sail across the high seas and I well remember her stories of the great ship and the wonderful green sunsets she had seen.’21 Edith was touched, as she told Josephine, when three-year-old Roland, at the news of Beacus’s birth, promised her that he would ‘love [the baby] so, and call it another Angel, as I call him my angel’.22 Mischievously, many years later, he took delight in the fact that Edith was the sister of Havelock Ellis, and that the famous sexologist considered his ‘adored nanny . . . an insignificant puritanical prig.’23 Of course, his parents would have thought of Havelock Ellis as a ‘lecherous impostor.’24 Roland is much more reserved when speaking of his mother than he is of his father. She was ‘dignified, thrifty, believing that the riches she inherited were to be held as though in trust from God, and she was determined to be no inconstant steward’. Josephine was also a person of ‘unshakeable convictions’.25 Roland’s rebellious spirit since early childhood was more focused on his mother than his father. Josephine was probably more obdurate, more difficult to please than the more withdrawn James. In Roland’s mind, his mother and father were ultimately conjoined as ‘ardent puritanical Quakers’. In 1908, when Roland was eight years of age, the family moved from St John’s Wood to Oxhey Grange, a High Victorian Gothic country house built in 1876 by William Young; it stands in an estate of 110 acres near Watford in Hertfordshire. For Roland the move was disruptive. He did not like his new home, found after a great deal of bickering: it was ‘an absurdly hideous Edwardian house that [James] tried at great expense to romanticise by adding here and there halftimbered gables, a turret crowned by a gilded weathership of his own design and a palatial front door capped with two bourgeois lions in Portland stone. He filled the oak woods with rhododendrons, made a garden in a field with a pond surrounded by rocks from the Midlands, collected suits of armour, swords, and crossbows.’ According to Roland, this place had little to offer: ‘Had it not been for a muddy stream which had formed a small maelstrom in the middle of a meadow, for the red squirrels, the occasional viper and the unique badger that having bitten clean through the gamekeeper’s boot before it had been shown the way to the zoo, it was a drab piece of countryside waiting to be absorbed into London’s suburbs’ (Fig. 6).26

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Figure 6. Oxhey Grange.

Oxhey grew rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century with the coming of the London and Birmingham Railway from London Euston to Boxmoor; the settlement there was developed to house railway workers. This new environment might have seemed pastoral, but, as an older person, Roland vividly recalled, ‘The grass in the meadows was blackened by the smoke of the Flying Scotsman and an endless succession of main line trains to the north.’27 Roland, in this one sentence from his autobiography, emphasises the smell and noise created by the locomotives and intimates he had been thrown into a new environment in which he was not completely comfortable. This is the first glimpse he provides of his loss of childhood innocence. Josephine held frequent garden parties and other gatherings for missionaries and supporters of the Temperance Society. The entire family attended morning and evening prayers, and spent a large portion of each Sunday at the corrugated-iron Quaker Meeting House in Watford. There were monthly meetings at Jordan’s Meeting House at Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. From the seventeenth century, this place had been the centre of Quakerism, and Oxhey Grange’s

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close proximity to it may have assisted the Penroses in their decision to settle there. The Meeting House, with its bare brick floor, extensive panelling and benches, was built in 1688. William Penn is buried on the grounds, and the Mayflower Barn stands there. Religion was not the only focus of family life. Having ‘spent the morning sitting in silence as an elder’, James would later in the day ‘shoot pheasants and [lead] the family and the dogs round the estate on Sunday afternoons’.28 The four boys had very different temperaments. Alec was compliant. Lionel, who developed a strong interest in dissection, informed his mother he did not believe in God. Roland was a peaceful, starryeyed boy, although he once had a falling-out with Beacus when the latter attempted to dig a canal through Roland’s vegetable garden. In response, a furious Beacus swiped Roland with his spade and gashed his brother’s head severely. Beacus was sent to bed without food; Roland’s head was bandaged (Fig. 7). Roland and Beacus sometimes had to accept the dominance of their older brothers. The four even went so far as to share their dreams: the ‘Derwe Band’, a group of black musicians who danced wildly while playing a dirge, visited them in their sleep. The youngsters enjoyed sharing their experiences of the Band, as all music except hymns was forbidden in the household. Despite their divergent makeups, the four boys banded together against their elders. Their parents may have attempted to shower them with love, but the four boys resented, as Roland recalled, the ‘narrow limits’ in which they were trapped because of the ‘unyielding discipline of religion’.29 James and Josephine were never emotionally demonstrative to any of their children, and this privation inhibited the subsequent lives of the siblings. Josephine may have been devoted to good causes, but her lack of maternal tenderness was what her children remembered about her. Even before attending school, Roland was aware of something else that set him apart from his siblings: ‘From my earliest youth I had found that neither reading nor writing and even less arithmetic came to me with ease. This gave me an excellent reason for turning towards the visual arts.’

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Figure 7. James Doyle Penrose, Portrait of Roland, c. 1905.

In particular, Bank House stimulated his imagination. For Roland the child, the environs were wonderfully mysterious: A large walled garden with the shelter of tall trees, summer houses, greenhouses, stables, dank cellars . . . a garden door which opened into the seclusion of the family graveyard for those peculiar people – Quakers – a privet maze and a medieval stone cross, extensive greenhouses sheltering exotic plants, well-mown weedless lawns and carefully laid out flower beds were all within these secluded precincts.30

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To him, there was a startling contrast between such ‘interludes in the ancestral house’ and the ‘infertile suburban spaces’ of Oxhey Grange. The entire family gathered at Bank House in the summer, and for a fortnight at Christmas. Roland had vivid recollections of his grandfather’s wide-ranging collection: mummies, coins, walking-sticks, Rhino horns, narwhal tusks, a crystal ball, the enormous tooth of a sperm whale, even Sir Isaac Newton’s footstool. The smell of cedarlined drawers was pervasive; and so was the presence of an imperious Alexander telling the boys to ‘keep off dirty paws’. If curiosities dominated the holdings at Bank House, it also had a collection of rare Bibles and incunabula that it gave it true respectability. ‘The four folios of Shakespeare’ were their owner’s proudest possession. ‘Pure gold’, the aunts assured their nephews. Roland the boy was most impressed with the facsimiles of William Blake’s illuminated books he came upon: ‘a discovery which filled me with wonder and opened visions of another world in which I imagined I could live as an artist–farmer in some country like Ireland’. He was also taken with Blake’s engravings of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, wherein scantily clad men and women mingled with God, Christ and a wide variety of serpents and monsters. Of particular interest were the female nudes. In Roland’s very repressed world, these images came as a tremendous shock. Roland’s propensity towards expressing himself in sketching and drawing may have been assisted by his inability to read fluently. It is possible that he was dyslexic. As an adult, his handwriting was extremely disjointed, and his research notes were often messy and fragmented.31 He slept at Wisbech in a dressing room next to his grandfather’s bedroom, which contained the great family bed, a four-poster with red curtains and steps on either side. Night after night, his insomniac grandfather would keep him awake as he recited Horace in Latin and passages in English from a translation of Ariosto. His ears burned, perhaps more than once, when he heard Alexander proclaiming through the shut door the resounding words: ‘Down fell the misbeliever and o’er him Roland stood’ (Fig. 8). During family holidays at Bank House – and also at Easter, at the thatched Hillside boarding house at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight overlooking the English Channel – Roland allowed his dreamy side to come to the fore by drawing and painting. He made pen-and-ink drawings of a variety of subjects such as farmyard scenes, coastal

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Figure 8. Penrose family group, 1908. On his eightieth birthday, Alexander Peckover was presented with a ribbon of eighty roses. In the front row, from left to right, are Roland, Lionel, Alec and Beacus. Second row, from left to right, are Algerina, Priscilla Hannah, Alexandrina, Baron Peckover, James Doyle Penrose, Josephine Penrose and Anna Jane.

landscapes on the Isle of Wight and themes echoing his father’s work, such as St George and the Dragon. Most are (later) labelled ‘Drawn from Life’. Although he did not like to admit it, the artistic side of Roland the boy was drawn to his father and his profession. Later, when he disdained the kind of art that his father practised, he distanced himself from the memory of once having imitated him. Roland did have ways of escaping the constrictions of his family. His grandfather Penrose had set up two of his sons, Arthur and Henry (Harry), with a small farm near Herstmonceux. Later, Harry bought the grassland farm known as Beechcroft a few miles away. When he stayed with his uncle Harry at Beechcroft, Roland noticed how the relaxed atmosphere there was completely different from home.

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At Beechcroft, the child felt able to be himself. In this place, where piety and propriety were downplayed, he felt he could breathe more freely. Harry, his wife Annie and their three sons had created an idyllic, pastoral life for themselves: their seventeenth-century house had an especially dramatic view of the landscape. In contrast to Oxhey Grange and Bank House, Beechcroft, a working farm, was a spot fully engaged by its inhabitants with the soil. Later, when as a teenager Roland arrived by rail at Hailsham, his uncle would meet him with pony and trap. During his stay the youngster eagerly joined in with pitching sheaves or gathering hay. His ambition of becoming an artist–farmer was likely derived from his working vacations at Beechcroft. School soon became an essential part of Roland’s boyhood. After kindergarten and preparatory school in Hampstead, when he and his family were still in St John’s Wood, Roland boarded at The Downs School, a Quaker prep school near Malvern, until 1914. The Cambridge-educated Herbert Jones, who had served as the headmaster at Leighton Park School, had founded this school in 1900. Unlike more traditionally-inclined schools, the Downs emphasised science and the arts. All in all, Roland had a happy childhood. In retrospect, he felt he and his brothers had been too restrained by their parents, but this is a feeling that many youngsters experience. He may have rebelled against his Quaker heritage, but he learned that he had a basic obligation to cultivate and listen to his own inner voice. He was also trained to be aware of the needs of others, and to take an active hand in being at their service. He also found considerable satisfaction in drawing and painting: undertaking those activities allowed him to cultivate his individuality, and to uncover clues to understanding himself. His parents reminded him that he had been born into a religious tradition that rebelled against conformity and, as an adult, Roland would become a blend of the conventional and the unconventional. Roland the adult was certainly a mixture of the orthodox Quaker and the bohemian. One friend recalled, ‘No matter how heavy the night before had been he was meticulous first thing in the morning, well-groomed and at his desk going through his papers.’32

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In Roland’s case, nevertheless, a basic conflict was established between the cultivation of his own sensibility and the necessity of assisting others. Roland Penrose the Artist and Roland Penrose the Apostle of Modernism were the two fundamental sides of this complicated man, and that particular duality would never be fully reconciled.

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Chapter Two

‘This Fascinating Horror’ (1914–1918)

At the age of fourteen, in 1914, Roland was sent to Leighton Park School, near Reading.1 He was expected to pay close attention to his studies. From this time, he lived at Oxhey Grange only during school holidays, and he and his brothers spent carefree summers doing farm work for their uncle in Sussex. At Leighton Park, referred to at the time as ‘the Quaker Eton’, Roland was further schooled in a fundamental aspect of his parents’ religion: self-reliance. Founded in 1890 as a public school for boys, it was from its beginning supported by Algernon and Alexander Peckover. The specific aim of the school was to prepare its students to enter Cambridge and Oxford while, at the same time, emphasising and thus inculcating Quaker principles in its charges. The number of boys at Leighton Park grew from four in 1890 to 103 in the 1920s. In Roland’s time there were seventy students. As at virtually all schools affiliated with dissenting religions, the pupils were encouraged to question the basis of so-called obvious truths, weigh their findings carefully and arrive at their own conclusions. The curriculum at such institutions placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics, but overall, the boys were encouraged to be independent thinkers. Music was well established. Roland on the cello and Lionel at the piano played duets as part of the ‘Entertainments Programmes’. During the summers, the boys were expected to attend summer camps to do farm work – very much like the routine already established for the Penrose siblings. Overall, the emphasis was on a strong mind in a strong body. In contradistinction to the traditional public schools, the daily assembly, called the ‘Collect’, finished with a silence lasting several minutes – there was no hymn-singing; the ‘Meeting for Worship’

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replaced the ‘Collect’ once a week: this event lasted for twenty to twenty-five minutes and was held in silence, although there was the opportunity for an individual to break the quiet by speaking about an issue; the ‘Monthly Meeting’ gave pupils the opportunity to speak about any problems arising in the governance of the school, and was usually conducted by the Head Boy. The curriculum and practices at Leighton Park were devised to assist the young men in its charge to face contemporary life forthrightly. Despite the advanced thinking that the school represented, many of its benefits were shattered for Roland even before he arrived there in the summer of 1914. As he vividly recalled, ‘One scorching afternoon in August the games we were playing with the neighbour’s children in a cornfield were brought abruptly to a halt by the sudden appearance of the commanding figure of our host – “Come quick!” – he shouted. “The boys [the soldiers] are marching down the road.” ’2 The contrast between innocence and experience in this sentence could not be more marked. The first fourteen years of Roland’s life had been lived during peace; now England would be changed forevermore by the Great War. Like many youngsters of his generation, Roland became well aware that the shadow of war pervaded every aspect of English life. Back home, his family was thrown into a state of quiet despondency because of Quakerism’s strong adherence to pacifism. The Penroses actively supported the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), and James and Alec, Roland’s oldest brother, assisted in the formation of a local branch at Watford. Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway founded the NCF to encourage men to refuse war service. The NCF required its members to ‘refuse from conscientious motives to bear arms because they consider human life to be sacred’.3 In 1916, Allen and Brockway were arrested for distributing a leaflet criticising the introduction of conscription. When they refused to pay their fines, they were sentenced to two months in Pentonville. As Quakers the Penroses were thoroughly familiar with pacifism as a cornerstone of their religious practices, but nevertheless they felt anew that their religion placed them on the margins of what was considered acceptable societal behaviour. Fourteen-year-old Roland had an additional response: his cynicism about any kind of religious belief was reinforced because he witnessed the uselessness of his parents’ prayers for peace.

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In March 1916, when the Military Service Act became law, conscription was introduced for the first time in Britain. Since the Quakers had a long-established history of pacifism, they usually fared better at the tribunal hearings. A year before the Conscription Act went into effect, Alec was given a ‘W.O. Gray exemption cert 186 C.O.’4 and thus immunity from military service. He felt a moral obligation to serve as a noncombatant, and underwent training at Jordan’s to prepare himself to work as an orderly with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU). James and Josephine allowed the FAU to use Oxhey Grange for training exercises from 1915 to 1917. Josephine in particular was indefatigable in her opposition to the war. From 1916 to 1919 she attended War Victims Relief Committee meetings; in October 1916 she went to the Peace Conference on International Sanctions; in May 1918 she was at the National Peace Conference. Alec was posted to France in April 1915 and served on an ambulance train, taking the wounded from the casualty clearing stations in Flanders to hospital. For two and a half years he witnessed the effects of war on men whose bodies had been mangled and destroyed. The trains on which he served were subjected to bombs and shells. In July 1917 he suffered severe shell shock after an accident left him with facial burns. When he returned home, he was a nervous wreck. When Lionel appeared before the Watford Rural Tribunal on 3 August 1916, conscription had come into effect. He informed the Tribunal of his grounds for objecting to fight: ‘I believe all war is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. I cannot see that to take men’s lives can ever be in accordance with what I believe to be the teaching of Jesus Christ.’ The chair of the Tribunal then asked his father: ‘Are you a conscientious objector?’ He replied: ‘Yes. My family have been Quakers for the last 250 years, and my wife’s family also for 250 years.’5 Later, in June 1918, Lionel joined the FAU and served on an ambulance train. Unlike his brother, he did not experience any outward major trauma but, like his brother, he later refused to discuss his service in the FAU. Roland, anxious to be of use, began in 1918 preparing for service three months before he was eligible to enter the fray. The young man went to his uncle Arthur’s farm at Herstmonceux, where he persuaded Arthur to teach him to drive a lorry. Despite the ordeals that

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Alec had endured, Roland felt that his elder brother had experienced something real and exciting, and he wanted to become engaged in an activity that would make him feel he was alive. He was desperately afraid of being left out and missing something thrilling. His training with Arthur allowed Roland to join the FAU three months ahead of his call-up date. Later, after passing his First Aid exam and learning to drive an ambulance, he was seconded to join the Red Cross Italian Ambulance Unit in August 1918, and then sent by them to the Piave in northern Italy. Roland was trained by the Quaker Friends Ambulance Unit, but served in a Red Cross unit. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday (Fig. 9). The Piave River begins in the Alps and flows southeast for 220 kilometres into the Adriatic near Venice. In 1809 it had been the scene of a major battle of the Napoleonic Wars, in which Franco-Italian and Austrian forces clashed. In 1917, the Austrians and Hungarians had defeated the Italians at Caporetto and occupied Italy as far

Figure 9. Roland in First British Ambulance Unit uniform.

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south as the Piave. The battle there in June 1918 was the decisive confrontation on the Italian front during the Great War; there, Austria-Hungary suffered nearly 200,000 casualties. Since the Italian ambulance units were severely depleted, they needed all the assistance they could obtain. The mission of Roland’s Red Cross unit – many of whom were artists, musicians and writers – changed after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarians: the front moved forward so rapidly that the Red Cross ambulances were held up on the south side of the Piave until the bridges could be repaired for crossing. When they did get through, Roland and his compatriots had to deal with the huge mass of 100,000 freed Italian prisoners, suffering from malnutrition and dying at a rate of two to three hundred a day. In addition, much of the civilian population was homeless and starving. Instead of transporting the wounded, the ambulances delivered food while medical personnel got the hospitals up and running again. The First Italian Ambulance Unit (there were four others), under the command of forty-two-year-old George Macaulay Trevelyan, the distinguished historian whose work on Garibaldi had made him well known in Italy, had an assortment of about thirty-five Talbot and Ford ambulances. The much larger Talbots were harder to drive than the Fords on the winding mountains in this part of Italy. Each of the ambulances had stretcher racks for four men, plus additional room for the sitting wounded. In order to minimise vibration, the vehicles had to be driven slowly. The work was terrifying, as one report detailed: in the final days of the War the work of the Unit consisted in hurrying forward to the regimental medical posts which were moving onward from place to place with the advance. The continuous motion put its organisation, adaptability and resource to a severe strain, especially as the ever-receding base at Villa Trieste was divided from the out-stations, not only by distance, but by rivers either unbridged or bridged in such a way as to allow only the smaller cars to traverse them. The roads also on the late Austrian side of the Piave were in extremely bad condition apart from the shell holes which rendered many of them unusable. Under the inevitable difficulties, however, encountered in such a rapid advance, the car officers and out-station adjutants continued to keep the drivers and patients supplied with food.6

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Although Roland was assigned a Ford, he made an unfortunate mistake when, in a state of fatigue, he turned a small brass valve in the wrong direction. Deprived of the oil feed to the engine, the ambulance became a casualty of war. The shamefaced young man was demoted to carrying out tasks of less crucial magnitude. Roland missed most of the excitement of war because the Austrians surrendered on 4 November, although the official demob was not until the very end of the year. One week before the Armistice was signed, he was in Padua, where he was captivated by the great physical beauty of this part of Italy and the devastation dealt to it by war. His base was at Monselice at the Villa Trieste, a place near the Euganean Hills, the charms of which had comforted Petrarch at the end of his life. There, Roland tasted wine for the first time and resolved to drink nothing else. If the eighteen-year-old’s religious upbringing was challenged by the war, he was not liberated sexually. When a young local woman danced provocatively at the end-of-war celebrations at the Villa Trieste, he was embarrassed: ‘Oh please don’t let her take off any more of her clothes,’ he said to the fellow standing next to him.7 Roland was uncomfortable with the woman’s provocative behaviour – moreover, he was afraid of women, perhaps because he felt smothered by Josephine’s overly rigorous attention to him and his brothers. Although Roland’s stint at the front was brief and his two elder brothers served in the Friends Ambulance Unit, he knew full well the awfulness of war by what he saw with his own eyes, and by what he witnessed of his brother Alec’s subsequent suffering. The war left a decisive imprint on Roland, as it did on many young men of his generation. He learned that youngsters like himself were pawns in an elaborate chess game being played by the imperialist powers. He could not return to a notion of England as a chivalric nation. The world into which Roland had been born no longer existed – if, he now wondered, it had ever existed at all: The blinkers of my sheltered education fell from my eyes, and with the squalor and misery of the tail end of the war, an astonishing new horizon began to open up. Seeing in one glance the wonders of

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Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist Italy, the autumn landscape of the plains of Venezia, its fruits, the nobility of the architecture side by side with the stinking horrors of battlefields, roads strewn with rotting corpses, and the abject bewilderment of the masses of prisoners shivering in the first frosts . . . But it did seem in those surroundings, in spite of the appalling confusion with the war now over, that there was a chance for a new era to begin in which the healing vigour of the arts, so evident in those Italian villages, could again assert its importance.8

After having experienced first-hand the horror of war, Roland contrasted the resulting destruction before his eyes with what was left of the incredible beauty of this portion of Italy. The war could not fail to invigorate the sardonic side of Roland’s character – but it did this only to a limited degree. He felt that a ‘new era’ could assert itself, one in which the power of art to transform and enhance human experience could prevail. Romantic though he may have been in clinging to this notion, he maintained throughout his life a steadfast belief in the power of art to alleviate isolation and despair.

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Chapter Three

A Heretic in Training (1919–1922)

On 18 January 1919, a mere ten days after returning to England from the war, Roland enrolled at Queen’s College, Cambridge. He was part of a vast intake of returned servicemen to higher education. Although his true interest was in art, his parents wanted him to attend university alongside his brothers: Lionel went up to St John’s College, Cambridge to read Moral Science the same day as Roland registered at Queen’s to study History, while Alec had settled in at King’s College to read English a few days earlier. Queen’s, founded in 1448 by Margaret of Anjou, had been one of the smallest colleges in Cambridge until the nineteenth century, but had been significantly expanded by the time Roland arrived. In 1919 there were fifty-five first-year undergraduates. The rooms assigned to Roland overlooked the Cam near the Isaac Newton building: his room was Essex 9. A few months earlier, Alec had shattered the post-war serenity of the Penrose family. While recuperating at Beechcroft, he had had an affair with his uncle Harry’s wife. The tender, kind Annie was twice her young lover’s age. The scandal rocked James and Josephine. They summoned Alec back to Oxhey Grange. They then found a suitable wife for their erring son: the vivacious Bertha Baker came from a more than acceptable Quaker family, and Alec took to Bertha immediately. The couple married at Jordan’s on 24 March 1919 during the university’s spring vacation, settled in at Cambridge, and not long afterwards a child was born. Subsequently, Annie died from cancer. Josephine, obviously cautious after Alec’s debacle, visited Cambridge frequently so that she could, as much as possible, oversee the activities of her three sons.1

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The newly-married Bertha Penrose noticed that Roland was ‘shy and gentle’ and had a calm diffidence in his way of ‘suggesting or proposing’ an opinion.2 Roland was coming into his own as a strong but nevertheless considerate person. Although he referred, somewhat dismissively, to his college (and his university, generally) as ‘the fog of the fens’,3 Roland’s creativity was stimulated in his new environment. However, the effects of the war lingered on. Although he labelled the large charcoal drawings of men and monsters he had begun to draw as expressive of ‘romantic yearnings’, they really ‘came struggling out of darkness, symbolic but with that urgent yet forbidden aspect of sex, still too incomprehensible and dangerous for me to admit except in naïvely veiled appearances’.4 These drawings may have expressed sexual longing, but they also issued from that part of their creator that had come into contact with the dark forces of war. Roland switched to Architectural Studies after obtaining a disheartening Third in the History Tripos in May 1920. He transferred to architecture in part because the buildings he saw in Italy had touched him.5 However, his academic studies were, as far as he was concerned, a small part of his Cambridge experience. Quite soon after arriving at Cambridge, Roland felt much more attracted to the sophisticated and worldly ambience of Alec’s college, King’s. As a respite from academic study, he and his brothers joined the Marlowe Society, which, Roland claimed, ‘provided a release from puritanical taboos’.6 His parents had considered the works of Shakespeare sacrosanct, but they looked down upon any other kind of dramatic fare, and so acting in plays constituted a form of rebellion. From the time the Society was founded in 1908 until 1934, men played all the parts. Usually acting roles were given only to students from King’s, but Lionel and Roland were allowed to perform. One of Roland’s first roles was in a production of Webster’s The White Devil directed by John Tresidder Sheppard, an eminent classicist and, later, the first non-Etonian to become the Provost of King’s College (Fig. 10). The Marlowe Society allowed Roland to remove himself from the world to its somewhat artificial environment, an all-male enclave. The resulting feelings he experienced were complicated. ‘These performances [by this group] aroused not only passionate enthusiasm

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Figure 10. Roland as a torch-bearer in The White Devil.

for the theatre’, he observed, ‘but also complicated jealousies among the undergraduates since in those days according to tradition all female parts were still played by young men.’7 Roland’s sentence from Scrap Book is vague – and he probably meant it to be. It is also euphemistic. In the hothouse atmosphere of the Marlowe Society, Roland had what was his first sexual experience in 1921–2. His affair with George ‘Dadie’ Rylands lasted for about a year; he had certainly entered a sexual terrain that was, according to English law at that time, especially forbidden and dangerous. The two met when the radiantly charming Rylands, then in his freshman year, took the part of Electra in the triennial university production of The Oresteia. The tradition of performing a Greek play in its original language had begun in the 1880s, and it was considered a prestigious event. Rylands had been invited to come up from Eton early so that he could take this role. Roland played a guard and assisted his brother Alec in ‘scenery execution’; Alec also designed the costumes. The play was performed nine times in March 1921 at the New Theatre. In the March 1922 Marlowe Society production of Shakespeare’s Troilus, Roland was Diomedes, Dadie Calchas. Alec also designed this production (Fig. 11).

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Figure 11. George Rylands in 1935, photographed by Ramsay & Muspratt.

Many years afterwards, in 1997, Rylands’ memories of Roland were deeply affectionate: ‘He was sensitive, he had beautiful manners, and he was modest. To me he was a completely sympathetic person, even though he knew nothing of poetry and I knew nothing of painting.’ Roland introduced Rylands to contemporary art; in fact, he first heard the name Picasso from his lover. When asked if the atmosphere at Cambridge was ‘monastic’, as Roland claimed, Rylands disagreed: ‘It wasn’t monastic. There was a lot going on sexually between men. Quite openly, too. It wasn’t just Platonic.’ More specifically, he talked about his relationship with Roland: ‘He had an affair with me. And it was a full love affair. It was sexual. We were really very attracted to each other and close friends.’8 In 1982, he wrote to Roland: ‘I recall . . . a friendship which was a romance and for me a release from the anxieties and inhibitions of adolescence.’9 In his reply, Roland was similarly affectionate: ‘Your letter goes straight to my heart for many reasons. I have not forgotten that friendship which meant a great deal to me in my growing years.’10

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Roland’s interest in drawing and design were not neglected. On the staircase of Corpus Christi, he painted two giant beasts. In October 1919 he designed a new cover for the Queen’s magazine, The Dial. Two years later Roland had a part in Arden of Feversham, which ran for two days in the long vacation. He used his skills – some of them gained from his architectural studies – to design the set for this production. His painting of the sets received approval from his peers, and he was asked to decorate some rooms with murals. Perhaps as a respite from his burgeoning interest in the fine arts, Roland took up cross-country running and earned a Blue. At Cambridge, Roland lost some of his habitual shyness. Always a gentle person who avoided open conflict whenever possible, he nevertheless clung to his own tenets. He could be stubborn, even recalcitrant, in maintaining an opinion, but he always covered up this side of his personality with exquisite good manners. He appeared to be more flexible than he really was. He was a person of strong opinions whose gentleness softened the way he expressed disagreement. For example, he remained deeply troubled by the obtuseness of his parents, but he remained polite to them. Among his closest friends at Cambridge were Bonamy Dobrée, who had served in France and the Middle East during the War, and Ronald Nixon, who went up to Cambridge in 1919 after service in the RAF; in his Cambridge days Nixon developed a strong interest in Buddhism as a way of distancing himself from the traumas of the war. His rooms were filled with various statues of the Buddha. At the outset of his stay at Queen’s, Roland felt the university an arid environment. As a whole, Cambridge did not display a great deal of interest in the visual arts, and at one point Roland seriously considered leaving Cambridge. Alec persuaded him against this move. Things picked up slowly. As Roland recalled, the charming Mansfield (Manny) Forbes, a fellow in English and Librarian of Clare College, ‘whose rooms were waist-deep in books . . . could be persuaded to talk for hours on his latest discoveries – Gaudier-Brzeska and Cézanne’.11 There was sometimes even whispering in corridors of the succès de scandale of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The ‘real nucleus’ of interest in the fine arts at Cambridge was at King’s in the person of Maynard Keynes, who, having resigned from the Treasury, taught economics. His book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) had gained him an international reputation. He had

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a gentle, attractive way of talking, although he tended to lay down the law on many subjects. He often gave small dinner parties for undergraduates in his rooms at Webb’s Court at his college. Roland’s first meeting with the great man went well. The presence of many tomes on economics and philosophy, of which he knew he would not understand a word, impressed him. But the young man was electrified to see on Keynes’s walls pictures by Cézanne, Matisse and, especially, the cubist work of Braque and Picasso. The first work in Keynes’s collection had been his acquisition from the Degas estate sale in March 1918 of Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples (c. 1877–8). When in about 1920 Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were replacing a mural originally done in 1910–11, displaying key moments in Keynes’s intellectual life, Roland may have seen them at work in the economist’s rooms. According to Clive Bell, Keynes had no ‘innate feeling for the visual arts’, and formed his collection on the advice of those more knowledgeable than himself. Keynes’s view of art was completely Euro-centric, even though he had purchased works influenced by African art. In this matter, the economist’s knowledge might have been severely limited, but it was in his rooms that Roland’s naïve eye first found sustenance. Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group that included Roger Fry, Grant, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell. Up to this time, Roland had known about the Bloomsbury Group – a gathering of close friends who shared bonds of unconventionality, strong beliefs in friendship and a desire to write and paint in new, unorthodox ways – only through repute. ‘Here,’ Roland told himself, was a ‘unique chance . . . to make contact with some of the revolutionary excitement that was going on in the outside world.’12 The Group had a penchant for all things French, its weather, its writers and its artists. The general shared feeling was that life on the Continent was far less restrictive than in England. A summer trip down the Rhône to Avignon, Arles and Nimes convinced him that this was true. Roland simply remarked upon the superiority of the climate of Provence; however, he was probably referring to a congenial, passionate approach to life he did not find in his homeland. At Cambridge, Roland did not become, like Rylands in 1922, an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual group also called the Cambridge Conversazione Society. This group, founded in 1820,

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was revived in Roland’s time by Keynes. Both Alec and Lionel were ‘born’ (elected) to this prestigious group. Roland may well have been a member of the Heretics Society, a group founded in 1909, which, very much in keeping with Quakerism, questioned traditional values, especially theological ones. Law Four of the Society required rejection of all authority in religious matters. The linguist Charles Kay Ogden was the president, and Sebastian Sprott the secretary. The Society met on Sunday evenings in King’s Parade. Ernest Jones, the psychoanalyst and biographer of Freud, was also a member, and a great deal of time at meetings was reserved for discussions centring on psychology. Roger Fry and Clive Bell gave talks to the Heretics in 1921. Perhaps inspired in part by Fry and Bell, Roland and Sebastian Sprott visited Munich and Paris in March and April 1922. It was likely through Keynes that Roland met Fry, and it was one of the most decisive encounters in his life. Fry, like Roland, had been born to a wealthy Quaker family; he was a proselytiser, a man determined to make the English aware of the glories of continental art. Fry’s inner light told him that the English were far too xenophobic. In November 1910 he had organised the exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (a term he coined) at the Grafton Galleries, London. This exhibition was the first to prominently feature Gauguin, Manet, Matisse and Van Gogh. Virginia Woolf later said, ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed,’ referring to the profound effect this exhibit had on contemporary sensibility. Fry followed it up with the ‘Second PostImpressionist Exhibition’ in 1912. Despite the scorn so often bestowed on his efforts, Fry soldiered on (Fig. 12). Just as Fry’s post-impressionist exhibitions changed the face of English art in the first decade of the twentieth century, in a remarkably similar way Roland’s later embrace of continental modernism continued the work undertaken by the older man. In fact, Roger Fry’s life provides a paradigm for understanding Roland’s career as a painter, as an apostle of modernism and as someone who experienced an emotional tug-of-war in balancing these two roles. Like Roland, Fry had inherited considerable wealth from his Quaker family. Like Roland, his religion had freed him from an overreliance on accepted conventions of behaviour – and art. Like Roland, he was conflicted about how he should spend his life. Was he to be an artist himself, or someone who promoted advanced art?

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Figure 12. Roger Fry, photographed by Ramsay & Muspratt.

Fry and Roland were both talented painters, but they were not – as both realised – great ones. In each instance, duty gave way to what each considered his self-indulgent side in pursuing an artistic career. Fry’s career as a painter suffered because of his commitment to transforming English art; a similar thing, it can be argued, would happen to Roland, who also came to associate the idea of artistic and personal freedom with France. He now wanted to do away with the ‘overpowering traditions of Georgian respectability’. Fry liked order, precision and form. He esteemed the great French and Spanish artists, who had reimagined and reinvented what form could be. Roland would also come to admire these artists, but he would move in a new direction: he came to sympathise deeply with those who proclaimed that life was messy, disordered, conflicted and, often, supremely illogical. In championing such art, Roland moved away from Fry and, in so doing, he allowed a vastly different form of visual modernism to become part and parcel of English art. He

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became the conduit through which this second wave of continental modernism entered English art. Roland, perhaps under Fry’s influence, purchased in 1915 his very first work of art – a drawing by Gauguin – for £15. When he was pressed for money the following year, he sold it. Roland took a first at Cambridge and graduated on 17 June 1922. He returned to Oxhey Grange and then took a trip to Cornwall with Beacus. He was unsettled, although he knew what he wanted to do: he had determined to become an artist, and Roger Fry had insisted that he could only do so in Paris. The Penroses had become significantly richer in 1919, when Josephine’s father died: she inherited part of his library, farming estates in Norfolk and Sussex and a sum of £200,000. For Roland, the death of the ‘white-bearded limping patriarch’ freed him from a ‘benign’ tyrant.13 The Penroses had no difficulty in providing their son with a generous allowance, but were disappointed that he did not intend to pursue architecture as a profession. Further insult was added to parental injury when Roland announced he wanted to become an artist, but made it clear that he did not wish to paint in a style or manner of which his father would approve. Roland announced he was following some leads given to him by Fry. James became irate. He did not mind his son becoming a painter, but he most certainly did not want him to follow in the new-fangled footsteps of Roger Fry, someone he considered a half-baked eccentric. Reluctantly, James settled an allowance of three hundred pounds on his wayward son, but asked him not to frequent Parisian studios that used female models. Secretly, Roland had become a sexual rebel. Publicly, he rebelled against his father. In 1922, James had other, more pressing family concerns on his mind. Beacus had run away to sea; Alec’s wife Bertha had had a much-publicised affair with Robert Henry Scanes Spicer, who, like Alec, was an undergraduate at King’s and an Apostle. On encountering his wife’s lover on the street, an outraged Alec threatened to horsewhip him. The affair became further compounded when Bertha became pregnant by Spicer.14 Only Lionel led a settled life, but he and his wife frequented Bloomsbury parties, assemblies of which James and Josephine remained suspicious. When visiting Oxhey Grange, the daughters-in-law would

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gather in the cloakroom and ‘wash off any cosmetics that might have strayed onto [their] faces and to remove earrings, necklaces and other vanities. Cigarette ends would go down the drain.’15 Roland also found Oxhey Grange dispiriting. The repressive side of Roland’s upbringing resulted in sexual inhibition. Moreover, the enclosed, sealed atmosphere of the Marlowe Society led him to think of himself as homosexual, in large part because he was not situated in an environment and atmosphere where he could see the choices open to him. In some ways, Roland’s sexuality bears some similarities to that of Keynes, who as a young man was involved exclusively in homosexual relationships but then, in 1925, at the age of forty-two, married the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Nevertheless, as an older man, Roland would become aware of the strong emotional claims Picasso made on him. In 1922, Roland’s attention was more fixed on his career than on his sexuality. He was anxious to get in touch with the artists Fry had promoted, and Paris was the perfect place to experiment not only with art but a whole new way of life. He desperately needed fresh air – and soon found it.

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Chapter Four

Born Again (1922–1931)

In crossing the Channel, Roland immediately experienced the ‘sensation that I was changing my skin, sloughing off the stifling restrictions of my puritanical upbringing and the long process I had been put through in preparation for a successful entry into English middleclass society. Nothing could have elated me more.’1 His remembrance of those few moments when he experienced his mother’s ‘tenderness’ became ‘increasingly vague’, and even his alliance with his brothers began to crumble. ‘The well-ordered life, soft carpets, fat woolly cats, porridge, roast beef for Sunday lunch and family prayers were gone, already thrown off with a cry of delight, and with a small allowance in my pocket I was born again.’2 In all its rich variety of alluring pleasures, in startling contrast to stodgy England, Paris was captivating. Roland visited museums, art galleries, the flea market in Saint-Eustache and the Jardin des Plantes by day; by night he was awestruck by the glamour of Pigalle and Montparnasse. He was taken aback by the rank odour coming from les pissotières, and intrigued by the signs on their inner walls advertising the services of doctors who could cure sexually transmitted diseases. Fry suggested Roland study with Othon Friesz, who, earlier in his career, had been a prominent Fauvist. Friesz had been a fellow student of Raoul Dufy at the Le Havre School of Fine Arts in 1895–6, and the two went to Paris together for further study. In Paris, Friesz met Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault. Like them, he rebelled against the academic teaching of Léon Bonnat, one of the most admired and copied artists of his day, and joined the Fauves, with whom he exhibited in 1907. The

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following year, Friesz returned to Normandy and to a much more traditional style of painting, since he had discovered that his personal goals in painting were firmly rooted in the past. He opened his own studio in 1912 and taught until 1914, at which time he joined the army for the duration of the war. He resumed living in Paris in 1919 and remained there, except for brief trips to Toulon and the Jura Mountains, until his death in 1949. Roland took up Fry’s suggestion, but he found the classes a sham and, therefore, a waste of his time. Friesz’s tutelage was probably unsatisfactory because he had retreated from the avant-garde and Roland had become interested in advanced French art. Roland then attended at the studio of André Lhote, whose work had become cubist after a stint as a Fauve. Lhote, a native of Bordeaux, learned wood-carving and sculpture from the age of 12, when his father apprenticed him to a local furniture maker to be trained as a sculptor in wood. He enrolled at the École des BeauxArts in Bordeaux in 1898 and studied decorative sculpture until 1904. Whilst there, he began to paint in his spare time, and he left home in 1905, moving into his own studio to devote himself to painting. He was influenced by Gauguin and Cézanne and held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1910, four years after he moved to Paris. After working in a Fauvist style, Lhote shifted towards cubism. He joined the Section d’Or group in 1912, and exhibited at that group’s Salon. The outbreak of the Great War interrupted his work and, after discharge from the army in 1917, he became a member of a group of cubists who placed themselves under the patronage of the dealer Léonce Rosenberg. In 1918, Lhote co-founded Nouvelle Revue Française, the art journal to which he contributed articles on art theory until 1940. He taught at the Académie Notre-Dame des Champs from 1918 to 1920, and then at other Paris art schools – including the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and his own school, which he founded in Montparnasse in 1922. Roland did not hold Lhote’s paintings in high esteem, but found him an ‘endearing and imaginative teacher’.3 Through Lhote, Roland became aware of the monumental contributions made by cubism’s inventors: Gris, Braque and especially Picasso. At Lhote’s, Roland

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learned of African art, one of the most significant influences in the formation of cubism. Although Roland never became a cubist, he tried to integrate some aspects of that genre into his work. In Paris in 1922–3, he was in touch with artists whose departure from the kind of art practised by James Penrose and his peers was profound. Roland had discovered the right climate for him for making art. Roland became a friend of Smyrna-born Jean (Yanko) Varda, an artist of Greek and French descent. Varda the Artist taught Roland little, whereas Varda the Man of the World taught his naïve younger companion how to enjoy life. He quickly became Roland’s mentor in the pursuit of a new style of life. As a child, Varda had been hailed as a prodigy in Athens, where he had painted portraits of some prominent residents. In 1912, at the age of nineteen, he moved to Paris, where he met Picasso and Braque – and quickly abandoned any interest in the academic style of painting he had previously pursued. During the Great War he lived in London, became a ballet dancer and made friends with members of the avant-garde. By 1922, Varda had returned to Paris, where he painted cubist-inspired canvases. However, his approach to art was highly unorthodox, as Roland was well aware: ‘He broke up mirrors . . . on the floor, and setting the pieces on three-ply boards, proceeded to embed them in a gritty gesso mixture of his own devising, on which he would then paint in bright colours. These mosaics were highly decorative and caught and reflected the light in surprising ways when placed in dark corners. He would make ships and bull-fights, and groups of ladies like great galleons on the quayside of Mediterranean ports’ (Fig. 13).4 Varda resided in a putrid-smelling shack on the outskirts of Paris, in the Zone, ‘that wilderness of ruins in the old fortifications’, where Roland visited him. Varda may have been only seven years older than Roland, but this compact, taut Greek – ‘easily moved to tears or hysterical laughter’, one friend recalled – was much more adept in the ways of the world.5 He had the eyes of a satyr and, as one ex-lover remarked, ‘virginity to him was but a fruit to be eaten’.6 Varda, a sexual profligate, encouraged Roland to explore his heterosexual side.7

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Figure 13. Yanko Varda.

‘After spending three and a half years in the monastic climate of Cambridge surrounded exclusively by entertaining and scholarly male friends, I had some difficulty in adjusting myself to the spectacular heterosexual society of Montparnasse,’ Roland later observed. He then continued this reflection by alluding to his friendship with Moîse Kisling, the Polish-born French painter who had moved to France in 1910. At the outbreak of the war he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, but was seriously wounded at the Somme. As a result of his army service he was awarded French citizenship. In Montparnasse he became close friends with Jules Pascin and Amedeo Modigliani. His depiction of female nudes against highly coloured landscapes brought him a great deal of renown. Roland recalled Kisling affectionately: I had got to know Kisling, a very amiable Polish painter who had a retinue of saucy girls as models. He took great pleasure in transforming them with oil paint and canvas into peachy nudes that sold well. I was encouraged by him to come up to his studio as often as I liked ‘pour se rincer l’oeil’ [to rinse the eye]. As our intimacy grew I found the courage to ask Kisling if he had ever had a boy friend. ‘Mais bien sûr,’ was his cheerful reply, ‘quand j’étais jeune j’ai tout

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essayé – les trous du cul aussi bien que les cons,’ [when I was young I tried everything – assholes as well as cunts] a revelation which conclusively released me from my past and the torments of a conventional puritan conscience.8

In relating this conversation in Scrap Book, Roland does not mention that he had also experimented in a similar way. He was never comfortable in discussing this aspect of his past, even though that past later caught up with him. In 1922, Roland remained excessively shy about having sex with women. He may have felt guilty about his affair with Rylands, and wondered if that relationship might prevent him from enjoying sex with women. The uninhibited Varda had no compunctions about serving as a guide to new kinds of pleasure: he even gave his friend precise instructions about the mechanics of sex. Then, fortified by downing some cognac and accompanied by Varda, Roland arrived at a brothel picked for him by his friend, who handed him over to a woman he had pre-selected to deal with a virgin. She was both accommodating and gentle but, after intercourse, she was startled when Roland burst into paroxysms of laughter – perhaps of relief that he had successfully vanquished an obstacle. To calm him, the lady handed her client some photographs of small children – her offspring, who were being cared for by their grandmother in the country. Roland took this as an object lesson, and he became careful about the dangers of conception.9 Paris provided Roland with another kind of new experience. The most significant encounter with another artist Roland experienced during his first extended stay in Paris, in 1922–3, occurred at a tea party at the home of the Greek painter and wood-engraver Demetrios Galanis in the rue Cortot in Montmartre. That artist was Georges Braque (Fig. 14). I was at once captivated by the imposing presence of a man who could spend a good half-hour completely absorbed in a contemplation of Goya’s Naked Maja. Never before had such concentration on a painting seemed possible and Braque’s example alone did much to encourage superficial good taste and academic standards to float rapidly away and to be replaced by a passionate dedication to the arts.10

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Figure 14. Georges Braque.

Years later, he recalled this life-changing meeting: ‘The intensity of his concentration was something new. It removed painting from being the amusing pastime that it had been before in my life.’11 As much as cubism inspired Roland, it can be said that Braque influenced him. However, later, Roland would be drawn to the side of Picasso, Braque’s companion in the invention of that movement. All in all, France liberated Roland the man and the artist. He had found a place in which he could breathe. Although not much is known about his training as an artist, and he had obviously learned a great deal from his father, Roland now quickly gained expertise in the mechanical, fine-motor skills of painting. Although he was not yet sure what kind of artist he wanted to be, Paris was the perfect place in which to focus his eye. Roland’s friendship with Varda also provided him with the opportunity to explore his sexual side in a way previously closed to him. On the Continent Roland discovered himself in many ways. At long last, he began to feel free to explore his inner world. In the south of France, that world expanded even more. In 1923, Varda decided to spend the summer in the isolated fishing village of Cassis, situated east of Marseille in the Provence–Alpes– Côte d’Azur region in the south of France. Since the village, perched between two small bays, was obviously a wonderful, secluded retreat, Roland was delighted to accept his friend’s invitation to accompany him. The two had to stand most of the way on the eighteen-hour

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express train that took them to Marseille; then they journeyed a further ten miles to their destination. The steep rocky cliffs of the region were among this area’s many charms, as were the medieval castle overlooking the Hotel Cendrillon and the stuccoed limestone dwellings clustered around it. Virginia Woolf, when she visited the place in 1929,12 thought that life there was ‘delicious’. There was a lot of wine, and ‘curious derelict English people, who have no money and live like lizards in crannies, sometimes keeping a few fowl or breeding spaniels’.13 Her sister, Vanessa Bell, told Duncan Grant on 3 August 1929 that at Cassis, ‘one leads a purely sensual & unintellectual existence . . . which I at any rate find fatally easy’. According to Grant, ‘the local people here are simply like children and never can be alone. I think them perfectly charming but it means they live simply from moment to moment . . . there is a full moon tonight and really the beauty of the landscape is beyond anything lovely’ (Fig. 15).14 In the town, Roland discovered Villa les Mimosas, a small twostoried ‘jerry-built’ house made of ochre stucco; a high wall separated the house from the road and led to a long, narrow garden.

Figure 15. Cassis.

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A square tower at one corner gave the place additional charm. Roland bought the place that year (1923) and also acquired a small lateen-rigged fishing boat, Lou Cat. In 1927, when he rented the villa from Roland, Duncan Grant told Vanessa Bell: ‘The house is very nice with quite sympathetic furniture & pictures, books, & a little room in a tower which has windows in two directions.’15 The Lou Cat proved to be of inestimable value to Varda: in rough seas, his women passengers would cling to him, and he would use those occasions to further his sexual pursuits. The Lothario liked to be regarded as a hero. Varda and Roland soon went to work constructing a studio at the bottom of the garden, among the vines. The resulting structure was in essence a lean-to, roofed with curved, orange tuiles de Marseille. A loft occupied part of the interior, as did two huge north-facing windows giving a view of the summit of La Couronne de Charlemagne. Roland did most of the actual construction, whereas Varda scavenged their material. Their work programme was stymied for a bit because, after a hard day’s work, they were in the habit of eating crustaceans in village restaurants. These shellfish were kept ‘fresh’ in buckets of water taken in part from the town sewers, and so the two suffered from severe dysentery. Roland installed a housekeeper, Elise Anghilanti, at the Villa. She proved to be an invaluable ally when Josephine and James visited. The house was in immaculate condition and the dinner – served without wine, of course – was perfect. Everyone retired to bed but, the next morning, Roland was surprised to see his mother walking in the garden. He was sure the intoxicating beauty of Cassis had charmed even her. When he enquired at breakfast, she informed him: ‘Dear boy, I have to tell thee that I was so troubled by the fleas in thy mattress I could not stay in bed!’16 A later English visitor remembered that Cassis ‘was seething with English visitors in the summer, and we all complained that it was “spoilt”; yet it was we and our like that “spoilt” it. Feuds would develop and insults would sometimes give way to fists.’ Varda was accused by some of leading innocent girls astray, but he also organised fêtes at which young women, after gathering wreaths at a local cemetery, would dress themselves up like Byzantine empresses. Varda, in a jewelled turban and bare to the waist, would dance.17

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Among the locals, Peter Teed, a retired Colonel in the Bengal Lancers, was the leader. He had abandoned his wife in India and, arriving in France, purchased the chateau of Fontcreuse a mile up the valley from Cassis. There he installed his mistress, Jean Campbell, a nurse, and supplemented his army pension by making white wine. Roland and other locals assisted Teed with the vendange. Roland was particularly drawn to Teed because he was a longtime friend of Roger Fry. In Paris, Varda had introduced Roland to the poetry of Rimbaud and Baudelaire – also to Alfred Jarry’s satirical farce Ubu. Roland had countered by sharing his enthusiasm for Alice in Wonderland and Moby-Dick. That first summer in Cassis, Varda recommended his friend read the poems of Paul Éluard and André Breton. Under Varda’s excellent tutelage, Roland may have become an eager heterosexual, but sex remained an issue about which he was deeply conflicted. He thought of himself as taking pleasure in the various Venuses ‘who emerged daily from the blue waters’ at Cassis. He even considered himself as someone who had metamorphosed from a ‘well-behaved Quaker into a hedonist, drunk with the excitement of a new and independent life’.18 A strong idealistic strain remained within Roland: sex was one thing, love another. Although he had outwardly rejected his parents’ puritanism, he may have experienced strong feelings of guilt when he acted out his libidinous side. As a young man, his inclination was to separate the two strands and to pursue agape rather than eros. In reality, therefore, he was seeking a kindred spirit, the perfect soulmate. That year, he met the mysterious, illusive Valentine Boué (her given name was Andrée), two years older than he: ‘On opening the door [to his home in Cassis],’ he later recalled, ‘I found myself face to face with a girl of great beauty dressed in a conventional welltailored black suit.’ She had come to call on a literary critic whom she had been told was visiting Roland and Varda. ‘Her appearance was unexpected and incongruous, a thunderbolt falling out of the sky.’ Without hesitation, he invited her in and was immediately transfixed by her ‘immaculate beauty and enigmatic intelligence. I persuaded her to stay and to marry me a year later’ (Fig. 16).19

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Figure 16. Valentine.

Valentine’s father, a colonel, had fought at Verdun and Valentine had been educated at a Légion d’Honneur school for the daughters of officers, in Gascony. According to family legend, as a teenager she made an abortive flight to Paris to join the Folies Bergère. In 1923, the unhappily married Bertha Penrose wrote to Roland, inviting herself to Cassis. When he met his sister-in-law’s train at Marseille, he confessed he was infatuated with Valentine. In turn, his visitor was taken with the physical beauty of both Varda and Valentine. ‘The woman was extremely beautiful, the man handsome and sex-charged. They both had thin striped vests on their otherwise bare torsos, bare arms, feet in sandals, and a cotton skirt or trousers.’20 In response to the conventionality of her background, Roland observed, Valentine ‘had in revenge developed a splendidly independent attitude to life very unlike that which was expected of her. Although admirably female in her acute sensibility, she was in revolt against all conventional forms of family life.’ For Roland, she became ‘a goddess of the irrational, of inutility, of feminine mystery and charm such as I had never dreamed of’. He was ‘willingly captivated by her spell in spite of her habit of frequent and sometimes

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embarrassing vituperation against banality, incomprehension and stupid conventions’.21 The image of the thunderbolt aptly describes their subsequent life together. Valentine’s eccentricities were many. For example, she loved the outdoors, but she despised all exercise except dancing, swimming and walking. One day, when the Cassis football team was one man short, Roland agreed to fill in at the neighbouring village, Le Bedoule. When the match finished, Valentine had vanished. Roland recalled, ‘It took several days to track her down to a small hotel in Toulon and to return hand in hand.’22 On this occasion, Valentine refused to speak to Roland in English. Eccentricity ran in the family. Valentine’s father, tall, thin and aristocratic, lived apart from his wife Suzanne, who remained in the old family home of La Selisse. Suzanne was a devout, pious Catholic who refused to grant her husband a divorce. The Colonel was renowned for his acerbity. Like his daughter, he was both intractable and creative. A family friend remembered: ‘He was a little mad but had extreme originality. He was not like the others [around him]; he had imagination – it ran in the Boué family.’ His father had given him many radical ideas, ‘including his intolerance of the church, which caused him much conflict with his wife. Valentine was devoted to her father, and whenever he left her mother, Valentine would go too. She fought incessantly with her mother. The house was full of combat, and Valentine was brought up in an atmosphere of continuous tension.’23 During Roland’s first stay with him at Gers, the Colonel announced abruptly that he was aware Roland knew how to drive. ‘I have bought [an automobile] and wish you to teach me how it should be maneuvered. Come, it is there in the meadow.’ With military precision, the decorated war hero had laid out the meadow according to the ordinance map of the town of Condom. However, he had decided that the town was to be driven through in reverse; if that was successful, driving forwards in the future would be mere child’s play. However, the Colonel’s plan soon resulted in the devastation of the entire pretend town, as Roland recalled, and ‘suddenly regaining his dignity, he thanked me very politely and we returned to a frugal lunch’ – accompanied by wine, into which was added heavy doses of bicarbonate of soda. The Colonel subsequently discovered

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that driving forwards was the best way to drive. ‘The local inhabitants, however,’ Roland wryly pointed out, ‘rapidly took shelter as he approached.’24 Roland and Valentine married in her hometown of Condom-surBaïse, where she astonished the locals by wearing a sari as a wedding gown. That evening, the Colonel flung open the doorway to a spare bedroom where he had joined two single beds together. ‘Voila, quel champ de manoeuvre!’25 The couple subsequently wed more sedately at the Registry Office in Watford followed by a ceremony at Jordan’s Meeting House on 21 December 1925. Valentine might have found the atmosphere at Oxhey Grange stifling. Bertha Penrose, who was also a guest at the time, wrote to her lover Clive Bell: ‘I am so suffocated with ennui that I can hardly bring myself to write any sort of letter, let alone a sort of love letter. It’s dreadful at this place where there is no one intelligent to speak to, no subject one can discuss if there were, except the weather & missionaries, and where one can’t even read, because the books one wants to read are generally taboo.’26 Valentine took long, solitary walks. Roland withdrew into silence. At that time, Valentine realised that her husband had ‘a life inside and no one can get in there’.27 The early years of the marriage are hard to decipher, because no archival documents survive to provide a window into the lives of the couple. There is no doubt that the marriage was a white one, because Valentine’s vagina was too small to allow penetration. The gynaecologist they consulted told them that nothing could be done to rectify the situation. To Roland, this was at first not a major impediment to their relationship: ‘for a couple as much in love as we were there were no limits to the ways we could enjoy each other’.28 There was an additional complication: Roland took pleasure in bondage. As he confessed in an unpublished manuscript – written about himself in the third person, and now in his archives in Edinburgh – he had a strong inclination towards it, ‘from an obsessive desire to make sure . . . that the object of his desire would never escape him and vanish from his horizon . . . High up in the pine forests of Cap de Canaille he bound his first love naked to a pine tree. She seemed honoured, even excited by this sylvan and unexpected ritual, but angry afterwards.’ Valentine was offended. Her fury may have arisen because she realised that she was partaking of a strange ritual that had little or

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nothing to do with herself. She might have agreed to Roland’s request because she felt remorseful about not being able to gratify her spouse in what might be considered a more normal way between husband and wife. Roland, in his third-person account, interpreted his fetishism this way: ‘In his most lucid moments he attributed this to the vague horror of being snatched from his mother’s breasts and handed to a wet nurse of whom he had only a vaporous memory. He longed to make sure of his girl, his love, possess her in an imperative manner which would not offend her but assure him that she would not vanish from his grasp and his uncontrollable desire for his mother’s breast.’29 In addition, the bondage fantasy may well have been inspired by Roland’s desire to dominate his overly controlling mother. Roland may have told Valentine of his affair with Rylands. He certainly knew that Valentine had a lesbian side, as evidenced in this recollection of Bertha Penrose. One night during her stay at Cassis, she went to bed at three in the morning. Before I was quite asleep the door opened and in crept Valentine. She was in my bed immediately kissing and caressing. I was taken aback, but could not resist. Her clever fingers were everywhere: her flesh was smooth and smelt lovely, but I was quite unable to abandon myself to her expert love-making and after a certain amount of excitement, she went away disappointed, leaving me astonished.30

Despite the evidence of this episode, for Valentine true intimacy was never sexual. Rather, she sought closeness with her spouse derived from an alliance working joyfully and peacefully side by side. In many ways, she attempted to impose that goal upon her husband, who, for a long stretch of time, accepted her dominion. In truth, she had unreasonable expectations of others and, when her demands and needs were not met, she could become overly controlling and domineering. Various members of Bloomsbury – a group that prized unconventionality – who stayed at Cassis found Valentine a difficult person. For example, Vanessa Bell wrote to her sister Virginia Woolf on 22 February 1927: ‘The Penroses suddenly announced that they meant to return at once [to Cassis]. Aunt Daisy [who had rented Villa les Mimosas] had thought that she could keep the house another

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3 months, and had meant to stay another fortnight & then hand it over to me. As usual in these friendly lets there was a misunderstanding, put down to Valentine, Mrs Penrose, the Marseilles whore.’31 This reference to Valentine was probably meant ironically. On 18 October 1927, Duncan Grant wrote to Vanessa Bell: ‘We were asked to lunch at Roland’s and were given a very good one. Valentine was even friendly . . . & behaved quite nicely. She is rather lovely to look at & dresses very well . . . She is much better after a cure at Dax [spa in south-western France] which I suppose makes her pleasanter.’32 Both Roland and Valentine rebuffed mothers they deemed overcontrolling. Roland’s way of conducting himself in the presence of others was to be charming and even-handed. Valentine took no such route. If she was angry, she lashed out. On the surface, they were poles apart. Inwardly, as time would show, this was also so. In time, Roland’s sexual appetite became ravenous. In the early twenties, the couple, very much in love, patched over their differences by resolving to work closely together. What united them from the outset was a mutual interest in surrealism. Both had decided to explore that movement, Roland in painting and Valentine in composing poetry. Intriguingly, Roland initially discovered the power of the movement through its writings, not its art, even though he must have seen surrealist paintings earlier. In Paris, Roland had witnessed from 1922 onwards all the various trends in modern art. Fauvism had reached its zenith and was no longer in the ascendancy. Cubism was still practised, but its heyday had been ten years before Roland arrived. He would also have been well aware of the legions of ambitious artists who were trying to climb the heights ultimately ascended by only a few men: Matisse, Picasso, Gris, Braque and Léger. He would have seen some Futurist and Expressionistinspired works. At this time, surrealism as manifested in the writings of André Breton and Paul Éluard became more and more central to Roland. In a sense, he parachuted into one of the most exciting movements in art well after it had begun and, to him, this group was – and remained – enshrined in these two individuals. One man was to become Roland’s close friend; to the other he remained reverent, but detached (Figs 17 and 18).

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Figure 17. André Breton, 1924.

Figure 18. Paul Éluard.

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Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word ‘surrealist’ in 1917 when, in programme notes to the ballet Parade, he used the word ‘sur-réaliste’ as a counterpoint to someone else’s description of Parade as ‘réaliste’. Later, he appended the subtitle ‘A Surrealist Drama’ to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias [The Teats of Tiresias]. In his preface, he provided this explanation: ‘When man tried to imitate walking he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. He thus performed an act of Surrealism without realising it.’33 To a friend, he spoke about his invention of a new critical term: ‘All things considered, I in fact think it better to adopt Surrealism rather than Supernaturalism, which I had initially used. Surrealism does not yet exist in the dictionaries, and it will be easier to manipulate than Supernaturalism, which is already used by the Philosophers.’34 The new term remained dormant for quite a while because of the intervention of Dada. This movement arose out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I and was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. In place of reason and logic, Dada substituted frivolity, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear. It may simply be a nonsense word. To the Dadaists, the Great War had shown the meaninglessness of most human activity, and it also unleashed a vehement hatred for ‘reason’ and ‘logic’, the underpinnings of bourgeois society. Simply put, Dada was not art; it was ‘anti-art’. To everything for which art had previously stood, Dada eagerly wanted to present the opposite. To the Dadaists, previous representations in art had been derived from a corrupt society; if you wanted to do away with such degeneracy, modes of representation had to be fundamentally changed. As a movement, it felt it was successful only if it gave offence. Dada quickly gained traction in, among other places, Paris, Berlin and New York – and, as a movement born of nihilistic sentiments, it quickly burned out. The overlap between Dada and surrealism can be most clearly seen in the activities of André Breton, who was a Dadaist for a short time, but the allure of the group evaporated for him when he realised that he could not take part in a movement that was essentially anti-intellectual. Its anger, he foresaw, had nowhere to go. Besides, in place of Dada’s nothingness, he had found a new place to explore: the unconscious.

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Even before his flirtation with Dadaism, Breton had, in 1920 in The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques), co-authored with Philippe Soupault, claimed that a ‘new morality will have to be substituted for the prevailing morality’.35 Well aware of Freud’s work on the unconscious, he ‘resolved to obtain from myself’ what analysts were trying to elicit from their patients: ‘a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought’.36 His interest in automatic writing eventually waned as he cast his net further and deeper. In his celebrated definitions of surrealism, he called for an essentially new form of morality and philosophy in which the unconscious would be privileged over the conscious: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

In those justifiably famous words Breton created a religion that, according to the art historian David Sylvester, encompassed ‘a code of behaviour, a hatred of materialism, an ideal of man’s future state, a proselytising spirit, a joy in membership of a community of likeminded, a demand that the faithful must sacrifice other attachments, a hostility to art for art’s sake, a hope of transforming existence’.37 Breton’s definition of surrealism is the classic one. It emphasises the ‘absence of control’, ‘the actual functioning of thought’ and ‘disinterested play of thought’, but Breton was rigorous, often overrational, in his attacks on reason and in his rigorous control of his followers. He always knew best. Having established what surrealism was, Breton stretched – and broke – his own rules when so inclined. For example, in an extremely loose way, Picasso became surrealist when Breton decided it was

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in the best interests of the movement: ‘It has been said that there could be no surrealist painting. Painting, literature, what’s that – oh Picasso, you who have raised the mind to the highest degree of contradiction, but of evasion!’38 If Picasso was the great genius of modern art, he could have only reached that pinnacle by breaking all the rules. According to Breton’s logic, such a master of contradiction and evasion was obviously a surrealist. Breton was also an ideologue. He could be cordial, even effusive, but he did not like anyone to challenge his opinions, mutable as they often were. In contrast, his disciple Paul Éluard was warm and cordial, sometimes to the point of sentimentality. One of the most striking differences between the two men can be seen in the so-called ‘wallet affair’ that took place on 25 April 1921. On that day Breton, Éluard and some others were at the Certa, a Basque bar in the passage de l’Opéra, when they noticed that their waiter had left his billfold with 1,000 francs at their bench. The group absconded with it, and repaired to a nearby café to decide on their course of action. Éluard voted for returning the wallet and its contents, whereas Breton proposed to keep the cash for himself as a reimbursement for money he had spent on several group expenditures. When an agreement could not be reached, Éluard took the wallet for safekeeping. Perhaps because he sympathised with the poverty of the waiter, he anonymously returned it. When Breton learned what had happened, he was furious with Éluard for months afterwards. Breton may have coveted the money, but he was probably more upset that his friend had defied him. Breton’s mother dominated her son. She was impossible to please, but, as a young man from Normandy coming from a financially modest household, he attempted to satisfy her great expectations for him by studying medicine. During the Great War he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met Jacques Vaché, who had a disdain for the established artistic traditions of his time. His friend’s suicide at the age of twenty-four left a black hole in Breton’s heart that was never closed. In 1921, he married and moved to 42 rue Fontaine in Paris. At its peak, his flat housed more than 5,300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books and ethnographic objects. Two years earlier, he founded the review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe

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Soupalt. For a short period he was associated with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, but once his attention was given over to automatic writing in 1920 in The Magnetic Fields, he moved steadily to claim leadership of the surrealists in 1924 by publishing the Surrealist Manifesto and by becoming editor of the periodical La Révolution surréaliste. Two months older than Breton, Paul Éluard’s birth name was Eugène Émile Paul Grindel (Éluard was his mother’s surname). His father was a prosperous realtor, and Éluard did not have the money worries that frequently troubled Breton. At the age of sixteen, his schooling was interrupted when he contracted tuberculosis. In 1922, at the Swiss sanatorium in Davos, he met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, upon whom he bestowed the name Gala. They married in 1917. Around this time Éluard wrote his first poems. In 1918, he met Breton. Illness had prevented Éluard from obtaining the kind of academic training that Breton and many of the other surrealists had received. He had wanted desperately to serve in the army, but the acute bronchitis he contracted soon after enlisting meant that he was only on active duty for three months. He was a deeply religious young man who only gradually rejected Roman Catholicism. Much more than Breton, moreover, he was an impassioned person, someone anxious to serve a cause. As such, he acted as Breton’s attentive lieutenant for several years. As a poet, Breton tends to use images in a forced, somewhat mechanical way to evoke a dream world. Here is the beginning of ‘Vigilance’: In Paris, the Tour Saint-Jacques Swaying like a sunflower Sometimes against the Seine its shadow moves among the Tugboats Just then on tiptoe in my sleep I move towards the room where I am lying And set it afire Nothing remains of the consent I had to give The furniture makes way for beasts looking at me like Brothers Lions whose manes consume the chairs39

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In Éluard’s ‘The Earth is Blue like an Orange’ (1929), the lyrical narrating voice is gentle, carefree and persuasive: The earth is blue like an orange Never an error words do not lie They no longer supply what to sing with It’s up to kisses to get along Mad ones and lovers She her wedding mouth All secrets all smiles And what indulgent clothing She looks quite naked.40

Later, when Breton and Éluard were at odds with each other on political matters, Roland managed to stay on Breton’s good side, but his sympathies were with Éluard. Roland never sympathised with the partisan side of surrealism – he always maintained his distance from that kind of discourse. Breton, for Roland, remained a congenial figure, but he found him, as did many others, icy and remote. Rather, he was drawn to the warmhearted Éluard. From Breton and Éluard, Roland, as I have indicated, learned about surrealism, particularly its ambition to be a style of life as well as a movement in the arts. Roland found it difficult, as did many others, to relate to Breton’s doctrinaire surrealism. Éluard was a vastly different person. Although he quarrelled bitterly with Breton on political issues, his own practice as a poet lay in the beauty and delicacy of his lyrical meditations. His poetry is deeply autobiographical and uses surrealism to investigate the illogical workings of his psyche. In that regard, he and Roland were very similar artists. From Éluard, Roland learned ‘freedom of expression, an unflinching challenge to all conventional ideas, the continuous test to which all moral concepts should be put by considering them in reverse and above all the basic importance of the subconscious in all inspiration’. The last idea Roland recognised ‘as being akin to the Quaker belief in the “inner light” as the surest guide to truth’.41 Roland’s early paintings show him trying to find himself by exploring a variety of leads. He did not yet have an artistic personality. That gradually changed only when, at Cassis, he was exposed to the

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writings of Éluard and Breton. Roland’s early surviving paintings from 1925 and 1926 (such as Atterissage (Plate 1)) reveal that he had achieved a remarkable facility in all the technical aspects of contemporary painting. Pequod is quasi-cubist in technique. Roland considered Atterissage his first significant surrealist painting, in that some sort of ‘landing’ had imposed itself on a typical landscape. However, it is only in Monsters (1925) (Plate 2), with its playful juxtaposition of what looks like a toy theatre and a three-headed statue, that he fully hints at the future. In this oil, Roland rendered an imaginary town, its theatre and the statue in fully saturated, joyous colours. This is a whimsical piece of work that abandons realist standards of depiction. The result is a dream-like urban landscape in which the laws of logic have been abandoned. These early paintings demonstrate that Roland had looked carefully at his teachers Friesz and Lhote, as well as Derain and Segonzac. However, his most significant influence remained the folk-art style of Varda. Roland was also obviously flirting with surrealism. At that time, the originality and verve of Valentine’s poetry were attracting attention. Jean Ballard, who published Les Cahiers du Sud, persuaded her to allow him to publish some of her poems. Roland exhibited for the first time (The Sailor’s Return – an oil on canvas) at the Bloomsbury-dominated Royal Watercolour Society Galleries in June 1925. A year later, he showed an oil painting, Fontcreuse, at the London Group’s twenty-third exhibition. At the same time as her husband was taking his first tentative steps in the direction of surrealism, Valentine continued writing poetry inspired by that movement. She titled the verse she wrote at Cassis Imagerie d’Épinal. Épinal is in northeastern France, and the title refers to the popular prints created by a local company, the Imagerie d’Épinal. These stencil-coloured woodcuts of military subjects, Napoleonic history, storybook characters and other folk themes were widely distributed throughout the 19th century. Valentine was particularly interested in the explorers Jacques Cartier and Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse. She describes, in a manner very much like Éluard, the arrival of the latter’s ship on Easter Island in 1786: The Easter Island botanist And April’s geographer

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Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist Ascend searching for simples; antipodean star. Circle of the crew, the beach And frigates in coves. Gentle natives begin to make Certain signs Adam sets his naked foot on the tree veins.42

In this collection, the poet’s imagination allows her to investigate the French explorers who ventured beyond France in pursuit of new trade routes and spice. They were entering exotic terrain, and the poet is suggesting that her surrealist imagination allows her to perform similar imaginative feats. As a couple, the Penroses persisted in their desire to realise their fullest potential as creative individuals. The letters that Valentine later wrote to her husband suggest that at some point Roland broke the compact on which their marriage had been founded. For example, she made a series of declarations: ‘time is passing for me, my energy, instead of being directed towards meaningful work . . . that energy is being wasted. You have not yet accepted the principle of our life, which is a good one, and its manifestation in practice, which is disastrous. You believe that we can settle in here to work, but, no, our only purpose here is the endless arranging of things that later come undone . . . We must cut these problems off at the very base.’43 For Valentine, her marriage to Roland became unstuck when he no longer fully shared a common goal. At that time, he began pursuing his creativity in ways separate from his wife’s. He was shaking off what he must have considered his wife’s attempt to dominate him. Valentine was often remote and quixotic, but she is perhaps more properly (and sympathetically) understood as a sensitive, tormented and overly self-absorbed person who wanted to achieve her destiny as a writer. She felt her alliance with Roland would assist both their careers, but she found it strenuous to cope with his ambitious streak when it was unleashed. Ultimately, she was much more passive and retiring than her husband, and felt betrayed when he actively pursued his career.

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During the mid-twenties, Valentine’s spiritual nature continued to attract Roland. He remained both enchanted and attached to her, but her inability to cope with his successes began to divide them. From 1926 onwards, Roland’s goal was to become a surrealist artist. In following that path, his now strong, determined ambition would, ironically, lead him astray from his wife, even though she claimed that she was also an ardent proponent of the movement. As a surrealist artist, Roland explored his inner world. He did not attempt to use the movement as a platform from which to engage in political battles, as did Breton and Éluard. His paintings from the twenties and thirties clearly demonstrate that he used the conventions of surrealism to explore the contradictions within himself. To him, his life experience showed that existence was devoid of logical causality. He was also aware that the divergent strains within himself made themselves known to him in his dreams. In his paintings he gave form to those illogical fantasies. As an artist, he is often most successful when he attempts to grapple with deep-seated conflicts. He does not necessarily seek to make those explorations universal, but he is an exceptionally careful craftsman, one who is especially dexterous in his use of colour and technique. Christmas 1926 at Oxhey Grange was so strained that the Penroses were looking for somewhere else to spend the holidays in 1927. They gladly accepted an invitation from Bonamy and Valentine Dobrée in Cairo, where Bonamy, whom Roland knew from Cambridge, was a professor of English. In 1923 Roland and Varda had visited the couple when they were living in France, at Larrau in the Pyrenees; in 1925 Roland and Valentine had stayed with them there. The Penroses looked forward to spending the holiday in a Muslim country and thus avoiding the traditional Western rites, which they found depressing. Things began well when Dobrée met them at the rail station wearing a tarboosh, but he spoiled everything when he informed the Penroses that they were expected to decorate the tree that had been delivered that morning. Valentine Dobrée, née Brooke-Pechell (her real name was Gladys), was the daughter of a diplomat, and in 1927 had published Your Cuckoo Sings by Kind, a novel celebrated for its frank treatment of

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sexuality. She had had affairs with, among others, Ralph Partridge, Mark Gertler and Varda. Her husband tolerated her dalliances, but sometimes put his foot down. In personality, Roland’s Valentine’s and Dobrée’s Valentine were complete opposites. When he met the Dobrées in 1922, Lytton Strachey observed that the professor possessed ‘mildly literary & pedantic tastes. He is dull but harmless . . . she is rather more interesting . . . perhaps a Saph . . . much attracted to [Dora] Carrington. She paints à la Modigliani.’44 The Egyptian exotic asserted itself in the form of Aziz Eloui Bey, a high-ranking official in the Egyptian Railway Company, who seemed to the Penroses to have stepped straight out of the Arabian Nights. He lived near the Dobrées in a large mock-half-timbered palace. His Circassian wife Nimet, Roland felt, was a beauty cast in the Nefertiti mold. Ten years later, Aziz would become a significant person in Roland’s life. Another guest of the Dobrées was ‘a slim tall dark-eyed Spaniard called Galarza, Vicomte de Santa Clara . . . His hieratic appearance was equal to the gravity of his speech and the high philosophical tone of his thought.’45 Vicente-Marcelino-Julio Galarza Pérez Castañeda was a Cuban-born archeologist, forty-eight years old when the Penroses met him (in 1908 he had discovered the tomb of the queen of the Fourth Dynasty). His devotion to Eastern mysticism preoccupied him during the twenties and thirties (Fig. 19). Already enthralled by alchemy and all kinds of esoteric religious systems, Valentine was immediately taken with Galarza. The Penroses eagerly accepted an invitation to his tiny, sparse whitewashed apartment in a suburb of Cairo. His goal in his particular practice of the arcane was, through meditation, to close the gap between his consciousness of his own existence and the unconsciousness of the universe. Only if that gap was closed could a state of perfect equilibrium – Nirvana – be established. This ‘plan of the universe, in which each conceivable element had been given its place, was far more complex. It consisted of a circle divided into segments in which each element was faced by the opposite quality on the other side of the circumference.’ In this scheme of thought, the individual is constantly attempting to get in touch with the lost part of himself represented by the ‘quality

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Figure 19. Galarza,Vicomte de Santa Clara.

on the other side of the circumference’.46 So intricate was this system that the Penroses resolved to make a second visit the following winter. However, the impetus for this decision came from Valentine. Upon returning to Paris early in 1928, Roland, having been told that Max Ernst was about to vacate his studio in the rue Tourlaque, called upon him in order to procure the space for himself. Roland was immediately taken with the ‘personality of this blueeyed young hawk and by the paintings from a new world hanging on his studio wall’.47 From childhood, the Cologne-born Ernst, nine years older than Roland, had enjoyed defying authority. While studying a wide variety of subjects at the University of Bonn, he had visited asylums and become fascinated with the art of the mentally ill. As a young artist in 1912 he was influenced by Picasso, Van Gogh and Gauguin, and during World War I he was drafted and served on both the Eastern and Western fronts. He later claimed to have ‘died’ from 1914 to 1918 (Fig. 20). De Chirico heavily influenced Ernst’s early work, and he then became absorbed in creating collages. He drifted into Dada and

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Figure 20. Max Ernst, Punching Ball or The Immortality of Buonarroti, 1920.

then surrealism, and at the time Roland met him he had painted L’Eléphant Célèbes, a work in which his experiments with combination, assemblage and collage came to dramatic fruition. For Roland, the depiction of the half-elephant, half-machine was ‘conceived with the revolutionary anger of the Dadaists and yet tending towards the more constructive and poetic ideas of the surrealists’. It was, in his opinion, the ‘first surrealist painting and therefore of seminal importance’ (Fig. 21).48 From the moment he crossed the threshold of Ernst’s Paris studio and saw the work on display, Roland knew that he wanted to be a surrealist artist. The work that entranced him that day was a large, striking white canvas (96.5 cm × 129.5 cm) hung high on the wall. At the top of the picture was the beautifully calligraphed word PHOTO, followed by ‘ceci est la couleur de mes rêves’; above those words was a splash of vivid blue. This painting, not by Ernst but by his next-door neighbour Joan Miró, is a peinture-poésie;

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Figure 21. Max Ernst, Célèbes, 1921.

these canvases were linked to the Spanish painter’s association, in the early 1920s, with surrealist poets (Fig. 22). Immediately after the visit, Roland and Valentine determined to live in Paris. Shortly afterwards they purchased an apartment on the Left Bank in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the first floor of an eighteenth-century building at 8 rue des Saints-Pères on the corner of rue Verneuil. The lofty proportions of the flat and its tall windows made the entire living space calm and restful. Their provincial furniture softened the metropolitan feel of the flat. At the north end

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Figure 22. Joan Miró.

of the street, the roof of the Louvre was visible above the trees lining the Seine. Valentine, who had been educated in Paris, took classes at the Louvre and Sanskrit lessons at the Sorbonne. Roland had his first one-man show at the Galerie Van Leer, two blocks away, in June 1928.49 Although Roland decided not to take Ernst’s studio, he and Valentine began a friendship with Ernst and his wife, Marie-Berthe. The Ernsts were hard-pressed financially, and the attachment grew so quickly that Roland, with characteristic generosity, invited them to Provence, where he rented La Noblesse, a huge slab-sided mas among vineyards of La Cadière-d’Azur. Although it was only twenty kilometres from Cassis, Roland must have decided that Villa les Mimosas would be too small for the four of them. The two couples took delight in everything La Noblesse offered, even the ‘rats that ran along the branches of the mulberry trees at dusk and the bats that festooned the ceilings of the great staircase, squeaking and making love upside down all day’. Nearby was a

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‘clear fast flowing stream’50 that helped make the entire landscape unspoilt, almost paradisiacal. The summer became an ‘orgy’ of painting in which Ernst became Roland’s teacher. Canvases, brushes, paints were ordered from Paris. Max also taught his pupil to box, to catch rats and to play chess. He also instructed his new friend in the intricacies of surrealism. There was one hint of discord in all this. The ‘touch of teutonic sadism’ in Max and his fellow surrealists was much more acceptable to Roland than to Valentine, ‘who remained closer to the twittering enthusiasms of Marie-Berthe’.51 Ernst was quite capable of being extremely charming, but he also had an exceptionally strong, commanding personality. Self-doubt was not part of his emotional vocabulary. Roland found Ernst’s temperament ‘with its touch of the black caustic humour of Alfred Jarry and the Surrealists . . . more acceptable’ than did Valentine. Max enjoyed boasting of his dastardly exploits. He also recounted in vivid detail an anecdote he had heard about a seal being thrown into boiling water to see how it would react. Valentine swooned into Roland’s arms when she heard this macabre story. That summer, Valentine made no attempt to conceal her dislike of Ernst. She was profoundly unsettled by her husband’s admiration for such a man. Her feelings may have been derived in part by what she felt was Ernst’s denigrating attitude towards Marie-Berthe. From immersing himself in the writings of Breton and Éluard, Roland had become a surrealist in theory. However, for Roland, Max was ‘the person who taught me more about how to paint, the actual techniques of painting that he had invented himself, and there was no sort of privacy about that; he was not jealous about his own inventions.’52 In 1926, Ernst published a collection of thirty-four frottages (wherein an artist takes a pencil or other drawing tool and makes a rubbing over a surface) under the title Histoire Naturelle. Upon beholding them, the experience for Roland was ‘like waking in another country’. He would not rest until he found his own way there.53 Roland, following in Ernst’s path, made frottages of his own. Ernst taught Roland how to paint in a surrealist fashion. The German may have been a demanding teacher, but his strictures allowed Roland to paint in a way he found liberating. Quickly, he gained confidence. Roland turned a blind eye to Ernst’s dark side.

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He may have done so because he felt profoundly indebted to his instructor. In his painting, Roland was more influenced by Ernst than by any other artist. Roland’s oil from 1928, Conversation between Rock and Flower (Plate 3), demonstrates how well Ernst had taught him. Menacingly, the image hints at the discord between husband and wife. On the left is the feminine red flower, growing out of what appears to be a tree stump; on the right, the masculine, one-eyed rock glances apprehensively at its companion. From a hole at the top, the stone seems to be offering an olive branch in appeasement. The flower has two personalities. On the one hand, its red, blue and yellow portions are beautiful and alluring – on the other, its grey parts are heavy and cumbersome. The suggestion is that Valentine is both seductive and rejecting. The rock’s shape has no suggestion of lightness – it is obdurate, even more rejecting in personality than the flower. The tree stump, the rock and the profile of part of the flower are rendered in sombre, grey tones reminiscent of Ernst, although the juxtaposition of the two key elements seems to be Roland’s. From the German artist he had learned about collage and the importance of the objet trouvé; here, specifically, the brushwork on the rock has the appearance of frottage. Roland achieved this by rubbing dry colour onto this part of the bare canvas. The title might be meant somewhat ironically, in that there is ultimately no genuine dialogue between the flower and the rock; in fact, both are intransigent, and both live gloomy, depressed existences. This painting certainly provides evidence of Roland’s greater self-confidence as an artist; it can also be seen as a progress report on an unhappy marriage. Although there may be an attempt to communicate between rock and flower, it is an overly reticent, stilted conversation. And that was exactly the problem: husband and wife could not make their feelings known to each other. At first, Valentine and Roland attempted to live in joyful isolation when in Cassis. She wrote poetry; he painted. Valentine was never a person who openly and clearly expressed her feelings. She probably could not do so, and she may not have been aware that she allowed her growing sense of unhappiness to be displaced by focusing her dissatisfaction on the mistral – the strong, cold and usually dry regional

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wind in France which comes from the north or northwest and accelerates when it passes through the valleys of the Rhone and Durance Rivers to the coast of the Mediterranean. Roland loved Cassis and, left to his own devices, would have remained there indefinitely; but the relentless, vivid light and the picture-postcard scenery disturbed Valentine. For her, the place was simply too perfect. To circumvent dealing with the mistral – and perhaps, unconsciously, to avoid confronting their many incompatibilities – Roland and Valentine began to travel. At the end of 1928, as planned, they visited Egypt again to consult Galarza (via Switzerland and then by ship from Venice to Alexandria). They then returned to Paris by way of the Middle East and Greece. Galarza’s recipe for inner harmony – meditation and retreat – comforted Valentine. Roland was skeptical. The Dobrées were in England during the Penroses’ second stay in Egypt, and so that winter they rented a small house within a few hundred yards of the Sphinx. Roland found it difficult to concentrate on Nirvana when in his garden the hoopoes with their colourful crowns of feathers flocked and goats, horses and camels congregated at his front gate. At night there were the bright zodiacal lights – and at almost any time of day, beautiful peasant girls could be seen. An expedition to Kharga, the southernmost of Egypt’s five western oases, allowed him to see ‘the integral purity of the desert’. He was especially moved by beholding how the ‘fertility of the soil as soon as water touched it within a few inches of the apparent sterility of the desert was itself a parallel to the extravagant wealth of the pasha that flourished side by side with the hopeless poverty of the fellaheen’.54 The violent contrasts between rich and poor also fascinated him. The pursuit of the exotic was a strong component in Roland’s imagination. This fascination is especially evident in the relatively straightforward Egyptian Pyramid (1928), but Eclipse of the Pyramid (c. 1930) (Plate 4) is more complex and surrealistic, in the deliberate way in which ‘foreign’ objects are juxtaposed against the Egyptian landscape. The latter is heavily influenced by what Roland had learned from Ernst about frottage. Eclipse also bears a striking resemblance to Atterissage from about five years earlier, in the way the monochromatic moon and landscape – the ordinary – are imposed upon by the two coloured shapes hovering over the ground – the exotic. With considerable success, Roland was continuing to experiment with surrealism.

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He was also attempting to discover how one lived a surrealist existence. When, through Max, Roland was finally introduced to André Breton, he took special note of how conventionally Breton was dressed, his extremely correct French, and his elegant manners. He was ‘impressive’ and attentive to a newcomer like Roland, and ‘he would dominate the conversation but not aggressively’. Breton gave listeners the impression that his very presence made everything that was said of great significance. Superficially, Roland resembled Breton in his conservative manner of dress and correct demeanour. In contrast to Breton, Éluard was ‘very loveable . . . [he had] a great deal of warmth, much more so than Breton [who] was polite, but not warm.’55 For Breton, Roland could never become a surrealist of his persuasion because he was not French and because he did not adhere to the movement’s political leanings. Éluard had no such difficulties – their friendship flourished. He was Roland’s role model in acclimatising himself to surrealism. Near the outset of her writing career, Valentine also found support from Éluard, who identified so strongly with her that he could completely incorporate her point of view in his preface to a later collection of hers, Dons des féminines (1951): ‘I have survived in this impossible world. I have suffered this odd life but I struggled to live and lived to struggle. My frankness has been the most limpid of my weapons. I have wished to be lucid and I have concealed nothing.’56 Valentine’s poetry began to be noticed in surrealist circles. The December 1929 issue of La Révolution Surréaliste publishes various responses, including those by Roland and Valentine, to its Enquête sur l’Amour. Early on, Roland would have learned of the complicated history between Ernst and Éluard. Four years before, in March 1924, Éluard had mysteriously disappeared. For a considerable period of time, his whereabouts was unknown. He had been experiencing anxiety attacks due to strains caused within the surrealist group by Breton’s disapproval of his involvement with his father’s real estate business, and, more significantly, by Ernst’s affair with Gala. Éluard embezzled 17,000 francs from his father’s company and sent his father a message threatening death to anyone who came after him.57 He then went to Marseille and boarded a steamer. Following in the wake of the French ships that had carried Gauguin through the Panama Canal to the South Pacific islands, Éluard ventured into Southeast Asia. Some assumed that his marital situation had led him

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to suicide. This impression was enhanced by his collection of poems published soon afterward: Mourir de ne pas Mourir (Dying of Not Dying). The frontispiece was a portrait of Éluard by Ernst. When Éluard disembarked in Singapore about two months later, Gala and Ernst, who were well aware of his movements, had already set out from Marseille to meet him, having sold Éluard’s collection of paintings to raise money for the journey. Reunited, the three sailed to Saigon, arriving on 12 August. After touring the city for about two weeks, husband and wife returned to France together, arriving on 28 September, with Ernst following ten days later. They acted as if nothing had happened. Breton romanticised the absent Éluard, whom he perceived as some sort of Odysseus figure who had gone off to wrestle with his inner demons. Of course, Homer’s adventure is about a man trying to find his way home to be reunited with his wife. In this scenario, the unfaithful Gala, accompanied by her lover, set off on a voyage to be reunited with her husband. Éluard’s reaction to the loss of Gala to Ernst in 1924 and, later, in 1929, to Salvador Dalí was, as might be expected from a surrealist, highly unconventional. Even after May 1930 when Éluard met the delicate-looking, spritely, impoverished Maria Benz (whom he called ‘Nusch’) and soon married her, Gala remained the great love of his life. This can be clearly seen in the ardent letters he wrote to his first wife before and after their divorce. Moreover, Éluard always maintained that Gala took second place in his affections to Ernst. A friend recalled: ‘Paul Éluard, having obviously sacrificed his attractive wife in his generous enthusiasm for his friend [Ernst], made such shrift as he could to play the cheerful cuckold, but sometimes looked restless and nervous . . . saying with a brave grin: “Well, I love Max Ernst much more than I do Gala.” ’58 At the time, for Roland, such entanglements must have seemed foreign. Although he and Valentine differed on a number of key issues, their sensibilities did not encompass the emotional volatilities in the relationships between Gala and Éluard, between Gala, Ernst and Éluard, between Éluard and Nusch and between Éluard and Ernst. Later, Roland would experience such turmoil and know first-hand the complexities that ensue in surrealist-based affairs of the heart. In fact, he would replace the conventional sense of morality he had learned as a youngster with the unconventionalities encouraged by surrealism.

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Roland’s closest tie was – and remained – with Éluard: ‘I owed much to Éluard for his revelation of a new way of life, essential factors being freedom of expression, an unflinching challenge to all conventional ideas, the continuous test to which all moral concepts should be put by considering them in reverse and above all the basic importance of the subconscious in all inspiration.’ This concept brought Roland back to his childhood and adolescence: ‘The last idea had something that he recognized as being akin to the Quaker belief in the ‘inner light’ as the surest guide to truth.’59 Éluard was also a compulsive seducer and eager wife-swapper. He may have loved Gala deeply when they were together, but he had been constantly unfaithful to her.60 Later, Roland’s sexual conduct would emulate that of his close friend. A new surrealist experience presented itself when, in March 1930, Ernst beseeched Roland to participate in the making of Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. Ernst had likely encountered the Spanish director at a surrealist hangout and agreed to be in the film. Then, in turn, Ernst asked Roland to be in it. The funds for this film (one million francs) were supplied by the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles, eager patrons of surrealism. Since Roland was the only surrealist in Paris who owned a dinner jacket, this piece of clothing provided his entrée (as an extra) into what became the most celebrated of surrealist films. During the filming, Roland was summoned home to England when his mother died. He felt almost no sense of loss at her passing, an indication of how divergent her values had become from his. His father, now suffering from dementia and groping female caregivers, was packed off to a nursing home in Bognor Regis, where a male nurse wheeled him about in a wicker Bath chair on the promenade.61 In his scene, filmed at Billancourt Studios, Roland stands stiffly next to Marie-Berthe, whereas Ernst has a star role as a brigand. The film premiered on 28 November 1930 at Studio 28 Cinema in Montmartre. On 3 December, two groups (the Patriots’ League and the Anti-Semitic League) sacked this place, in the process destroying the twenty surrealist paintings and photos on display in the foyer. The government responded on 12 December by seizing the print and banning the film on the grounds that it was an incitement to riot. When Valentine had objected strenuously to Roland’s participation

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in the film, he had ignored her. However, like her husband, Valentine made a small, uncredited appearance in the film as a woman in a car. Earlier in 1930, the Penroses had sold Villa les Mimosas and in November that year they bought the derelict Château Le Pouy, situated on a hilltop near Auch in Valentine’s native Gascony. The terraced hills ploughed by white oxen, the unspoilt villages and the sublime beauty of the nearby Pyrenees were an inducement to live there, but it was the remoteness that Valentine craved. ‘In that remote hilltop fortress I set up house with my Gascon wife,’ Roland recalled. ‘With respect rather than blasphemy we replaced the windows with their long grey shutters and made the old stone walls and roof again weatherproof.’ In that place, Valentine returned ‘to her underlying temperament of the benign witch’. He would sometimes wake up to a deserted bed. Then, a ‘lithe naked dew-soaked girl would come to me and whisper into my ear the adventures she had with a family of badgers among the rocks and the black oaks’ (Figs 23 and 24).62

Figure 23. Roland and Valentine at Le Pouy.

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Figure 24. Le Pouy.

Valentine took special delight in exploring the lush, deep valleys that led up to the Spanish frontier. On one expedition she and Roland were joined by Ernst, who was an experienced mountaineer, and the English painter Darsie Japp.63 During their ascent Ernst pointed out that the clouds looked as if a thunderstorm would soon overtake them. It did: all of a sudden all landmarks were clothed in thick mist, and salamanders surrounded the party. Ernst and Japp were in favour of finding their original path and turning back, but Valentine was defiant – she wanted to explore unknown regions. She threatened to go on alone if the three men did not wish to join her. They capitulated. Eventually, they came upon a lone shepherd’s hut, where they spent the night. The shepherd kindly offered them milk, which Roland proclaimed the most delicious he had ever tasted – he liked its slightly gritty quality. The next day he discovered the source for the wonderful texture: the milk canister was full of dead flies at the bottom.64 Roland attempted to find ways of connecting with Valentine. However, he must have begun to ask himself, had he ever really been attached to her? Am I as cut off from my wife as I was from my mother? In a letter to Dobrée of 21 June 1931 he hinted that the move to Gascony might have been an error in judgement on his part, as he feared ‘intellectual stagnation and being unable to paint.’65

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Chapter Five

Insoluble Questions (1932–1935)

James Penrose’s death on 2 January 1932 provided an emotional release from the past, but Roland remained deeply unsure of his relationship with Valentine. In an attempt to sort out the problems in their marriage, he agreed to travel with her at the end of 1932 to India, where Galarza had taken up a professorship in Arabic philosophy at the University of Calcutta. Specifically, he was at St Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, popularly known as St Paul’s, an undergraduate liberal arts and sciences college in north-central Calcutta founded in 1864 and affiliated with the University of Calcutta. On the way to India that November, Roland was appalled by Port Said: ‘grotesquely foul and the Orient at its worst, to wake in the morning and go ashore and fine oneself surrounded by blacks and nondescript Levantines all in nightshirts, night caps and bare feet makes one rub one’s eyes and prick oneself in case one should have joined a reservation of lunatic sleepwalkers and really still be in bed. In fact with the heat in general one has a sensation of never being quite awake.’1 Upon arrival an elderly servant, Poushana Butler, who would serve as their companion for four months, met them. From the outset, Roland disdained the prospect of acting like a member of a ‘conquering race’. Based on his letters to his brother Alec, the itinerary of the Penroses seems to have been: Bombay, late November to the first of December; Goa, middle of December; Mysore, Bagaphur, Bandauri and Biyaphur, December; Indore, late December–January; Udaipur and Jaipur, January; Calcutta (including Ramakrishna monastery), 15 January–mid-February; Benares, 14 February; Mirtola, 20 March; Agra, early April; and then Bombay. Their departure from India was on 10 April.

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Although they were largely sheltered from them, the Penroses nevertheless felt themselves assaulted on a daily basis by the harsh realities of everyday life in India. Roland’s sense of natural justice was further battered when he witnessed the treatment of the Indian people at the hands of their English rulers: ‘Wherever the white man has settled in any numbers, the result is commercial horrors, elsewhere the heathen live and die in superstition but at least they escape a blacker death.’2 Roland strongly objected to the barriers created by the imperial system: ‘When I meet the young hopes of British commerce, who take all this for granted and without being any more offensive than you or I in England, accept their role of undisputed tyrant with gusto, I feel hopelessly English.’ He had been instructed that he was not to treat the servant assigned to him for the next month ‘with any kindness’. In fact, any such display of emotion ‘would neither improve his opinion of me nor mine of him. This may be true but the work of screwing oneself up to becoming one of the conquering race fills one with astonishment at one’s own callousness.’ So disgusted was Roland by what the English had done in India that he sometimes claimed to be an Irishman. Bombay was especially dismaying: ‘the horrors of the architecture are almost unimaginable. One would think that the English had intended to anchor themselves here by the sheer weight of the dark green basalt enormities that punctuate the rambling uncertainty of the bazaars.’3 A visit to the renowned Byculla Club confirmed his certainty that the ‘real’ India had been completely sequestered off by the English: ‘The Club was originally built in the country but the city has engulfed it considerably and outside its perfect Victorian sedate seclusion there is India with all its most vivid and living colours. My host told me that the modern young English man has no further use for the charming relic and its debts are likely to cause it to disappear before too long.’ On the sub-Continent, he discovered there were two types of Englishmen, those ‘who become more pagan’ and those that became more steadfastly English.4 Valentine, not wishing to be cast in the role of a traditional tourist, arranged to visit the Towers of Silence before leaving Bombay so that she and her husband could witness the dead laid out for the vultures to devour. They were in Goa for the feast of St Francis Xavier, who

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had arrived there in 1542; as Roland pointed out, the Jesuit missionary had ‘entered long go into the Pantheon of Indian Gods for those who remain Hindu and [had] become a God unique for those who have been converted’. There was also the splendid ‘overgrown state and decayed look’ of the heavily perfumed cloister gardens where the celebratory mass took place (Fig. 25).5 Roland and Valentine arrived by night in Mysore ‘and were astonished at the illuminations, the hills above the town being outlined by electric lamps forming a combination of very beautiful and sweeping curves above the town and stretching for miles. The palace and the marble statue of the former Maharaja were ablaze. But from the hotel this morning the town had strangely shrunk in size, the hills had again become uninhabited jungle and the palace was covered in every cornice and pinnacle by what appeared to be large drops of dew sparkling in the sun.’6 The separation between fantasy and reality in India fascinated him: ‘The hills round the city are covered with a woolliness which looks wonderfully soft and attractive in the morning light but when you get up close you find it is nothing but thorns and cactuses.’7

Figure 25. Valentine in India.

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India, he felt, was ‘a grand country provided you are rich and important enough to live outside the bazaar, that is, above the normal level of existence.’8 When they met up with William le B. Edgerton, a Cambridge friend of Roland’s and an official in the Central Indian Agency in Indore, after a 700-mile rail journey, he made sure that the Penroses were treated as specially favoured guests of the Raj. ‘Billy met us at the station with a superb white-turbaned, red and gold coated servant who made us feel at once that we had moved into the proximity of princes and Viceroys.’ Edgerton’s bungalow and its garden were kept in perfect condition by ‘the unceasing toil of gardeners in white turbans and women covered with bracelets.’9 The Penroses were pampered royally, swam in a pool, served peacock at dinner (they judged it stringy rather than succulent) and taken to watch the young Maharaja play tennis. The guests at the Governor General of Central India’s Christmas dinner talked about nothing but the upcoming duck shoot. Then an overly respectable game of charades followed. Disgusted by the small-mindedness and dullness of his fellow guests, Roland reflected on the obvious fact that the English did not wish Indians to enter their inner circles: he thought that was a blessing in disguise for the excluded. On a subsequent visit to the Maharaja, there was much discussion of shooting tigers and panthers by placing a calf under glaring floodlights and then waiting for the predators to strike. The guests played bridge while waiting for something to happen. A few days later, at the palace of the Maharaja of Udaipur, there was a very different atmosphere: servants were dispatched every evening to feed the wild animals. As a result, droves of wild boar, hares, monkeys, peacocks, flying foxes and varied species of birds assembled on the grounds: ‘all the animals were very punctual about getting up and [then] going to bed . . . no dallying . . . they were exactly on time at their occupations.’10 At Jai Singh’s Observatory in Jaipur, Roland was taken aback by the ‘strangest collection of shapes with marble facings’ and noted that the ‘beautiful white curves and unfamiliar bird-like forms give the impression of strange beings with their wings open waiting patiently to receive an inspiration for which they have been destined.’11 Calcutta was another disappointment – it ‘is a replica of London and at this time of year seems like summer in England. The sky is

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always smeared with smoke, which at night becomes a light fog sticking in your throat and making your eyes smart, the atmosphere in general is distinctly depressing.’12 Later in his trip, even the Taj Mahal disheartened Roland’s architecturally trained eye: ‘I could only find adverse criticisms to make, though all the praises that have been sung are to some extent true. Unfortunately, it is forever ruined for us to whom its praises have been overdone and appeals first to people with bad taste.’13 Whilst in Calcutta, he experienced flying for the first time when he took up the offer of a young Hindu pilot to view Calcutta from the air in his two-seater plane. The ‘bird’s-eye view’ was almost entirely obscured because of the smoke and dust clothing the city. If before Roland had been less than enthusiastic about Galarza, his reservations were now sufficiently cast aside for him to prolong their stay in India in order to meet with him for longer than previously planned. In Calcutta, the Penroses met twice a week with their guru, who lived alone in the single room where he received them, and seldom ventured outside. This arrangement worked well enough that they eventually moved closer to his residence, and they found a sense of contentment at long last in February 1933 in a little bungalow on the banks of the Hooghly, next door to the Ramakrishna monastery. Another reason for choosing this neighbourhood was that they were nearer the country and the air was better than in Calcutta. ‘Also,’ Roland noted, ‘Valentine is able to get Sanskrit lessons from the monks of the monastery and I am able to draw. To begin with I have painted elephants, flowers and Indian girls on the white wash of the white walls . . . When I paint, the monk intones the Sanskrit verses with the same heroic ring that Grandfather Peckover had chanted “Down fell the misbeliever.” ’14 There was a strange, shrivelled old spinster who lived in the monastery as a sort of mascot. Although American by birth, she had lots of connections with the English aristocracy. That March Roland encountered two old Cambridge friends, George Poole and Ronald Nixon. At Mirtola, he met up with Poole: ‘He lives here permanently and officiates in the temple. He is an exparson and has changed, again with great thoroughness, his former religion and rites for the worship of Krishna, though, unfortunately one still sees the ritualistic Anglican underneath the eastern costume. He has all his reasons for what he is doing clearly tabulated but in these questions it is not reason that can convince me.’15

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Roland felt that Poole’s exchange of one religious system for another did not display evidence of any kind of inner transformation, whereas he saw that Nixon had the bravery to pursue a completely new kind of life. At Cambridge, Roland had witnessed the former fighter pilot’s sense of meaninglessness. He was aware that in 1921 Nixon had accepted the offer of a teaching position at the University of Lucknow in northern India and had become a close friend of the university’s vice chancellor, Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, a Theosophist. Over time Nixon had come to regard Gyanendra’s wife, Monika Chakravarti, as his spiritual teacher. In 1928 she took vows of renunciation in the Gaudiya Vaishnavite tradition and adopted the monastic name of Yashoda Ma. Soon afterwards, she initiated Nixon into vairagya, and he adopted Krishna Prem as his monastic name. In 1930, two years before the Penroses’ visit, Yashoda Ma and Krishna Prem had founded an ashram at Mirtola, near Almora, in mountainous north-central India (Fig. 26).

Figure 26. Ronald Nixon (Krishna Prem).

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At Benares (Varanasi), Roland found Nixon ‘with his friends camping on the bank of the Ganges. Nixon has certainly gone the whole hog and accepted the Hindou religion with all it has, superficial and profound. Perhaps he’s right . . . I have the greatest esteem for his courage in doing the thing properly. The English people who hear of it throw their hands in horror and ask if he really wanted to go in for religion, why didn’t he do it decently and become a padre? Nixon, in his way, is offering some slight atonement for the sins of his compatriots and he is loved and respected by everyone. He has no small courage.’16 Courage was something that Roland was desperately in need of in his dealings with Valentine. In India, Roland confronted the emotional distance between himself and his wife. His feelings of sadness and alienation were compounded by his horror at what the English had done to India, and by his revulsion at the squalor in which so many Indians lived. For him, the white man’s burden was an intolerable weight. He was thoroughly repulsed by the colonial enterprise. As far as he was concerned, imperialism was an integral part of what was dangerously wrong with his society and, of course, surrealism was an artistic and political force that challenged the basic standards of the capitalistic system. Another aspect of India found a responsive chord in him: ‘Wherever we have been in India the predominating form of worship has been phallic, as one motors through the countryside one is continuously passing stones or trees or images with letter-bold-red paint slopped over them in such quantities that very often their original form is completely obscured, both male and female origins are depicted in any shape likely to suggest them.’17 The sensuality of India may have appealed to him because his own sexual nature was being neglected in his marriage. The meetings with Galarza in Calcutta ‘cleared up’, Roland claimed, ‘a great many questions in which I was in doubt and have given me renewed energy to live this life which I now feel to be so well worth living . . . I begin to perceive that nearly all the insoluble questions which torment me are nasty bogies of one’s own fabrication.’18 This is what he told his brother, Alec. In reality, Roland and Valentine remained even further apart emotionally. There are no letters from 1932 that provide information

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about the sessions between the Penroses and Galarza, but some from 1935 and 1936 indicate clearly what those encounters were like. In February 1936, Roland told the guru: ‘The situation between her and me is not one which can be remedied by discussion . . . Though I still remember in all its essentials the long conversations we have had with you and though especially your first talks in Cairo have made a lasting impression, I fear that I am not temperamentally suited to the contemplative life which forms part of your system and there are certain aspects of your teaching which I do not find personally to be of help in the difficult task of living, though they would undoubtedly fit the case if I were on the brink of death.’19 Earlier, on 7 September 1935, Galarza was blunt when he informed Roland that Valentine had ‘not had the strength to follow the advice I gave in our last meeting with as much stress as I could. You will remember how I emphasized that our life on [the path to enlightenment] must be combined with our daily life by devoting some hours to each of the difficult, and apparently contradictory pursuits that make up our worldly existence. I exemplified this with my own activities. However, as soon as you left, Mrs Penrose went to one extreme and, partly for the purpose of reaction, you went for the other extreme. Subsequently other older causes of disagreement were evoked and added, so these occasionally superseded them.’20 In a subsequent letter, Galarza made it quite clear that he felt the Penroses were treating their meetings with him merely as a form of marriage counselling. Moreover, husband and wife were trying to score points off each other and in so doing perverting his work: ‘I have been appalled to see that my doctrines, which were always intended to be a cause of greater concord and union between you, have been turned against themselves.’ He added: ‘The gentleness of wisdom’s teaching, clearly shown by me and constantly directed to follow the lines of each individual’s receptivity, has been converted into a means of wrangling about your [differing tastes], your mode of living, your thoughts . . . and into an attitude fit to drive a rather penitent and lenient man to desperation.’21 When Roland left India, that place became for him ‘a piece of mental baggage, which must be put in a corner close at hand but not allowed to obstruct further action’. Spiritually, Valentine righted herself in India. In the brother-sister relationship of Yashoda Ma and Krishna Prem, she witnessed exactly what she had hoped she and her

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husband would achieve in their marriage. Her vision, however, was decidedly not Roland’s. In a photo from 1932 (see Fig. 32), he looks forthrightly at the viewer. He is exceptionally well dressed, a cigarette carefully poised in one hand. The portrait reveals him as a young man of taste. If he was overly reticent before, that side of his personality had vanished. Here, he is a well-intentioned, soft-spoken patrician, a man of sophisticated taste. In many ways, he was no longer the man Valentine had married. Upon arrival back in Europe, the Penroses went to Gascony, where Valentine remained. Roland went to Paris and then, a week later, to London. In Paris he was reunited with Ernst, who took a special interest in his friend’s photographs of the erotic sculptures at the Black Pagoda at Konark Sun Temple. The German artist was also intrigued by the wood blocks used in Rajputana for printing muslin – this was welcome information to someone interested in frottage. Roland agreed to fund Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de bonté ou les Sept Eléments Capitaux, five paperback cahiers in a grey cardboard slipcover published in Paris in 1934 by Editions Jeanne Bucher. Many of the images in this book were offensive to Valentine, and she was furious with her husband for financing the project. Valentine, who had no use for cinema as an art form, was further incensed when her husband acted as producer for the short film Affaires Publiques, the first film of Robert Bresson. The two men knew each other because Bresson had begun his artistic career as a surrealistically-inspired painter.22 They formed a company called Arc, and through it Roland funnelled more than 200,000 francs.23 The film is slapstick comedy, centred on two neighbouring republics, Crogandia and Miremia, and the various disasters that befall the ceremonial unveiling of a statue, the launching of a ship and the crash-landing of a Miremian pilot in Crogandian territory. After its premiere at the Cinéma Raspail in 1934, it fell into obscurity.24 India had obviously not resolved Roland’s questions about the status of his marriage. In the summer of 1933, while he and Valentine were staying at an old Basque farm near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he had a moment of epiphany when he gained a new insight into the ‘incompatibility that exists between beauty and ugliness, between life and death’. In stark Roman lettering on the keystone of the arch that led

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to the stables was a motto containing two aphorisms: NUL BIEN SANS MAL – NUL MAL SANS BIEN (No good without evil – No evil without good). ‘In this indissoluble union of opposites I discovered a pagan truth which liberated me at last from the Christian doctrine that good could and would and must triumph by totally obliterating evil.’ The revelation came soon after both my parents had died and their benign disapproval had ceased. The idea of the essential independence of good and evil changed the whole of my understanding of life. It now became clear that whereas the annihilation of good would mean chaos, the cessation of evil would produce sterility. In this eternal marriage of heaven and hell I did not cease to hope that good will predominate and keep evil in its place as a painful but necessary stimulant. But fate it seems has so ordered it, teaching us to laugh at adversity and weep for joy. Also we cannot deny that it is possible to find beauty and poetry in evil, which can redeem it from being utterly sinister and squalid. The fascination of the poetry of evil lies in its inexorable presence.25

This moment of insight may have released Roland from his Christian past, but it was also an instant in which much of what he had experienced in India came to the fore where he had witnessed the huge divide between rich and poor. In accepting the essential duality of human existence, he also found freedom from Valentine. He no longer felt bound to his past with her. For a long period of time, Roland realised, he had not been paying sufficient attention to his own inner light. Although he had long abandoned Quakerism as a guiding force in his life, he had nevertheless internalised many of its precepts. Roland’s reflections on good and evil can be interpreted as a kind of surrealist response to morality. He would not simply pursue the good and avoid the evil. Instead, he recognised that human existence often contained a perverse blend of the two. As such, he saw no problem in pursuing his dark side. For him, life was supremely illogical, and surrealism recognised this basic fact. By the end of 1934, Roland and Valentine were travelling on deviating paths, but they shared a reluctance to admit this fact. The two entertained the possibility of visiting Switzerland to consult Carl

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Jung. This discussion came to nothing because Roland was suffering from a duodenal ulcer, and decided to return to England for treatment. He suggested that Valentine travel to Zurich alone, and wrote to Jung: ‘In any case my wife will be able to explain her troubles to you herself. They are of a distinctly unusual nature, and she may feel more free to express herself away from my influence.’26 Valentine did not visit Jung, presumably because she felt her husband was as much in need of treatment as she was. Back in England, Roland got back in touch with his brothers, from whom he had become distant. By this time Alec was married to his second wife, Frances, and was a fellow of King’s College. Alec’s nickname was ‘Gentleman’, an epithet that served him well. He was an extremely anxious person who had tried analysis with James Strachey, but then moved to Jungian analysis and finally to Catholicism. Roland, who wrote regularly to Alec while in India, remained devoted to his brother even though he considered him inordinately old-school. He did not admire the Bloomsbury atmosphere of Alec’s new home at Bradenham in Norfolk, a large estate with a Georgian house: ‘For me it was blindly conventional, in particular where the visual arts were concerned, and hopelessly provincial.’27 The prolifically gifted Lionel was a true polymath: psychiatrist, medical geneticist, mathematician and chess theorist who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of intellectual disability. According to Roland, he had been ‘endowed with a more clever and inventive mind than all the rest of the family put together [and] was happily enthralled in his study of Freud’. Beacus had run away to sea at an early age, trained as a cadet in the British India Steamship Company and served as an able seaman on three square-rigged ships. ‘He was in love with those seaworthy but fragile ships and with the forces of nature from whose clutches they had to survive. This life, he found, brought about an appreciable reward on his return home in the delights of fast cars and female company.’28 In an attempt to cure his ‘sea-fever’, he underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna. He wed Joy Newton in 1936, but before and after the marriage he was a famed Lothario. His most famous affair was with Dora Carrington, ten years older than he, whom he met in 1928. The two collaborated on the making of three short films. Their affair went sour because of his jealousy over the hold Lytton Strachey exerted

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upon her. Strachey despised Beacus: ‘his existence is a sordid insignificance which . . . opens up vistas in human pointlessness hitherto undreamt of’. Outwardly, both Roland and Beacus may have been sexual profligates, but Roland was never as callous as his younger brother. Despite his considerable reservations about Bradenham, Roland took refuge with Alec there. The treatment for his ulcer consisted of drinking pints of a kaolin suspension mixed with chloroform; he also had to adhere to a diet consisting mainly of porridge and boiled fish. During a visit to London to consult his doctors about the ulcer, Roland had a brief affair with Julia Strachey, the niece of Lytton Strachey, who had separated from her husband, the sculptor Stephen Tomlin. In 1932 the Hogarth Press had published her novel, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, which her publisher Virginia Woolf thought was ‘extraordinarily complete and sharp and individual’.29 In contrast to Valentine, Roland found Julia cheerful, light-hearted and amusing. Since the barriers between the Penroses had been erected by themselves, Roland could truthfully tell his wife: ‘Don’t think I am writing because of a new adventure. – No, there is no one between us.’30 No other person could be blamed for the imbroglio they had reached. Roland’s wording also suggests that he had slept with other women at about this time. Roland’s new sense of himself as a sexual being allowed him to explore pleasure in what was, for him, a new way. Valentine’s own view about sexual activity was much more constricted than her husband’s. This remained her credo: ‘It is difficult to believe that something sexual could reduce a loving human being to the rank of zero; and that instinct and pleasure could be more powerful gods than sincere love and tenderness.’31 In this passage from October 1934, she is reiterating the basis on which, as far as she was concerned, their marriage had been founded. She never really changed her mind about that issue, and, as a result, was dismayed that her husband might be intimate with other women. In May 1935, she asked Roland, ‘I would like to know frankly if Maguy [another acquaintance] has been your mistress or at least something along that line. It’s quite stupid but two or three persons pity me for being such a cuckold . . . No, I really don’t believe you’ve done that.’32 Roland had become sexually liberated from the confines of his relationship with Valentine. He was disturbed by her violent temper.

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Moreover, the couple no longer had shared objectives. All in all, he felt a free man, one who wanted to savour his newly found independence. He informed his wife on November 1934: ‘I am of the opinion that we would do well to formalize our situation.’ It is from respect and the affection I have for you that I want to see your life take the path that I know from the bottom of your heart you want. I know above all there is an impediment in you, like me, to the right to affirming the desire for liberty. You have a future, a mission that you must not neglect. It needs courage I know, but don’t let the hard things of the moment obstruct clearly seen objectives. When one has to do a painful operation, one does it because one sees beyond the suffering, and I know you often said to me you have no doubt about your path. Your attitude this summer was the proof . . . If by chance you change your opinion about Switzerland [to consult Jung] I will wait longer to see the result.33

Politely, he was suggesting they separate. In her reply in French, Valentine resorted to the formal vous instead of the usual tu: ‘When you find yourself in need of what love cannot give, of what no satisfaction can fulfill, of what art itself can only hint at, of what soothes all pain and gives meaning to every life, remember your only Valentine.’ She added a postscript: ‘Do what seems right to you.’34 A month later, she had changed her mind. She arrived in London to effect a reconciliation with her husband. From her room at the Thackeray Hotel in Great Russell Street opposite the British Museum, she wrote: Your letter [not extant] is a masterpiece of cruelty; if you were truly yourself, you wouldn’t be able to cause so much pain. But even that, it is for you that I offer it up, for you alone, who are still so dear to me. There is nothing in life or understanding that is impossible when someone is as devoted to you as I am. I understand you, Roland, even at this moment, I love you more than I love myself. Why do you hate me? . . . I shall always believe in you, through everything. Write to me tomorrow, I beg you, or come to me.35

A deep gulf had been opened up. The stressful nature of his marriage had taken its toll. Roland felt in danger of losing his way because,

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although he still felt attached to Valentine, he felt constrained by her, almost as if he were harnessed to her. As his ties to her loosened, the pain he had experienced from his ulcer abated. From January to August 1935, Roland resided at the flat he rented at 127 Rossmore Court, on the southern edge of Regent’s Park. He began painting again. The work of Jean Hélion and Wolfgang Paalen, both members of the Abstract-Creation group, inspired his new canvases. These two artists used flat, abstract shapes completely removed from figurative painting. Their canvases are filled with brightly coloured forms jockeying for the best vantage points from which to show themselves off. Roland’s own attempts to incorporate this style into his work resulted in some dramatic canvases from 1934–6, such as Oasis, in which he revisited the rich polychrome values he had employed in Monsters (Plate 5). The sheer exuberance of these canvases shows a remarkable turning point in Roland’s career as an artist. The poised but childlike shapes and their strong architectural elements display an artist unleashed from troubling preoccupations. Roland may have been experimenting with non-surrealist modes of representation, but under Paalen’s tutelage, in the surrealist way of assembling holdings of found objects, he began to collect small Oceanic artefacts. During that summer of 1935, Roland holidayed at Six-Fours-surMer near Toulon. He did not see Valentine, who was in the Pyrenees. In October he visited Valentine in Paris in order to bid her bon voyage when she left for another trip to India. The following spring, he sold Le Pouy. In response to a telegram Valentine sent in November 1935, upon arriving in Bombay – ‘GREATEST LOVE YOUR WIFE’36 – he braced himself to tell her: ‘These interminable discussions . . . are really useless. If two people do not have need of each other, which is evident in our life together, they will not become attached by discussion. I believe that rather than give up, you are waiting for what I am not able to give you.’ If Valentine was inhibited in pursuing her writing career, he was not: ‘I am absolutely passionate about my work. With all my activity I have not the time to be unhappy.’ He added, somewhat truculently: ‘Moreover my personal unhappiness is character building.’37 Two days later, he wrote again to inform her yet again that their marriage was over: ‘there are some psychological difficulties between

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us which counter the loving tendencies, and to which are added the differences of habitude and life which accent themselves, above all in living far from one another. With the best will in the world I see that it will never be possible to re-unite our lives together. What we must do, we need to do now and make an annulment. The age of joy is passed.’ In an attempt to soften the tough stance he was taking, he added: ‘You are always my wife who I love above all, and my affection and friendship for you will always remain intact . . . After all we have suffered, both of us, we must not at any price repeat the same errors of the past.’38 On 2 February 1936, Valentine, writing from India, reminisced about their early infatuation with surrealism: ‘I understand you are doing a lot of experiments. I would like to remind you what we together thought in the past of the surrealists; since the time long ago when we started following them from afar and then up close: their ideas in the point of view of art and literature are very interesting. Not all of them beautiful, far from it. But once we get something moving, we cannot not mix. Their opinions on life and their life realizations are sometimes beneath all. They have made instincts – and especially the sexual one – into objects of worship . . . You need a very, very great force when you frequent them. I shall tell you, having experienced it. You need a lot of discernment, more than elsewhere because precisely there are good sides.’39 Surrealism’s preoccupation with sexuality obviously disturbed Valentine; she was also worried that her husband, having become intrigued by the movement, was in danger of being swallowed up by it.40 This letter was cautionary. On 24 June 1936, she was even more explicit about their differences: Don’t tell me that my ‘mysticism’ tears us apart. It’s because you removed me away from you without pity that I went higher, because you proved to be a ghost of narrow human joy . . . Either your pride, or your regret, do not admit what you know is real . . . I am neither a liar, nor a coward. But can only validate that which gives forth a true odour, like a truly beautiful poem . . .41

Valentine’s propensity to tell the truth, painful as it might be at times, had resulted, she observed, in few people loving her. And that penchant had caused her husband to distance himself from her.

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Meanwhile, Valentine had to face the fact that Galarza was not willing to meet with her in the absence of her husband. He informed her in February 1936: ‘to discuss separately [the pursuit of] Wisdom, in the present situation, would lead you astray practically and acknowledge an unfortunate misunderstanding.’42 The contrary routes of husband and wife can be glimpsed in Valentine with Cat (1932) (Plate 6). This canvas displays Roland in what was for him a traditional mode of portrait-painting: his wife is shown with a cat on her lap. First appearances here are deceiving. Valentine is dressed in blue; the small portal at the right shows a clear blue sky. The use of blue and various shades of brown give this canvas a sombre, icy feel. Valentine stares into the distance, lost in thought; the cat appears angry, anxious to leap away at a moment’s notice. Valentine seems to have no genuine interest in the animal, and the implication is that she is divorced from nature’s primal instincts as represented by her feline companion: the woman is too lost in her own inner world to pay attention to anything outside herself. Also, the portal is small, and this may further suggest her sexual and psychic remoteness. Distance is also the predominant feeling in Winged Domino (1938) (Plate 7), a later surrealist portrait of Valentine. The soft blue on the woman’s face and neck emphasise her detachment from human existence. The dove, the woodpecker and the butterflies perched on her hair, eyes and mouth further demonstrate that ordinary human nature finds it impossible to penetrate her. Moreover, the rose with its menacing thorns suggests the woman’s prickly nature. She is a Sleeping Beauty figure who will never be kissed back to life by any prince. Whilst Roland was suffering from an ulcer, Valentine had endured both piercing headaches and deep depressions. As a result, she was often exceptionally irritable. In reality, she was an extremely disappointed woman who felt that her husband had wronged her. Valentine had told Roland at the time they married that she was physically attracted to women. She had slept with Bertha Penrose at Cassis, and there are frequent homoerotic references in her poems. In reality and despite Bertha Penrose’s testimony, Valentine was asexual and desired to experience close friendships with her husband and, later, with women such as Alice Paalen, née Rahon, with whom she probably had an affair (Fig. 27).43

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Figure 27. Alice Paalen (right) and Valentine Penrose.

In a long letter to Roland of 7 October 1931, written before their trip to India, Valentine had attempted to state her position. Her letter is quoted here at length because it provides an excellent guide on her thought processes and how she perceived her situation with her husband. My dear Roland . . . As long as we choose this life, in which we have little support and are surrounded by a thousand demands on our attention, our intellectual life will be base. We are not the sort of powerful minds that are so imposing that others are compelled to leave them in peace. Other beings will not be silenced before us, and the thousand noises of the world will not be silenced either. Cares and material concerns clamour for our attention every instant – and don’t ever tell me that this is of no importance for intellectual life. For me, at least, just opening one’s eyes produces a state that is very much opposed to peace and work. One must either give up thinking beautiful thoughts altogether, or else leave all the material details to those whose job it is to attend to them. For that, it is best to be as materially unencumbered as possible.

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Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist Moreover, I know that you understand nothing of what is happening, that you still think everything is fine (in appearance, at least, because you must have thought about what I am saying here) . . . It is so stupid, to think that money, intelligence, nervous and (for me) physical strength are being wasted each day to follow a path that runs counter to the one that is rightly ours. Let’s get off of that path, at least. So that our days might be calm, as they used to be, between you, and me, and the long hours of work free from idiotic thoughts, every moment, that we have to go do this or that, or that we have to keep silent or risk having the whole thing blow up. . . . Domestic worries come out like worms from each possession – the more one possesses, the more of them there are, for people like us who, at heart, are not all that interested. You nonetheless have enough money to provide us with a life that is beautiful and intelligent, rather than one that is dragged by the power of things – inert things, which don’t come to you, but draw you to them . . . Let’s go on tolerating that which is inevitable. But don’t persist in trying to convince me that I’m wrong, or in telling me that all is well, that this is the life we are meant to lead, and that it is good for our souls, our work, and intellectual growth. The sooner it’s finished, the better! I would give up my spiritual beliefs (maybe?) in exchange for you and my love for you (Well, perhaps not, I don’t know) . . . Try to believe me and to understand, and try to hurry up about it. In any case, I love you very very much, and can’t help but believe that one day we will at last have a bit of respite, a bit of the true clarity that means that all the rest is unimportant in comparison. But we’re not there yet. All we can do is try to slowly extricate ourselves from the wall that has toppled down on us, causing us to struggle without being able to get out. I embrace you, and want to have confidence that together we’ll find either an example or a solid vision of what must be best for us – now, or some day soon. Your Valentine

Valentine’s prose is baroque, cumbersome and often repetitive. Basically, she is pleading for a life removed from the ordinary cares of the world. She wants herself and Roland to be closeted off and, in the resulting space, she is sure they will find happiness and contentment. She reminds Roland that he is a rich man, who has the ability to provide for them both. What Valentine does not say directly, but

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strongly implies, is that she does not wish her husband to stray into any kind of public forum. She wants him for herself. In yearning for a cocoon-like existence, Valentine does not seem to think it relevant that Roland no longer wishes to conduct his life according to her prohibitions. She also seems to be unaware (or unmindful) of one aspect of her husband’s character: he attempted to be tolerant of her changing moods, but he was also a person of a steely turn of mind when he felt he was being taken for granted. Roland and Valentine were separated physically in 1935 and 1936, but a final decision about the future of their marriage was once again postponed. On this issue, they remained indecisive. Meanwhile, Roland had continued his eager backing of surrealist activities – this had long been a bone of contention between husband and wife. Roland realised just how committed he was to surrealism when, back in England, he became uncomfortably aware that London had become ‘foreign’ to him: ‘I had neglected to keep in touch with wearers of old school and college ties, and those friends who remained were worshippers of the golden age of Georgian rather than Victorian grandeur, which to them still seemed inexhaustible and supreme in its prowess and elegance. Their belief in a gentle liberal reform contrasted inevitably with the surrealist revolution which was becoming the impetus behind all my hopes and actions.’44 Just as Dada had been a reaction to the horrors unleashed by the Great War, surrealism’s propensity to enter the terrain of nightmare and illogicality anticipated World War II. Roland, like other artists and writers of his generation, saw the world as spinning out of control, and recognised surrealism as an art form that captured that foreboding sense of free fall. Throughout the remainder of his life Roland remained an active proponent of surrealism. However, he was never completely certain of his status as an artist within that movement because of his usual apolitical attitude. Wrongly, he undervalued his work. Valentine once overheard Ernst and Éluard discussing Roland’s art, about which Ernst expressed a very negative opinion. ‘If he is so hopeless, why do you encourage him?’ the kind-hearted Éluard asked. ‘It is always good to have rich friends,’ replied Ernst the opportunist.45 Valentine’s hatred of Ernst might have led her to make this revelation, but she

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had also become convinced that surrealism was a virtually insurmountable barrier in her relationship with her husband. In any event, in relating the anecdote to Roland, she was attempting to warn him about false friends and, at the same time, to wound him. Roland’s paintings, sculpture and collages are of high quality. Moreover, they provide a guide to the inner workings of his mind, of the struggles he experienced. As such, they are excellent surrealistic works in which the world of the unconscious is depicted. Contradictory image-symbols reside side by side because, he recognized that the individual human mind is a repository of unresolved conflicts. Unlike Ernst, Roland never earned his livelihood as an artist. He obviously did not need to, but recognised that all his other artist friends had to do so. Although he painted well, since he was not compelled to make a living as an artist, he made a distinction between himself as an amateur artist and many of his friends as professional ones. From that vantage point, he would also have been sympathetic to Ernst’s point of view. Early on in his career as an artist, Roland had wistfully reflected ‘that I would never attain the stature in the arts of my brilliant surrealist friends’. If he could not be a great creator, he could use his considerable abilities to encourage others of greater talent. In so doing, he would ‘bring about a wider appreciation of the poets and painters who had inspired me’. He would dedicate himself to making the arts ‘more accessible, more appreciated and more an integral part of life.’46 Roland did not expect to find fame as an artist, but, he recognised, he had to paint: ‘I believe poetic expression to be one of the most important human activities, because I find this expression easier for me in the sphere of painting rather than in the other branches of the arts and finally because of a desire to create.’47 From childhood he had been entranced by the world of art, and had wanted to enter its terrain by whatever means he could. In the mid-thirties, although Roland was deeply unsure of his relationship with Valentine, he remained certain of the profound ties art, in the form of surrealism, exerted on him (Fig. 28).

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Figure 28. Roland, Paris, 1932, photographed by André Rogé.

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Chapter Six

‘Let’s Do Something’ (1935–1936)

In Paris on the rue de Tournon in June 1935, Roland and Éluard chanced upon precocious, intense nineteen-year-old David Gascoyne, who had recently completed his Short Survey of Surrealism. Éluard introduced the two Englishmen, who ‘got talking’, and, as Roland recalled, Gascoyne ‘said to me “It is extraordinary, but in London they don’t seem to know anything about the excitement that is going on here in Paris [in contemporary art, especially surrealism] – why is that? Let’s do something about it.” So I said, “Let’s do something about it indeed.” ’1 Gascoyne, who was born in Harrow, was the eldest of the three sons of Leslie Noel Gascoyne, a bank clerk, and his wife Winifred. Gascoyne grew up in England and Scotland and attended Salisbury Cathedral School and Regent Street Polytechnic in London. He spent part of the early 1930s in Paris. His first book, Roman Balcony and Other Poems, was published in 1932, when he was only sixteen. A novel, Opening Day, was published the following year (Fig. 29).2 When Gascoyne arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1933 he was introduced to the artist Julian Trevelyan, who remembered Gascoyne’s ‘great beautiful eyes opening wider and wider when I showed him photographs [of work] by Hieronymous Bosch for the first time.’3 Through Trevelyan, Gascoyne met the English printmaker S. W. (Bill) Hayter, whose Atelier 17 studio was a gathering place for many young British artists. There he encountered Hélion, Ernst and Dalí. Soon, Gascoyne had become a close friend of Éluard and a regular at the Café de la Place Blanche, another surrealist meeting-place. Gascoyne had returned to Paris in 1935 to finish work on Survey.

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Figure 29. Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, David Gascoyne.

The decision to organise the International Surrealist Exhibition with Gascoyne marked a decisive turn in Roland’s life, in that he began to allow his role as an apostle of modernism to overshadow his career as an artist. For the remainder of his life, these two sides would struggle to co-exist. Early in 1936, Roland and Valentine, now precariously reunited, moved to 21 Downshire Hill, a large, elegant Georgian house in Hampstead. Their new home had an excellent pedigree: Constable had once used the upper rooms as a studio. Settling there assisted Roland in his determination to promote surrealism. Many members of the avant-garde, including Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Paul Nash, whom Roland came to know only in 1935, populated this area of London (Fig. 30). (In 1936 Roland, Nash and the editor of the Architectural Review were the judges of the magazine’s ‘Holiday Surrealism’ competition, which aimed to discover the best spontaneous examples of surrealism in English holiday resorts.)

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Figure 30. Downshire Hill.

The Heath, including Parliament Hill, gave to Hampstead an arcadian splendour, almost as if this portion of north London had been sliced away from the tribulations of urban life. In the previous century Byron and Keats, as well as Constable, had settled there. The chance of still enjoying a pleasant mix of city and country life attracted, at the beginning of the twentieth century, writers as varied as H. G. Wells, John Masefield, J. B. Priestley, John Galsworthy and D. H. Lawrence. From 1933 to 1938, Hamsptead became a truly European modernist fortress when Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Walter Gropius and Sigmund and Anna Freud chose to live there. Despite the storm clouds gathering over Europe, a buoyant optimism filled the artists and writers residing there in the early thirties. Herbert Read had moved to Hamsptead in 1933. Briefly, Henry Moore lent him his living quarters; Herbert and his second wife, Margaret (Ludo), later moved to the nearby Mall Studios. Having returned to London from Edinburgh, Read, in his quiet but intense way, resumed his role as the leading spokesman for modernism, especially in the visual arts.

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Read’s gentle, unobtrusive personality appealed to Roland, although ultimately, he recognised, Read could never approach ‘a wholehearted union with the essentially French way of thinking of the surrealists, although he found much in common.’4 Moreover, Read was ‘an appreciative spectator rather than one wholly involved’5 with surrealism, because he was strongly attracted to abstraction and was a proponent of the notion that organic unity was necessary for any work of art. Read had been born in Yorkshire, to parents of modest means. In dress and manner he was very much a traditionalist. Despite outward appearances, he was a man consumed by a passionate devotion to all forms of contemporary art, although he was essentially a champion of English art. He liked both abstract and representational methods of expression, but was sometimes made uncomfortable by the demands made on him by these often opposing forces. He could also be unconventional: he left his unhappy first marriage, and absconded from Edinburgh to London with Ludo. Like Roland, he was gentle and polite in his dealings with others, but when roused he could become a fierce opponent (Fig. 31).

Figure 31. Herbert Read.

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Read’s pivotal role as the chief spokesperson for modernism in England came at a heavy price. Read thought of himself as a poet, and he found great happiness in writing modernist Romantic poetry in the vein of someone like Yeats. He knew that he could not reach the heights of his good friend, T. S. Eliot, the pre-eminent classical modernist poet, but writing verse mattered deeply to him. Like Roland, though, he sacrificed his creativity in order to enact the often thankless role of promoter of modernism. As Roland put it, he and Read shared ‘the same missionary spirit . . . and the same desire to change to the best of our ability, the sad state of the arts and society.’6 Moore, strong-willed in action but reticent in speech, was Read’s close friend. It was at the insistence of Wolfgang Paalen that Roland introduced himself to the sculptor,7 who was already beginning to experiment with surrealism – as was the dapper, sometimes excitable but deeply intellectual Nash, already firmly established as one of England’s premier artists, and whose Great War paintings Roland held in high esteem. The two became friends. Another friendship begun at this time was with the documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, at that time a painter. More than once Roland encountered him, immaculately and correctly dressed, carrying a beaten-up suitcase. When asked what was inside it, he had a ready-made answer: ‘Pandemonium.’8 Well before the first formal meeting of the organising committee of the surrealist exhibition was held on 6 April 1936, Roland had prepared the groundwork. His closeness to Breton and Éluard meant that the exhibition received their support, thus assuring its success. Roland also provided £200 in working capital. Although Penrose, Read and Nash found it difficult to find genuine English surrealists, they managed to persuade some artists that they were, unknown to themselves, of that persuasion. Eileen Agar was somewhat surprised by her conversion: having been an ‘artist exploring highly personal combinations of form and content’, she recalled, ‘the next day . . . I was a surrealist.’9 Both David Gascoyne and Herbert Read insisted, however, that artists like William Blake and writers like Lewis Carroll showed that England was a natural breeding ground for surrealism. Among the anointed English artists in addition to Roland, Agar, Nash, Moore

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and Gascoyne were Edward Burra, Cecil Collins, Mervyn Evans, Graham Sutherland, Charles Howard, S. W. Hayter and Humphrey Jennings. Another English artist deemed surrealistic by Roland and Read was Julian Trevelyan; he was surprised that he met their standards while Francis Bacon did not.10 However, unlike Paris, where young English artists could not avoid becoming aware of the claims of surrealism, London was not receptive to this movement, although well before the exhibition, Paul Nash and Henry Moore had introduced surrealistic elements into their work. In 1936, England was certainly not bereft of knowledge of surrealism, despite the fact that it aroused strong xenophobic feelings. Eugène Jolas’s English- language review, transition, was sympathetic to the movement; although published in Paris, it was readily available in London. In 1932, Breton had edited a special number of the English journal This Quarter. Giorgio de Chirico had a show at Tooth’s in 1928; the Zwemmer Gallery held a Dalí exhibition in 1934. At the Mayor Gallery in 1933, the works on display included surrealistically inspired pieces by Miró, Ernst and Picabia as well as Nash and Moore. P. G. Konody in the Observer was dismissive of this exhibition; the objects on display were ‘practical jokes’ because they substituted ‘conceptive or craftsmanly freakishness’ for the ‘sincerity and dignity’ of abstract art.11 Kenneth Clark claimed that a slightly later exhibition of Ernst’s collages at the Mayor left him unmoved: Ernst, according to him, had not ‘felt his symbols strongly enough’; as such, they remained too personal and ‘insult our senses by the mode of delivery’.12 The most coherent attempt before 1936 to find a home for surrealism in Britain was the short-lived Unit One, spearheaded by Paul Nash. In the Listener of 24 September 1932, he cryptically stated: ‘a marriage has been arranged – and will shortly take place’. By ‘a marriage’ Nash meant that the members of this group did not have to share similar artistic expressions; they would become ‘a unit: a solid combination standing by each other and defending their beliefs’. In addition to Nash and Moore, Edward Wadsworth, Edward Burra, John Armstrong and Tristan Hillier were very open to introducing surrealistic elements into their work; the abstractedly-minded Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth were not. The group soon fell apart.

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The preparation of the 1936 exhibition involved a great deal of maneuvering behind the scenes. Squat, fat, baby-faced, on occasion short-tempered but often dapper and lively, the Belgian composer, artist and collector E. L. T. Mesens had selected a large group of Magrittes (he had a substantial collection of his fellow countryman’s work). Since most of the surrealists lived in France, Breton and Éluard were supposed to choose the bulk of the exhibition. However, the two were not on good terms because the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, a Trotskyite, disapproved so completely of Éluard’s support of Stalin’s regime. The actual selection was done by the poet and graphic artist Georges Hugnet and by Man Ray, working under Breton’s supervision. Meanwhile, Roland shuttled back and forth between London and Paris to make sure that all the cumbersome arrangements were being put into place. Twenty-seven of the sixty-nine artists were British. The relatively high proportion of British entries displeased Breton; he felt that their work, more indicative of various modernist tendencies, was not surrealistic enough. Roland received tremendous assistance in particular from Éluard, who likely convinced Picasso to allow eleven of his paintings to be exhibited. The Spanish artist, who admired English furniture, tailoring and nineteenth-century paintings, would have seen the London exhibition as the successor to Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions, where his work had been prominently displayed.13 Things did not go smoothly. Two days before the opening, a packing case from Copenhagen containing ten paintings by Wilhelm Freddie and the Argentinian Leonor Fini was seized by Customs. Freddie’s The Fallen in the World War showed the naked, mutilated bodies of dead soldiers, whereas Fini’s Worship Exhibitionism depicted a group of naked young men dancing in the twilight. After a meeting with a member of the organising committee, eight of the canvases were allowed through on condition that the two disputed entries were returned to Denmark immediately. The Surrealist Exhibition, which commenced on 11 June 1936 at New Burlington Gardens, was re-hung at the last moment by Mesens, who was staying at Downshire Hill. ‘Whenever possible,’ Roland recalled, he made ‘contrasts of colour, dimensions and content, so as to produce, by shock tactics, the maximum of excitement’.14

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The re-hanging of the exhibition, which consisted of 392 paintings, sculptures and Oceanic, African and American objects,15 had been done at the insistence of Breton after he arrived from Paris; thus the catalogue, prepared in advance, bore no relation to the actual order of the items in the exhibition space.16 The paintings were hung in double or triple rows, large works alternating with smaller ones. The viewer often had to step forward and then back as he viewed the entries. Ethnographic sculptures and objets trouvés were interspersed throughout. The disruption caused to a museum-goer’s normal gallery experience was profound because ordinary expectations were so completely defeated. Any preconceived idea of a ‘normal’ museum experience was deliberately and provocatively challenged (Fig. 32). New Burlington Gardens, situated between Bond Street and the Royal Academy, was a prosaic-looking building. Those attending the exhibition took a lift up to the third floor and emerged to an eyeopening spectacle. As Eileen Agar recalled, images as arresting as Miró’s giant Carnival of the Harlequins, a menacing rendition of green, yellow and blue insects by Masson, and Ernst’s L’Eléphant Célèbes competed for the viewer’s attention. On a sweltering day, 1,150 people crowded into the Galleries to hear Breton’s opening speech. The Frenchman, his Roman head slightly tipped back and somewhat leonine in both appearance and manner,17 was clad in green and smoked a green pipe; the long flowing hair of his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, was dyed green (Fig. 33). Sheila Legge, the ‘surrealist phantom’, walked through the assemblage, dressed in a long white satin gown; her head was enclosed in a veil of roses. Her costume also consisted of a coral-red belt and shoes, black silk stockings and long rubber gloves. She held a dummy leg in one hand and a pork chop in the other. Since the rooms were stiflingly hot, she soon had to discard the chop (Fig. 34).18 Dylan Thomas offered boiled string in tea cups, enquiring, ‘Do you want it weak or strong?’ The newspapers were intrigued by the strange events of that day. Traffic was stopped along the length of Bond Street as far Piccadilly Circus. Meret Oppenheim’s now notoriously famous Fur Covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon was on show. According to Joseph Bard, T. S. Eliot, when taken on a tour of the exhibition, seemed pruriently interested in this object as a ‘super-objective correlative of the female sex’.19

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Figure 32. Small Room 5, International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936. Man Ray’s Lovers (1936), also known as L’Heure de la

Observatoire, is above the door. Célèbes is at the right.

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Figure 33. André Breton at the International Surrealist Exhibition, photographed by Bill Brandt, 1936. Roland’s Captain Cook’s Last Voyage (1936–7) is to Breton’s right. Herbert Read is standing behind the sculpture.

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Figure 34. Sheila Legge, the Surrealist phantom, at Trafalgar Square, 1936.

Another convert to surrealism, Julian Trevelyan, found the exhibition confusing but exciting: ‘It was dominated by several large canvasses of Picasso, already deep in his Minotaur legends, and by some great jungles of Max Ernst. There was also a powerful picture by Magritte . . . and a huge pair of lips across a landscape by Man Ray. There were arrangements of objects by acute schizophrenics and luminous little pictures by Klee.’20 Some out-of-the-way happenings made a visit to the exhibition, until its closing on 4 July, an even more bizarre experience than the organisers had anticipated. According to the Daily Telegraph, the composer William Walton hung a kipper on a hook protruding from a sculpture by Miró (Object 228). The Catalan was delighted by this addition, but the fish eventually had to be removed because of its rank smell. As Duncan Grant was leaving the exhibition, Paul Nash asked him to put it outside. In his talk on 19 June, Herbert Read, while standing uneasily on a spring sofa, shed his usual reticence and defended surrealism elegantly and fiercely. ‘Do not judge this movement kindly. It is not just

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another amusing stunt. It is defiant – the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilization to want to save a shred of respectability.’ Read proclaimed the dawn of a new age, but the painter Cecil Collins, who was an exhibitor, thought to himself: ‘No, it isn’t. It’s the sunset.’ Even after the exhibition opened, the English surrealists squabbled. The often-reproduced photographs of Roland, Dalí, Mesens, Agar, Read and some of the others do not include Paul Nash. When Éluard telephoned Eileen to ask her to come down to sit for the group photographs at the Burlington Galleries, Nash was lunching with her. (The two were in the midst of an affair, and Nash was jealous of Éluard, whom he suspected of having designs on Agar.) Incensed that he had not been contacted by Rupert Lee, the chair of the organising committee, Nash refused to accompany her to the sitting (Fig. 35).

Figure 35. Group photograph of some of the organisers, International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936. Standing left to right: Rupert Lee, Ruthven Todd, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, E. L. T. Mesens, George Reavey and Hugh Sykes Williams. Seated left to right: Diana Lee, Nusch Éluard, Eileen Agar, Sheila Legge and an unidentified woman.

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Salvador Dalí was, not surprisingly, the star turn of the exhibition. An astute businessman, the Spaniard had a concurrent show at the Lefevre Gallery and refused to allow his best work to be shown at the exhibition. On 1 July, Dalí, ever the supreme exhibitionist, gave the final talk: ‘Authentic Paranoid Phantoms’. He wore a diving suit decorated with plasticine hands and a radiator cap on top of the helmet; he had a jewelled dagger in his belt, and held a pair of Irish Wolfhounds on leads. The collector Edward James had taken Dalí to Siebe & Gorman, the makers of hard-hat diving suits. The salesman took the prospective rental seriously and asked Dalí to what depth he intended to venture. The Spaniard replied: ‘To the depths of the subconscious!’ The helmet was old and extremely heavy – it had to be tightly secured because if it fell off it could break the wearer’s neck. Ruthven Todd, the Scots poet and artist who was the exhibition’s assistant secretary, screwed the wing nuts on the helmet as tight as he could. Dalí then began speaking, but the heat in the poorly ventilated Galleries began to overwhelm him. Roland, in the first row, noticed that the speaker was turning puce. Then Dalí called for help by asking James, who was acting as his translator, to remove the helmet. Gascoyne was dispatched to find a spanner. James decided that the billiard cue the artist was using as a pointer would be more useful. He prised open the threaded front port (window) of the helmet by levering the billiard cue to unscrew the wing nuts that secured the port. Meanwhile, Gascoyne employed the spanner to loosen the screws at the base of the helmet. At the same time, the hounds tangled their leads in Dalí’s legs. Todd finally managed to free Dalí, who finished his talk in a condition of ‘combined paranoia and claustrophobia’.21 Earlier, there were tamer events. On 16 June Breton spoke again. He remained furious that a painting by De Chirico displayed the flag of Mussolini’s Italy.22 On 24 June, Éluard, having made sure that Breton had left London, crossed the channel to give a talk entitled ‘L’Evidence poétique’; Hugh Syke Davies spoke on ‘Biology and Surrealism’. There were readings of French poetry by Éluard, and of English verses. The exhibition caused the sensation to which its organisers aspired. It certainly made the English aware of a new force in the art world, and, in many ways, was an antidote to the growing black clouds in Europe. The only favourable newspaper accounts were by

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John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly in the Evening Standard.23 The Daily Worker was soberly unimpressed: ‘The general impression one gets is that here is a group of young people who haven’t got the guts to tackle anything seriously.’24 All kinds of people attended this landmark exhibition, including ‘old men from Lloyd’s cricket ground, young men from Henley and Mayfair damsels from garden parties’.25 The painter Augustus John, once the embodiment of English bohemianism, walked out in disgust. Cinemagoers who did not make it to the exhibition saw the coverage of the event on the Movietone News. All in all, the exhibition was, as Eileen Agar lamented, ‘something of a Nine Days’ Wonder – the brilliance and momentum and intensity of it were impossible to sustain’.26 Nevertheless, Roland had done everything in his power to propel the movement forward. His large sculpture, Captain Cook’s Last Voyage (Plate 8) was an inspired contribution. The torso of a woman, based on a Cnidian Aphrodite, stands on a baseboard shaped in profile like a boat. The woman’s body fills the wire globe surrounding her; the stump of her outstretched arm penetrates the surface of the globe near the Arctic. She has discovered a way of releasing herself from oppression. When discussing the object, Roland pointed at the torso and remarked, ‘This is at heart of what we all seek.’27 By that, he meant that this woman represented the beauty that all persons seek in their lives. Captain Cook’s voyages had been a series of expeditions intended to enhance the prosperity of England by exploiting foreign territories; Roland’s sculpture can be read as a critique of the colonial enterprise. The British Empire is on the verge of destruction: subjected peoples are about to rid themselves of the yoke of empire. On his last voyage, James Cook was killed in Hawaii, and Roland’s use of the adjective ‘last’ embodies his hope that the days of imperialism were coming to an end. In 1936, Roland felt that positive forces were about to be unleashed – forces that would change the world for the better.

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Chapter Seven

The Modern Colossus (1936–1938)

In July 1936, Éluard pressed Roland and Valentine to join him and Nusch at Mougins on the Riviera. Many other surrealists would be there, he promised. So would Picasso. (Roland had met Picasso, probably very briefly, two months before, at the Exposition surréaliste d’objets held at the Ratton gallery from 22–29 May 1936. In the Visitor’s Book Roland’s signature appears immediately below that of Picasso’s, and above Éluard’s; the poet presumably introduced Roland and Picasso.)1 Roland accepted the invitation, shipped his Ford V8 to France, and he and Valentine motored south at the beginning of August. Other guests included the American artist and photographer Man Ray, the poet René Char, and Christian and Yvonne Zervos, the publishers of Cahiers d’Art, who were at work on the second volume of their catalogue of Picasso’s work. Thirty-year-old Dora Maar, then near the beginning of her sixyear-long affair with Picasso, dropped in occasionally. She was born Henriette Theodora Markovitch in Tours, the daughter of a Croatian architect, but grew up in Argentina where her father practised. On the terrace of Les Deux Magots, a café in Saint-Germain-desPrés, Picasso had noticed her in conversation with Éluard and asked his friend to introduce them. Maar, who spoke Spanish fluently, had worked as a set photographer for the filmmaker Jean Renoir, but she was already known as a photographer and painter with a propensity to capture the incongruous and the grotesque. Picasso was fifty-four – nineteen years older than Roland – when they met. He was already considered one of the greatest artists of the century, having produced central modernist works during his Blue Period (1901–4), Rose Period (1905–7), an African-inspired Period (1908–9), Analytic Cubist Period (1909–12), Synthetic Cubist Period

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(1912–19) and Classical Period (1919–30). This schematisation of Picasso’s career fails to encapsulate his ability to transcend all manner of categorisation. In addition, he had produced a number of works that could legitimately be called surrealist. Picasso’s protean talents brought him enormous financial rewards, and his personality matched his reputation. He dramatised every aspect of his existence, and then allowed those experiences to find their way into his work. He was perfectly attuned to his extraordinary, often seemingly supernatural talents. Just as his genius towered over others, he was larger than life in his dealings with his fellow mortals. By turns boisterous, charming, overbearing, sympathique, haughty, effusively friendly and supremely caustic, he was a man who embodied the grand emotions he elicited from those who admired his works of art. Whether or not Picasso could be labelled a surrealist, Roland admired no other artist – living or dead – more than the Spaniard. Like Breton before him, he stood back in amazement at the fertility of Picasso’s riotous imagination. The ‘long days passed’, Roland fondly recalled, ‘with continuous delight undermined only by the sinister news of fighting in Spain which caused us all, especially Picasso, agonised misgivings’.2 The centre of attention at Mougins was, of course, Picasso, ‘dressed in a striped sailor’s vest and shorts’. He clowned, made impromptu portraits and, in general, held court as the small group’s monarch. Daily life consisted of swimming, sunbathing and beachcombing.3 All in all, Roland remembered this sojourn as ‘an unforgettable dream of marvels’.4 Here, Roland’s memory was extremely faulty. In most of the photographs from this visit in which she appears, Valentine looks careworn. The Penroses obviously remained uneasy with each other. Moreover, Roland was at the wheel of his Ford when there was a collision on the road from Cannes to Mougins; no passenger was injured except Picasso, who, having been flung violently against the side of the car, broke several ribs. Roland blamed the other driver for ‘coming towards us on the wrong side of the road’.5 Roland was deeply chagrined by this incident. He had, after all, inadvertently almost killed his hero. The event was so traumatic that he later tried to erase it from his memory.6 For him, it was if the incident had never occurred. In fact, he later claimed that he first met Picasso the year before: in his autobiography, Scrap Book, he

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states that Éluard took him to Picasso’s studio in the rue des GrandAugustins in 1935.7 In fact, Picasso did not move into that studio until January 1937. Roland learned more about the dire happenings in Spain during his meetings with Picasso. Christian Zervos had determined to visit Spain to investigate reports that left-wing extremists were destroying works of art and vandalising churches. He suspected that this was fascist propaganda, but wanted to obtain evidence to support this conviction. As they parted at Mougins in the summer of 1936, Roland volunteered to accompany him so that he could return to London with an eyewitness account of what was really going on.8 Roland felt that surrealist art should significantly change the political consciousness of those who looked at it. His involvement with the exhibition had certainly raised his concern with the degenerating state of Europe. He must have felt that as a non-combatant he would be fighting the best way he could on behalf of the Republicans by investigating the charges against them. David Gascoyne, who lunched at 21 Downshire Hill on 13 October, was startled to learn that Roland and Valentine were travelling to Spain. During that visit, he noticed the lack of harmony between husband and wife. He characterised Valentine as ‘a rapt, dark, quiet woman with an occasional expression of bad temper, pre-occupied and seldom speaking unless she had something to say’. Gascoyne felt he could never establish any genuine ‘communication in this house, with its soft carpets and lights and painting’.9 Gascoyne missed his train, and so stayed overnight with the Penroses. When at breakfast the next day the subject turned to Rimbaud, Valentine used the occasion to insult her husband’s taste in art. ‘How well I understand Rimbaud,’ she announced, ‘and his hatred of perfection. That is what is the matter here.’ As if jealous of them, she then nodded at the paintings on the wall. ‘[A]ll these pictures. I should like to take a piece of chalk and scribble on them all.’ Valentine then changed the subject by suggesting to Gascoyne that he travel to Spain with her and Roland: ‘You will feel that you are alive out there. Here, everything is unreal.’10 The young man decided to take the plunge. In order to obtain safe-conduct passes, Roland and Valentine had earlier joined Fenner Brockway’s Independent Labour Party, which

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had strong links with the United Front in Cataluña. The Penroses, the Zervoses and Gascoyne met up in Paris after obtaining their visas from the Catalonian People’s Bureau; they took a train to Toulouse, where they boarded a plane to Barcelona on 23 October. Their hotel was at the top of the Ramblas, near the Plaza de Cataluña. The splendidly ostentatious Gaudí buildings did not attract much notice from Roland during this visit. ‘The Ramblas were’, he recalled, ‘thronged with excited crowds, day and night, and endless processions of innumerable trade unions, including the newlyformed Union of Prostitutes.’11 Roland had a brief meeting with the anarchist Emma Goldman. He was deeply moved by witnessing the funeral of Buenaventura Durruti, the anarchist leader who had been killed in Madrid. The Plaza Cataluña was filled to the ‘tree tops with mourners; they covered lamp-posts and statues in their determination to take part in the ceremony.’12 Roland and the Zervoses gathered sufficient information to contribute a chapter to the book Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries. They travelled to Valencia, Vic, Gerona, Lérida and Tarragona in addition to Barcelona and its suburbs. They came to the conclusion that ‘in spite of the provocations of the insurgents . . . not a single monument of real value, not a single work of art had suffered irreparable damage’.13 Before leaving London, Roland wrote to Picasso offering to do whatever he could for him in his native country. The Spaniard requested that he visit his mother and sister in their flat in the centre of Barcelona. One underlying impetus for Roland’s trip to Spain may have been to give his friendship with Picasso a more solid footing; he might also have been attempting to make up to Picasso for the automobile accident. At the apartment of Picasso’s sister, Lola Vilató, the Penroses and David Gascoyne met the octogenarian Maria Picasso y López, who had lost touch with her son and was worried that he might be apprehensive about her safety in the strife-torn city. There, Roland saw a collection of work by his idol. Although the apartment was almost in darkness, it was still possible to view many early canvases by Picasso, including Science and Charity (1896), in which a physician sits at the bedside of a dying mother. The old woman, waving her hands in the air, told many anecdotes. One was about a drawing of a dead pigeon that Picasso’s father had

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begun and that the rascally young son had surreptitiously completed. At one point, the elderly lady took her visitors to a window at the back of the apartment: ‘It’s only today,’ she lamented, ‘that I have been able to open this after so many days [because] the smoke and stench from the convent [across the way, having] been set on fire, nearly asphyxiated us all.’14 On his way back from Spain, Roland stopped over in Paris, but he did not attempt to get in touch with Picasso to give a first-hand report of his trip.15 He may have thought he did not know him well enough; he may still have been smarting over the car accident. In March 1937, six months later, Roland wrote to Picasso from London about the embarrassing issue of the painter’s medical expenses and the resulting insurance claim. The real purpose of the letter, however, was to ask for an audience. He did not mention it, but he wanted to track down Femme nue couchée au soleil sur la plage, a painting of a female bather stretched out in the sun (Fig. 36).

Figure 36. Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée au soleil sur la plage, 1932.

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When he saw it illustrated in Cahiers d’Art, this magical picture had left him with a ‘longing to see and if possible own the original’.16 Accompanied by Éluard, Roland visited Picasso in 1937 at his new studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins in order to open negotiations to acquire this canvas. Picasso could be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, but on this occasion he was gracious. Yes; he would part with the painting. But they would have to fetch it from Boisgeloup, Picasso’s country property in Normandy. Within a few minutes of the request being made, Marcel the chauffeur was summoned and Roland, Éluard, Nusch, Dora, the artist’s fifteen-year-old son Paulo and Picasso himself climbed into a large vintage Hispano and set out for Boisgeloup. There was much to see at this retreat: the stables where many sculptures had been constructed, stacks of paintings in the upstairs rooms and an entrance hall dominated by an enormous hippopotamus skull. From the reproduction, Roland expected the painting to be large; it turned out to be small (33 × 40.8 cm). Nevertheless, his enchantment remained intact. ‘I had found my dream painting, my first acquisition of the great painter’s work, and thanking Picasso profusely we all returned to Paris in the Hispano at great speed.’ Picasso may have readily accepted Penrose’s offer because he had been insulted when the canvas had been rejected by his dealer, Paul Rosenberg: ‘Non, je refuse d’avoir des trous de cul dans ma galerie’ (I refuse to have any arse-holes in my gallery). At the time, Roland did not realise that the oval shape at the centre of the canvas was the lady’s anus. For him, the painting was – and remained – a ‘minute lyrical masterpiece’.17 The way in which the prone body of the woman is rendered is decidedly surrealistic: the canvas’s various triangles and curved shapes are arranged to approximate a traditional nude, but the segmentation of the body parts is done in a way that particularly appealed to Roland, who would later use a similar technique in his own paintings. A year earlier, in February 1936, Roland had purchased a Minotauromachy etching by Picasso from the Zwemmer Gallery. That year, he also bought Max Ernst’s La joie de vivre (Fig. 37) even before the artist had completed it. The title of this canvas, in which monstrous insects dominate the undergrowth, may be an ironic reference to Matisse’s painting of the same name. It was the first major painting Roland acquired.

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Figure 37. Max Ernst, La Joie de vivre, 1936.

Following the closing of the Surrealist Exhibition, the cash-strapped Breton asked Roland to find buyers for some of his paintings; in response, Roland asked Breton to sell him Picasso’s cubist papier colté of a triangular head (1913), somewhat resembling a metronome, set on T-shaped shoulders. Breton refused: ‘I am – insanely – determined to hang on to this little picture, which I pursued for years before I was able to contemplate it at my leisure.’18 Eight months later, Breton accepted Roland’s offer (he also sold him Miró’s Catalan Landscape). These purchases, and especially that of Femme nue in March 1937, unshackled Roland’s pocketbook. In many ways the impetus for his new wave of buying can be attributed to Picasso. In May and June 1937 the Zwemmer Gallery was the setting for two exhibitions: the first of Miró, the second of Picasso and De Chirico. All the works were the property of the collector René Gaffé, a Belgian perfume merchant and bibliophile who had asked his fellow countryman, E. L.T. Mesens, to arrange their sale. Mesens was disposing of forty items from this collection because Gaffé’s doctor had told him – incorrectly – that he had only a few months to live.

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Mesens put the collection on sale, but few canvases sold. Then Mesens approached Roland to ask if he would buy the entire lot. The price was a steep one for the time – £6,750 – but, after some hesitation, Roland agreed. Gaffé later pointed out to the collection’s new owner: ‘You have shown more guts than the picture dealers who ought to have leapt at such an opportunity.’19 There were fourteen Picassos, mainly cubist in style, including Girl with a Mandolin and Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. There were also some significant De Chiricos and Mirós. For Roland, cubism – in its disruption of traditional spatial planes to create a series of divergent, conflicting realities – may have had a surrealist side. Another surrealist-inspired work that captivated Roland at that time was Henry Moore’s Mother and Child, a large sculpture in Hopton stone. When Moore installed it in the front garden of Downshire Hill, the sculptor told Roland: ‘If ever you get tired of this, change it. I will give you another one instead.’ The remark made Roland admire Moore as much as he admired his work. Roland’s neighbours, to his amusement, ‘came poking their noses through the railings, thoroughly bewildered. I shall study the effect on the natives with great interest,’ he mused.20 In 1940, a few years later, the complaints of some neighbours were aired in the press. Roland obtained another major collection only one year after the acquisition of the Gaffé. In June 1938, while lunching in Paris with the Éluards, he was startled when the poet proposed that Roland buy the greater part (one hundred items) of his collection – mainly gifts from other artists, or items obtained in exchange for essays and articles he had written about them. There were forty Ernsts – including the majestic Célèbes – as well as four Magrittes; there were also works by Miró, Chagall, Giacometti and many other distinguished artists. The asking price was ridiculously low: £1,600. Éluard refused to negotiate a higher price and insisted that, whether Roland purchased the lot or not, they must at all costs remain friends.21 Éluard badly needed the money, and Roland was happy to accept. In essence, Roland had become a collector by accident – the two ‘bulk’ purchases had come to him, it can be argued, by fate. Within a short space of time, he had assembled the best collection of surrealist and cubist paintings in England. Without intending to do so, he had taken on a role he did not relish. He liked to be surrounded by striking things, but he had previously acquired works largely by exchanging his work with other artists – or he had bought something to assist

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an artist friend in straitened circumstances. Privately, he thought that people like the cubist-obsessed Douglas Cooper were hoarders and had no wish to join their ranks. Cooper dismissed Roland’s collection as ‘ready-made’. He told his companion John Richardson: ‘I don’t call it collecting if you combine Picasso handouts to his Surrealist friends with a collection bought, lock, stock, and barrel from a Belgian.’ However, Richardson later observed: ‘Most of the finest paintings that Douglas amassed between 1932 and 1939 came from a single source: a shadowy German called G. F. Reber . . . [who] lived lavishly, if somewhat precariously, in a château outside Lausanne filled with by far the largest collection of cubist and post-cubist art in private hands.’22 For Roland, the habit of collecting remained associated with his maternal grandfather’s acquisitive streak. Roland was probably perfectly aware that George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, was strongly averse to the collecting impulse.23 Moreover, a ‘collection shared too many characteristics with the cemetery’.24 He made the additional point: ‘The whole idea [of purchasing someone else’s collection] came as a shock . . . I had the sensation of being collected up myself.’25 Roland’s brother Alec was appalled that his brother bought art in great quantity rather than investing his money ‘wisely’.26 Despite his good intentions, some works of art overcame Roland’s reluctance to add to his holdings. On 14 January 1938, attending the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he visited Picasso’s studio and beheld Weeping Woman (1937), a canvas that enthralled him as much as Femme nue had nine months earlier (Fig. 38). ‘I have more than once been shaken by the emotional strength of a painting seen for the first time in an artist’s studio, but this contained an unprecedented blend of realism and poetic magic.’ He was especially taken with the ‘brilliant contrasts of red, blue, green and yellow in a highly disconcerting way. It was as though this girl, seen in profile, but with both the dark passionate eyes of Dora Maar, dressed as for a fête, had found herself suddenly faced by heartrending disaster.’27 Roland was speechless, but he summoned up the courage to ask Picasso to sell it to him. ‘And why not?’ replied the master, who parted with it for the very low price of £284. The vivid polychromes of this canvas contrast sharply with the sorrow on the woman’s face; in this painting he witnessed the tragic side of life. (This painting continues the exploration of communal grief that Picasso was exploring

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Figure 38. Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937.

in the huge canvas that documents the tragedy of Guernica; by concentrating on the face of the Weeping Woman, this canvas is more about the sorrow experienced by one person.) Although he had become a collector by default, Roland was often easy-going about his possessions. During World War II, Lucien Freud asked him to lend him Weeping Woman for a private exhibition at a friend’s flat in Brighton. The unwrapped canvas under his arm, Freud took the painting with him on the Underground and then on a train: he placed the picture on the seat opposite him, and enjoyed how the sun splashed on the colours and revealed their jewel-like brilliance (Fig. 39).

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Figure 39. Roland looking at De Chirico’s The Two Sisters (1915), photographed by Lee Miller in 1939. Magritte’s Representation (1937) is on the right.

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Roland the collector did have a very business-like side to him. He once told a friend that he never paid more than a three-figure sum for one piece, and never sold one for less than a four-figure sum.28 He may have amassed his collection in a haphazard way, but he knew full well its worth. Roland also sometimes gave pictures away to friends. He liked to dismiss his inclination to collect, but a letter of 1937 displays the tremendous pleasure he took in surrounding himself with gorgeous objects: ‘. . . there are Chiricos everywhere honeycombing the walls with metaphysical interiors. The hall is full of Picasso engravings and drawings and the dining room looks very impressive with the big Miró nude . . . It will take me some time to get used to so many important arrivals and I have a struggle with [Mesens] who wants to send them all off to America before I have even seen them.’29 Roland’s Quaker heritage remained an integral part of his personality, and he was very conscious of it when, seventeen years later in August 1954, he lent some works from his collection to an exhibition at Peckover House. He had been apprehensive: ‘I have become accustomed from my youth to disapproval of my taste in modern art and it would not have surprised me had the people of Wisbech felt violently hostile’ to an exhibition ‘of which my parents and grandparents [would] thoroughly disapprove’. The positive reaction that followed – rather than ‘an appalling uproar’ – led him to the realisation that there was a strong link between the items from his collection and the Quaker traditions of his family, because the art shown advanced ‘the cause of peace and international understanding’.30 Meanwhile, at the conclusion of their trip to Spain in 1936, Valentine, who had repeatedly asked her husband for a rapprochement, had resolved once again to part from him. Roland later wrote: ‘On return to London Valentine decided that rather than face a bleak winter in England, a country which still seemed foreign to her, she would return to her friends in the Himalayas.’31 One way of interpreting this statement is that in Valentine’s opinion Roland was once again pursuing various engagements with humanity, whereas she preferred a more solitary, mystical existence. This is the same divide that had confronted them years before, when Valentine had chastised her husband for wandering too far outside the perimeters of their marriage. Roland had finally had enough. He accepted the situation for what it was: late in 1936, he and Valentine went their separate ways.

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Chapter Eight

Aphrodite in Blue (1936–1938)

Roland was not at an emotional loose end for very long after Valentine’s departure for India. He had brief affairs, but he was certainly not prepared to encounter a goddess who would sweep him off his feet. On 21 June 1937, Roland was invited to a surrealist fancy dress party at the home of the Rochas family at 66 Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. Since her father was out of town, one of his daughters – Hélène – had decided to hold this event. One woman guest wore nothing more than a few strands of ivy. At one point during the evening, Man Ray punched Éluard in the face. The Frenchman immediately forgave the American because he felt it was perfectly understandable that a man so small in stature might feel compelled to strike out against a taller man. In order to be as surrealist as possible, Roland had dyed his right hand and left foot blue, wore paint-encrusted trousers and a filthy old coat. Costumed in this scruffy way, he beheld at the party an incandescently beautiful blonde dressed in a blue evening gown. Roland was immediately struck by the ‘abysmal contrast between her elegance and my own slumlike horror’.1 Few words between Roland and Lee Miller were exchanged that evening, because Monsieur Rochas arrived home unexpectedly and ejected all the partygoers. Ernst phoned Lee the next day and invited her to dinner to be introduced to a smitten Englishman. Ernst may have told Roland that this remarkable woman had played a statue come to life in Jean Cocteau’s 1932 film, The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète). Roland would have seen her perfectly shaped lips in Man Ray’s L’Heure de l’Observatoire, which had been shown in the Surrealist Exhibition the year before. It was surprising the two had not met sooner given that Roland knew Man Ray (formerly Lee’s lover) and Lee was acquainted with Ernst (Fig. 40).

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Figure 40. Lee Miller, Self-Portrait, 1932.

Lee was born Elizabeth Miller on 23 April 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her father Theodore Miller, an engineer, inventor and businessman, introduced Lee and her brothers John and Erik to photography at an early age. She was his model – there is a series taken of Lee as a young woman in the nude – and he also taught her the technical aspects of photography. When she was aged nineteen and visiting Manhattan, Lee stepped carelessly into the path of an oncoming car. A bystander yanked her back to safety, whereupon she collapsed in his arms. Her rescuer was Condé Nast, the founder of Vogue. Her beauty so entranced him that he offered to find her modelling work at his magazine. Lee’s career began when she appeared on the cover of the 15 March 1927 issue of Vogue, and for the next two years she was one of the most soughtafter models in New York. Then a photograph of her by Steichen was used to advertise Kotex menstrual pads. The resulting scandal ended that occupation.2 Lee, once she ceased being a model, became a photographer. She had an intense three-year (1929–32) affair with the American

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surrealist and renowned photographer, Man Ray, from whom she learned a great deal about taking pictures. Quite soon her talent began, he may have felt, to eclipse his own. She possessed an instinctive way of looking at a person or scene and then knowingly and intuitively pressing the shutter. He became inordinately possessive. After breaking off that relationship and starting her own studio in Manhattan in 1933, in 1934 Lee married Aziz Eloui Bey, whom Roland had met years before in Egypt. A person of indomitable intelligence and acumen, she easily switched places from being the photographed to being the photographer. One of the reasons for her remarkable success as a portraitist is that she had the ability to empathise with her sitters. Her relationship with Man Ray had left her wary. She had been attracted to Bey because he was not a possessive person: he loved Lee, but did not wish to control her. On that basis, she agreed to marry him. The landscape of Egypt, her new home, invigorated her as an artist, but as a place to live she soon found it dull. Aziz did not attempt to stop Lee from travelling when he saw how enervated she became. He was likely fully aware that she frequently took lovers. He may have been hurt, but he was tolerant. On the night Lee encountered Penrose for the first time her then lover, the art dealer Julien Levy, had accompanied her. On the morning following the dinner to which Ernst had summoned her, Lee woke up next to Roland in his small room at the Hôtel de la Paix. A few days later, he wrote to affirm what he had in all likelihood already told her face to face: ‘I have slept and woken at last from a dream – shall I ever dream again anything so marvellous?’ His existence had been so transformed that he was ‘looking at my time tables, plans, map and compasses to try and lay out a course for future navigation.’3 In the same letter, Roland invited Lee to join him in Cornwall, where he had rented Lambe Creek, Beacus’s Georgian house on the Truro River in Cornwall. She readily accepted. That house is elegantly set on the edge of a tidal creek, sheltered by dense woodland and open to the sun. The Éluards, Man Ray and his companion Ady Fidelin (a dancer from Guadeloupe), Eileen Agar and her Hungarian-born husband, the writer Joseph Bard, were also invited, as were Henry and Irina Moore, and Max Ernst and his new companion, Leonora Carrington.4 Mesens was also there. His enthusiastic womanising led Roland to call him ‘Tripotin’ [the Pawer,

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or Wanker]. Eileen Agar seems to have been mildly shocked by the various couplings. ‘The Surrealists were always supposed to be such immoral monsters, but I for one did not go to bed with everyone who asked me. When would I have had time to paint?’5 Despite other activities, Roland made sketches, including one of Nusch. He also made a series of drawings of a small boat beached in the shallows. According to Roland, this summer romp was a genuine surrealist experience: green meadows, the creeks, the moors, the Logan Rock, the Merry Maidens, the lighthouses, Woolworths’ stores, the Goonhilly Downs, the beaches and the local pubs. Agar had wonderful memories of an idyllic time: ‘It was a delightful surrealist house party that July, with Roland taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy.’ One day she went off to watch Lee take a bubble-bath, but there was not ‘quite enough room in the tub for all of us’.6 She saw Lee as a ‘Hellenic beauty . . . full of élan vital’. She retained a vivid memory of her ‘trouserless, dancing in the front of the headlights of the car in which we had gone for a midnight drive’.7 Roland’s marriage had kept him apart from the kind of sexual revelry in which he now became involved. From the outset of their affair, Roland and Lee agreed that neither would prevent the other from having sexual relationships with others. For them, true freedom meant a lack of possessiveness. True love obviously transcended sex. Back in London, Roland would continue to have liaisons with a number of women; back in Egypt Lee would see other men. The couple recounted their adventures to each other. The Englishman and the American woman appeared an unlikely couple. Lee was strikingly beautiful. She spoke quickly, authoritatively and wittily in a languid, captivating American accent. Roland was handsome in a reticent way; he had the patrician manner and speaking voice of members of his class. Although he was a man who knew his own mind, he was dexterous and sometimes overly polite in dealing with others. In their intimate moments together, however, Roland might well have been the pursuer who cast Lee in the role of the pursued, a role reversal that would not have appealed to her. Much more than Lee, Roland was determined early on to make their relationship a permanent one. Intrinsic to their relationship was that they both saw themselves as outsiders. From childhood, Roland’s Quaker heritage had given him a sense of having come from a group that had rebelled – and

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continued to rebel – against traditional English values. His pursuit of modernism in its surrealist mode derived in large part from his realisation that his eager involvement in such activities originated from his family’s religious orientation; for him, the progression from Quakerism to surrealism was a natural one. Lee was the American abroad: as such, those who met her did not readily pigeonhole her, and her explosive wit set her apart from those she encountered. In August 1937, two months after they had met, Roland and Lee visited Hôtel Vaste Horizon in Mougins, where Picasso and Dora Maar were staying along with the Éluards, Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard. Man Ray and Ady were also part of the group. Éluard courted Eileen Agar, and encouraged Nusch to sleep with Picasso; Lee had a brief liaison with Picasso; Roland was attracted to Ady.8 Picasso, Agar recalled, remained ‘le Peintre Soleil himself, Picasso the Master’. He was the ‘boss of the roost, his thoughts and moods somehow setting the ruling temperature’.9 As Roland put it, ‘The personality of Picasso was so strong that wherever one met him he had the effect of charging one’s emotional batteries.’10 There were expeditions every morning to Juan-les-Pins, a secluded beach near Antibes. These jaunts were followed by lunch on terraces ‘shaded by vines overlooking the sea.’11 Éluard and Picasso took turns directing the revelries. Roland abandoned his previous role of ‘taking the lead’ as he had done at Lambe Creek (Figs 41 and 42). Picasso, who occupied the lone room in the hotel with a balcony and with sufficient space for him to paint and sleep, claimed incorrectly that he was the only person who worked that summer. He did a number of portraits of Dora, Nusch, Éluard and Lee (as well as one of Roland, which has disappeared).12 Lee took photographs. Roland’s creativity was also stimulated, and he constructed his first postcard collages. Other surrealists had used postcards, but Roland appropriated the garish colours of such ephemera by overlapping sequences of the same card into abstract shapes. ‘Sometimes,’ he recollected, ‘I found that repetitive clusters could take the effect of a spread of feathers or a single image cut out and set at a peculiar [angle] could transform completely its original meaning.’13 Roland’s grouping of the postcards into fan-shaped or linear arrangements stemmed from his knowledge of the cubist formula of breaking down objects and placing them into series of flat planes.

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Figure 41. Roland and Lee on the beach at Juan-les Pins, 1937.

Figure 42. Éluard and Picasso on the beach at Juan-les-Pins, 1937.

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He then drew on the large sheets of paper to which the postcards were pasted, and added cutouts made of plain coloured paper. The results attracted the attention of Magritte, who co-authored, with Paul Nougé, an appreciation of them when they were exhibited at the 1938 Paris Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts. It may well be that the strangeness of the light-effects in England, which never cease to permeate the painting and photography of that country, offers sufficient explanation of why Penrose’s attention should have been particularly been focused on the problem of colour. Roland Penrose, however, has thought of formulating the problem in entirely new terms; up till now he says, colour has been used for no other purpose than the creation of the image of the objects. But what if we try to use the image of the objects to create colours? Roland Penrose has succeeded in this experiment.14

Magritte put his finger precisely on what was so revolutionary about Roland’s use of this form. His assembling of postcards emphasised colour and, in the process, he painted dramatic images with them. These collages are much more emotive than earlier uses of collage by other surrealists and, in that way, groundbreaking (Plate 9). For Roland, this experiment was in every possible way transformative. The repetition of postcards allowed ‘a personality’ to be ‘born – one personality was lost in another. An avenue of trees became the hair of a girl, a row of large flower pots became a backbone . . . many bricks make a house – but here each unit has a reality and a colour of its own, it condenses itself into a new reality, with the satisfying sensation that we have power even over reality.’15 That summer at Mougins, Picasso was completely taken with Lee’s statuesque beauty: he made six portraits of her as ‘l’Arléslienne’.16 The French expression refers to a woman who is quite capable of treachery and, in a more general way, perhaps suggests the dangers inherent in seduction; but the term also refers to someone who remains invisible and, to a certain extent, unknowable.17 In commenting on one of these portraits, Roland said: ‘Two smiling eyes and a green mouth were placed on the same side of the face and her breasts seemed like the sails of ships filled with a joyous breeze. It was an astonishing likeness. An agglomeration of Lee’s qualities of exuberant vitality and vivid beauty put together in such a way that

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it was undoubtedly her but with none of the conventional attributes of a portrait.’18 Picasso’s canvases demonstrate that Lee was so various that she could not be captured in any single likeness, while Roland’s commentary shows that he knew full well that Lee was in every way an Arléslienne: someone whose complex beauty could only be hinted at, never fully captured. Roland purchased one of the portraits of Lee, and eventually presented it to her. Picasso would have been well aware that Roland was following in his footsteps in choosing a lover: Dora Maar was also a photographer. In a snapshot taken by Lee during that summer, Roland’s slightly smiling, deeply concentrated face stares at Picasso. The gaze is one of radiant, idolising adulation (Fig. 43). That summer at Mougins, Roland was in the company of two people he adored. He had obtained physical

Figure 43. Roland and Picasso at Mougins, 1937, photographed by Lee Miller.

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intimacy with Lee, but the course of their relationship remained uncertain. Picasso’s hold on him never loosened. Picasso’s greatness as an artist was derived in large part from his ability to dramatise aspects of his personal life and, in the process, transform them into incredibly vivid – occasionally histrionic – works of art. Roland’s paintings are more self-enclosed and reticent than Picasso’s, but he shared with the Spanish artist the propensity to confess the secrets of his existence in his art. The title of Roland’s Conquest of the Air (1938) (Plate 10) may refer to the sense of personal liberation he experienced in his relationship with Lee. The head of the figure in the painting wears a mask covering his eyes and nose. The owl looks anxious to fly away – to be unshackled. However, the cage surrounding him prevents his liberation. Is there any genuine conquest of the air, or is there just the illusion of such a victory? Roland may well have been asking himself such questions.

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Chapter Nine

On the Brink of War (1937–1939)

1937 was a joyous year for Roland. In addition to meeting Lee he had exhibited in the Surrealist Objects and Poems show at the London Gallery, and at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had made his first postcard collages, and also created a number of sculptures. Then a new opportunity presented itself. If Roland did not like to think of himself as a collector, he was even more disinclined to conceive of himself as a dealer. The London Gallery had been founded in 1936 by Lady Noel (known as Peter) Norton, the wife of a diplomat. She and her partner, Marguerite Strettel, ran the gallery for over a year and had one-man shows for, among others, Munch, Moholy-Nagy, Léger and Gabo. When her husband was posted to Poland Lady Norton withdrew her financial support, and the gallery was in danger of closing. Roland’s friendship with E. L. T. Mesens had deepened during the negotiations regarding the Gaffé collection. After the Surrealist Exhibition closed, Mesens lived at Downshire Hill. In 1938 the two men entered into a partnership. Roland would provide most of the funding for the London Gallery in Cork Street as a showcase for contemporary, especially surrealist, art, and Mesens would manage it. Roland’s motivation is not difficult to discover: he hoped that under his control the London Gallery could continue the impetus begun with the International Surrealist Exhibition. Mesens had excellent administrative experience: he had managed galleries in Belgium; he had founded Éditions Nicolas Flamel; he had collaborated with the previous owners of the London Gallery in putting on a show of young Belgian artists in 1936. After prolonged negotiations with Anton Zwemmer, Mesens and Roland in partnership bought the gallery. The expense for Roland was staggering: he had to supply three-quarters of the capital, and to raise the money he sold farms he had inherited in Suffolk and Norfolk.

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At the launch of the London Gallery under its new management, Herbert Read gave the opening talk with a solemnity and gravity perhaps not completely in keeping with the occasion. Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington put in an appearance. Black Velvet flowed so freely that an inebriated Dylan Thomas became involved in a punchup and destroyed a picture. However, the star of the opening was Julian Trevelyan, costumed as an explorer in a dinner jacket, pith helmet, red gloves and spectacles with mirrored lenses. The reopened gallery’s first exhibition was devoted to Magritte, and occupied two floors. It consisted of items from Mesens’ collection of 150 paintings by the Belgian artist, who came over for the occasion. The reviewer in the Scotsman was particularly acerbic: the exhibition was in every conceivable way disgusting; in fact, it almost persuaded him to become a ‘Nazi Goebbels [who] at any rate will not tolerate such stuff.’1 Peggy Guggenheim’s Guggenheim Jeune gallery was next door at 30 Cork Street; Freddy Mayor’s gallery was a few doors down.2 Guggenheim, the American socialite collector, had long been associated with all forms of bohemia and the avant-garde. Peggy named her gallery to associate it, by inference, with the legendary Bernheim Jeune in Paris where Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse, among many others, had been shown. Mayor had opened his gallery at 18 Cork Street in January 1925 with an exhibition devoted to post-impressionism. Both his parents had been artists and, from childhood, he had long-established contacts in the art world. He was known for three things: his love of cocktails, his fondness for horse racing and his total lack of musicality. He claimed that he only knew that the national anthem was being played because everyone stood up. He had also a penchant for casinos. The three galleries were bastions of modernity, and the expectation was that they would support and enhance each other. All aspects of running the London Gallery were left to Mesens, who organised eighteen exhibitions over the next two years. The gallery operated a lending library – this helped to create an atmosphere of camaraderie. Surrealist works were on the first floor, with other forms of modernism on the second. Mesens engaged Sheila Legge – the surrealist phantom who had appeared at the Surrealist Exhibition – as his assistant. When she left in 1938 Mesens hired Sybil Fenton, the wife of the constructivist painter John Steven, to replace her. The alluring Sybil had been a model for Man Ray and, quite soon, she and Mesens fell in love.

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A show devoted to the neo-romantic John Piper, and then a Delvaux one, followed the Magritte. Mesens and Roland had purchased the forty-six works in the surrealist Delvaux’s studio for £164, with the understanding that the artist would receive 10 per cent of any sale made within two years, and 5 per cent thereafter. Mesens drew a salary of £6 a week and earned a commission of 5 per cent from sales (10 per cent from the sale of any works owned by Penrose or himself). The Gallery stayed in business until July 1939, at which point it was closed and its remaining stock of eighty-three works was placed in storage (Fig. 44).

Figure 44. Roland Penrose looking at Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman at the London Gallery, 1937.

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Roland and Mesens also established The London Bulletin (originally called The London Gallery Bulletin), which published many important articles on all forms of contemporary art. During its brief pre-war existence the London Gallery provided a safe, public harbour for the advancement of surrealism and other forms of modernism. With its two neighbours, it afforded an opportunity for collectors and gallery-goers to see advanced works of art at a time when public galleries did not have such art on display. Moreover, by establishing the Bulletin, Roland and Mesens used the gallery as a base for proselytising. Its articles openly discussed matters, including left-wing political ones, that newspapers and periodicals would not touch. Ultimately, Roland, in a philanthropic gesture, provided a space in which others could view the art in which he believed, and he underwrote the cost of a periodical that encouraged modernists of all persuasions to express their opinions. These were brave gestures, especially when Europe was on the brink of war (Fig. 45).

Figure 45. Cover of one issue of the London Bulletin.

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By October 1937, Lee was back in Egypt and Roland in London. He tried desperately to give his attention to all the ‘pre-Lee’ projects to which he was committed, but he missed her desperately: My love, I’m back here where I started from – stacks of fatuous unanswered letters, pictures, objects and an intolerable silence, a blank, everything tries to look as though nothing had happened and to the fact that all has changed, that a marvellous presence has been here and has gone. – Darling I read your letters, I’m broken – a wreck . . . To have lived three months of such unbelievable happiness lost in the enchantment of your presence and for it to finish like this is unbearable. I see you, hear your voice, feel your hand every minute and it’s nothing – gone –3

Lee was a Circe-like sorceress who had irrevocably transformed him; he was afraid that he had no powers with which to enchant her: you have changed me more than I could have ever changed you – you started me on a life so much fuller, so much more wonderful than anything I had known, in a way which I thought in these days impossible for me and now you, my love, my darling, the heart of it all are gone. Probably by now your jigsaw puzzle has gone back perfectly into place and the picture of your life that you had chosen in Egypt is again perfect, in which case I must bury my groans.

Outwardly, his existence might not seem altered, but this was not so: ‘Actually, darling, most people would like [to think] that I had forgotten you already. Your bed has not been empty for the last four nights but [the photographer] Thea [Struve – a recent girlfriend] occupies it so differently that I almost feel ashamed to make love with her. She is very sweet and is perhaps the only person who could console me of this bitterness. She puts up with my gloom with great patience, though I talk of you whenever I can and tell her of the lump that I can’t move at the bottom of my heart.’4 Lee was completely sympathetic to Roland’s feelings: ‘I hope you are as tender with her as you know how to be – because if she . . . is replacing me, especially so soon, it’s as if she were me – and I could feel it.’5 There were other romantic entanglements. As he mentions in his letter to Lee of 22 October 1938, Roland had a brief fling with Peggy:

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‘and then to bed with Peggy Guggenheim (a rather indifferent experience)’. This affair was transitory, but it yielded some unpleasant consequences when Peggy published her autobiography, Out of This Century, in 1946. She wrote of their brief liaison, ‘He looked like a man of straw and he really seemed quite empty. His ex-wife had once said of him, “He is a barn to which one could never set fire.” ’ She added: ‘He was a bad painter himself, but he was extremely attractive, quite good-looking, had great success with women and was always having affairs’ (Fig. 46). This lover was given the pseudonym of ‘Wrenclose’, and she called attention to his eccentric behaviour: ‘when he slept with women he tied up their wrists with anything that was handy. Once he used my belt, but another time in his house brought out a pair of ivory bracelets from the Sudan.’ When Peggy reissued her autobiography, Roland asked her to omit the reference to him as a bad painter. He did not care about her mentioning his handcuffs, but, he insisted, he had used an ordinary pair of police handcuffs – he had no idea how she got the idea he had employed ivory bracelets.

Figure 46. Peggy Guggenheim in New York, 1942.

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Peggy, in an altruistic mood, urged Roland to go to ‘Egypt to get his ladylove. He was surprised and asked me’, she recalled, ‘why I took such an interest in his affairs. I said, “Because I like you so much I want you to be happy, and if you don’t go and storm her gates she will never come.” He was touched by my advice and followed it.’6 One reason Peggy had cultivated Roland was that she wanted his assistance in setting up an institution in London that would be a counterpart to her uncle Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Nonobjective Painting in New York (now the Guggenheim Museum). Since Peggy had lost £600 during her first year running the Jeune, she wanted to establish a museum that could promote modernism effectively without involving herself in the ups and downs of the gallery world. On 13 April 1939, Roland told Lee that he was not going to get involved. ‘Peggy Guggenheim has been all honey to me and what she wants in return is that I should be one of the three big bugs on the selection committee. She is starting a Museum of Modern Art in London. Herbert Read is to be director and it is to be a grand effort to establish a “home” for art in this barbarous country. All very ambitious and rather lacking in funds – (I am not going in on that side).’7 At this time, Roland was more preoccupied with discovering surrealist ways to commemorate his love of Lee. At the Caledonian Market, he purchased a hairdresser’s model for three shillings and sixpence. She has ‘very naughty eyes’, he informed Lee, ‘and when I have cut her head off and repainted her cheeks [she will] become a very pretty object’.8 Roland had a wig made of long, straight blonde hair, added eyelashes and painted the eyes, lips and skin. In its final state, the head in The Dew Machine hovers upside down above a baseboard; chemist’s funnels were inserted into the neck and then filled with coloured beads, tacks, shells and seeds. The portion of the hair touching the baseboard was dyed bright blue. The oil painting Seeing is Believing (1937) (Plate 11) displays this object: a hand reaches up towards the woman’s hair as if to suggest that she possesses bewitching powers, much like Rapunzel. In the fairy tale as told by the Brothers Grimm, a prince hears the imprisoned Rapunzel sing and, enchanted by her voice, desires to visit her. He learns that she can be visited in her tower only if she

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lets her hair down. She does so, the prince makes the ascent and the two fall in love. When Rapunzel’s jailor, the witch Dame Gothel, discovers their deceit she severs Rapunzel’s hair, subsequently lowering the severed braid down for the prince and confronting him. In despair, he throws himself from the tower and lands on thorns that blind him. Subsequently, he and Rapunzel are reunited and his sight restored, but their path to true love is a difficult one. If Roland was alluding to this famous story, the work seems to suggest that love’s seductive powers can be easily destroyed by outside forces. In Real Woman (1937) Roland uses frottage and his new interest in postcards. The form of the woman resembles a headless piece of Greek statuary, although the torso was likely inspired by one of Man Ray’s paintings or photographs of Lee’s headless torso or Magritte’s Representation (1937), a painting that Roland had recently acquired. A single postcard conceals the woman’s pudendum, in the process calling attention to that part of her body and sexualising it. The use of the adjective ‘real’ may signify that Lee was a true woman, whereas Valentine was not.9 Roland’s dealings with Lee did not always go smoothly. He thought she did not write often enough. She had identical feelings. ‘Forgive me, darling,’ he asked, ‘for being grand-motherly but even two words on a post card would make an enormous difference.’10 He once told her: ‘I love you in spite of your bitchiness.’11 She was miffed when Roland refused her invitation that spring of 1938 to meet her in Athens. He declined because he was in the midst of making the final arrangements to purchase the London Gallery. She was hurt and, as a result, her feelings for Roland temporarily cooled. In June 1938 the lovers were reunited. Roland took a freighter from Marseille to Athens, where Lee met him. Although she had shipped her new grey Packard to Greece, the couple went to Mykonos by sea and then on to Delos. After returning to Athens they drove to, among other places, Epidaurus, Delphi, the plains of Thessaly, the port of Kavála and Thassos (by ferry). From Kavála, they drove the Packard across Bulgaria towards Romania. In Bucharest they sought out Hari Brauner, the ethnomusicologist and composer brother of the surrealist painter Victor Brauner, Roland’s long-time friend who lived in Paris. Hari took the couple to various folk festivals in the villages in and around the Carpathian

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Mountains. At Runcu, Lee bought a peasant woman’s dress so that she could wander freely taking photographs. It turned out that there was no need for the costume because the local women were incredibly friendly and welcoming. The couple drove to Balchik on the Bulgarian coast of the Black Sea, and then swung back to Bucharest. Lee and Roland spent their last evening with Hari and other new friends in an open-air nightclub near the North Station. The next morning they kissed farewell there. At their parting, Lee pointed out to Roland an attractive woman boarding the train: she was sure her desolate lover could find comfort in her arms. And that is exactly what happened, as Roland told Lee. The Romanian girl you saw through the window was so much intrigued by our farewell kisses that she could not let the matter drop and what you had thought would be an obstacle to success turned out to be just the opposite. Already before dinner time she was in such a state of lechery that she invited both the Frenchman [a fellow passenger] and me to do everything to satisfy her. The result was exactly like what one reads about in books but what doesn’t often happen, especially when the Wagon-Lit man tried to come in at the wrong moment and seeing his mistake took it all very discreetly as an excellent joke. After dinner the séance was continued with more success, especially as she turned out to be very pretty without her clothes. The Frenchman, a nice old bear with a large family – he showed us photos of them, took it all in a nice friendly way and we parted next morning all three the best of friends. Probably I shall not see either of them again but it was certainly the most unexpected and charming adventure I have yet had on a train.12

While still in Athens, Lee, in her funny but touching way, wrote her lover: ‘Bitch face here is a wreck – boredom, change of country, a new disease [she was worried she had tuberculosis] and lonesomeness for you.’13 On arriving at Munich train station on 9 September 1938, Roland beheld a vast amount of red and black banners emblazoned with swastikas celebrating Chamberlain’s appeasement visit. Roland was returning to London to complete arrangements for the English exhibition of Guernica, Picasso’s monumental mural. Such efforts, he realised would not defeat Hitler, but he was trying to use art to stem the tide of war.

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In addition to preparing that exhibition, Roland was kept busy refereeing various fights among the surrealists. Roland never became a communist, although he remained on good terms with Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary, and other prominent members of the party who supported Stalin. Breton, who had met with the exiled Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico, formed the Fédération internationale de l’art révolutionnaire indépendant, which was intended to liberate artists and writers from Stalinist control. This move only widened the gulf between him and Éluard. The English surrealists disagreed among themselves as to where they stood on this contentious issue. By refusing to confront Éluard about his pro-Stalinist stance, Roland offended the belligerent and intransigent Mesens. In this kind of scenario Roland was well aware that he had been placed in a completely no-win situation. Having been raised as a Quaker, Roland had a deep aversion to joining any group. Soon after arriving back in London, Roland assembled The Road is Wider than Long, his poetical-photographic account of his time with Lee in the Balkans. Years afterwards, Roland recalled his inspiration: ‘On my return to London I was seized by a desire to celebrate this brief and stimulating Balkan adventure in some endearing form and since I never keep a diary of daily events I put together my memories of the scenery, the people that Lee and I had enjoyed and the events we had lived through together, making of it a scrap book or a visual diary dedicated to her.’14 In form, The Road shows Roland carrying his propensity to experimentation even further. There is certainly a collage-like juxtaposition of text and image; the use of different typefaces rendered in a variety of colours brings a festive air to the book. All the photographs are by Roland, and give a tourist’s view of the trip. Their ordinariness contrasts sharply with the printed text and, as a result, a distinction is made between what Roland’s eye recorded of a journey to a foreign place and what his inner eye experienced in a trip taken with his beloved. The road the two of them travelled was long, but it is wide in the sense that it was a shared encounter. In fact, it is the voice of the lovers that tells the story, not an “I”: At night we found a deserted city . . . We climb and bleed with the thistles our fingers feel into the tomb of the saint.15

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The result is a lover’s bestowal of a gift upon his beloved – the two are fused together. In that sense, the book enshrines a moment of intense, passionate connection. The Road is a commemorative volume in other ways. Here, Roland captures a race of people who, although they endure incredible physical hardships and frequent displays of xenophobia, retain an indomitable, fighting spirit. The cart that blocks the road has been At work for six hundred years Standing to their necks in water Its men cut reeds Leeches eat their bones Their throats are too dry to sing16 (Fig. 47)

Such people are seen as the enemies by bureaucratic regimes anxious to eradicate them. NOMADS may not move their Tents The Markets are closed to them The Prefect has no time to waste17

The eradication of the Roma was one of the Nazi government’s priorities, and here, Roland is predicting the fate of the gypsies and other wandering peoples. Once again, on this occasion in words and accompanying photographs, he used his gifts as an artist to make a political statement. In the years ahead, the darkening political landscape of Europe would impinge itself upon Roland and his beloved. Road enshrines a moment when the two felt themselves free from the dominion of time. One issue that preoccupied Roland and Lee was the possibility of cohabiting. As early as October 1937 Roland had become anxious to find a ‘solution’ to living apart. Although, he told Lee, we aren’t the first to be in this sort of mess, I am so anxious, darling, that you should find a solution and not be so miserable, and you know of course the only solution which seems possible to me. I can see clearly your difficulties but I never can think that for people like us it is much use trying to tie one’s heart up with promises about

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Figure 47. Two pages from The Road is Wider than Long.

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‘always’. You mustn’t be depressed about that and it won’t make me love you one bit less even if I knew that you might not love me in ten years’ time. In fact it seems a miracle that you have ever loved me at all and if you saw me here in London in October instead of in the brilliance of the midi sun it would probably all be over in ten minutes. But that I simply don’t take into account & it seems to me very serious that you should be so isolated. I long for you physically but I long for you also in lots of other ways – your way of seeing things when we are out together is a thing I miss all the time, your way of making every moment we spent together new and significant, your abandon, your affection, your sense of humour . . . I want to repeat to you – come back and urge you to with all my power, but my problem is so much more simple that yours. Nothing stands in the way on my side and I can do so with the conviction that life with you would be inconceivably more happy than my present existence as a disgruntled hermit.18

Before meeting Lee, Roland had not pressed Valentine for a divorce. On 12 December 1938, he filed for one. It was granted on 19 June the following year on the grounds of non-consummation, specifically on the ‘incapacity of the Respondent to consummate the marriage’.19 Roland spent a heavily alcohol-enhanced Christmas with Juanita de Kerversian, his half-Spanish girlfriend, at Lambe Creek with Beacus and his wife Joy.20 He sorely missed Lee, who was back in Cairo with her husband. Roland might have been preoccupied by his love life, but he knew Europe was on the verge of war. For his part, Roland felt that his espousal of genuinely revolutionary art remained the best way he could attack fascism. On May Day 1938 he took part in a rally at Hyde Park, later providing Lee with a comical account: ‘You may think me quite loony but on the first of May I marched through the Streets of London with three other guys all dressed exactly like a cabinet minister with masks on. Four Neville Chamberlains shouting that Chamberlain must go. It was very exhausting as one could hardly breathe inside the mask but it produced a tremendous sensation and even the cops held their sides with laughter.’21 A year earlier in Munich, in 1937, an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ had been staged. ‘Degenerate’ was the term routinely affixed by the Nazis to all kinds of advanced, contemporary art. In July 1938,

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as a riposte to the Munich exhibition, a show of modern German art opened at the New Burlington Galleries. The pictures included some impressionist and realist canvases, but the exhibition was particularly strong in expressionism, a school of art despised by the Nazis. In order not to provoke actions against the artists, the pictures were borrowed from private collections, many from Paris. Hitler was offended by the London show and made it known that if any of the ‘modern’ painters whose work was on display had not yet left Germany, they should quickly do so. This counter-exhibition may have succeeded in affronting Hitler, but it was a financial disaster. Roland had been involved in organising this event, and he also helped to form the Artists’ Refugee Committee in November 1938.22 This group raised about £4,000 and helped between twenty to thirty people, mainly artists, to escape from Germany and Eastern Europe to Britain. Committee members took in evacuees. Roland employed a young woman from Prague as a cook.23 Roland’s deepest sympathies remained with the Spaniards. On 26 April 1937, German planes of the Condor Legion, in obvious collusion with Franco, bombed the Basque village of Guernica. In less than four hours, 1,654 people were killed. Four months earlier Picasso had accepted a commission from the Spanish Republic to paint a mural for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. Initially he considered expanding on the satirical Dream and Lie of Franco, of which he had made two etchings/aquatints.24 In eighteen scenes (nine images on each sheet), Picasso, in a vehement attack on Franco, caricatured him as a prancing monster and as a pig-like creature wreaking violence. Then he considered a much more neutral subject: a portrait of his own studio. Five days after the destruction of the Basque village, Picasso changed course: he made the first of a series of sketches that became Guernica. Long before painting Guernica, Picasso had only occasionally worked in a surrealistic mode. Without doubt, however, this large mural (3.5 meters tall and 7.8 meters wide) can be labelled such. On either side are screaming women (the one on the right is falling; the one on the left holds up her obviously dead child). In the middle area, a horse stumbles over the body of a dead warrior (the hand of the corpse intrudes to the far left); a woman rushes into the scene (her left leg extends to the far right); a woman with a lantern stares at the horse and fallen warrior (Fig. 48).

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Figure 48. Guernica installation at New Burlington Gardens, 1938.

Here, any sense of Picasso’s cubism and post-cubist classicism has given way to a vision of the horrors of war, which is a condition beyond reason but not beyond imagination. Surrealists such as Buñuel had used cinema as an effective tool, and this huge grey, black and white mural must have reminded many of its first viewers of a cinema screen, although the eye cannot in an instant take in the immensity of what is depicted. In confronting spectators with the horror of war, Picasso deliberately overwhelms them: war is completely beyond any normal way of perceiving existence. This mural is also conceived as a triptych. The female figures on either end are noticeably smaller than those in the middle and, therefore, seem slightly recessed when compared to the drama unfolding in the middle picture area. In making his own bold move into history painting, Picasso might have had in mind a picture such as Goya’s Third of May 1806, of which he had said: ‘All the elements in the picture are chosen, and placed in a hierarchy, deriving from that enormous square lantern, placed on the ground in the center of the canvas like the light of eternity.’25 The juxtaposition of the human heads with the representations of two animals highlights the tragic fact that all forms of life in Guernica have been destroyed; the deliberate distortion of point of

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view adds to the artist’s insistence that this is a scene of carnage; the arrangement of the various participants suggests that the viewer is witnessing a nightmare. This is a landscape of complete distortion and wanton destruction. In May 1937 Roland and Henry Moore, during a visit to Picasso’s studio at rue de Grandes-Augustins, saw the unfinished mural. Moore was surprised by Picasso ‘lightening the whole mood of the [occasion] . . . Guernica was still a long way from being finished. It was like a cartoon just laid in black and grey . . . Anyway, you know the woman who comes running out of the little cabin on the right with one hand held in front of her? Well, Picasso told us that there was something missing there, and he went and fetched a roll of paper and stuck it in the woman’s hand, as much to say that she’s been caught in the bathroom when the bombs came. There, that leaves no doubt about the commonest and most primitive effective of fear.’ Roland noticed how Picasso talked about the various figures in the painting as if they were alive.26 About a month later, on 21 June, Roland viewed the completed painting, which had not yet been removed to the Spanish Pavilion. After its appearance at the World’s Fair, the mural travelled to Scandinavia. By February 1938, Roland and the essayist and poet Juan Larrea, one of the Republicans in Paris who had persuaded Picasso to paint the mural, were working together to ensure that at the conclusion of its Scandinavian tour it would be sent to London, rather than travelling to New York City. Larrea told Roland: ‘We want the exhibition to happen with the maximum force and solemnity, both for Picasso himself, since the more admired he is the more useful he will be to our cause, and for our cause itself, since this is one of the rare means we have to reach that sector of the public, for whom this kind of argument may prove convincing.’27 Virginia Woolf, Fenner Brockway and E. M. Forster were among the Patrons of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, the organisation that sponsored the mural’s exhibition in England in late 1938 and early 1939. Just as the mural was being packaged for shipment, Chamberlain reached his notorious agreement with Hitler. The complete exhibition consisted of the huge canvas and sixtyseven preparatory and related drawings and paintings. The mural overpowered the small room in which it was placed at the New Burlington Galleries in London from 2 to 29 October 1938. Labour

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opposition leader Clement Atlee opened the exhibition, which ultimately raised £250 towards Stepney Trades Council’s ‘Million Penny Fund’ to send a food ship to Spain. To Roland’s delight, the larger of the two rooms at the New Burlington had been booked by Franco supporters for an exhibition of the work of Ignacio Zuloaga, a former associate of Picasso: ‘it was a pleasure to Picasso’s friends to see the great room more frequented by cats than human visitors, while Guernica was daily attracting crowds’.28 There were four other stops in England. The first two were Oriel College, Oxford, and Leeds City Art Gallery – only the sixty-seven smaller works were shown at these places, because of space restrictions. At Leeds, Bonamy Dobrée, Roland’s old friend and now Professor of English at Leeds University, opened the exhibition. Mural and drawings were reunited back in London, at the Whitechapel Gallery. In the London Bulletin, Roland noted that the Whitechapel showing had been an outstanding success: ‘On the first day nearly £100 was raised . . . and during the fortnight that the exhibition was open more than 12,000 entrances were registered. The misgivings of those who imagined that Picasso’s work would mean nothing to the working class has proved false. This response forms a striking contrast to the semi-indifference of intellectuals in the West End where only about 3,000 people visited the exhibition during the month it was open.’29 At Whitechapel, the entrance fee was a pair of boots to be sent to the Brigadists on the Spanish front. The final stop was in February 1939 at H. E. Nunn & Co.’s vacant Ford dealership on Victoria Street in Manchester, where the mural was nailed to the wall.30 In order to make the painting available to working-class people, the exhibition stayed open until 8 p.m. The headline in the Manchester Evening News of 31 January 1939 – DEATH COMES FROM THE AIR – was meant to further entice the public to venture out to see the painting. The Marxist-inclined art historian Anthony Blunt denounced Guernica ‘as the expression of a private brainstorm which gives no evidence that Picasso has realized the political significance of’ the event depicted.31 Herbert Read counter-attacked in the London Bulletin: ‘It is the modern Calvary, the agony in the bomb-shattered ruins of human tenderness and faith.’32 Once again, Roland had found a way to stir up a controversy by pushing contemporary art to the forefront.

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Roland missed Lee desperately. Back in London early in 1939, he met up with Hari Brauner and the troupe of Calusari dancers from Romania that he had accompanied to London for a folk-dance festival. A few days later, whilst saying goodbye to Brauner and the dancers at Victoria, Roland came upon an old friend, the ballet dancer and orientalist Beryl de Zoëte, an authority on folk dance, who casually mentioned that she was soon setting off for Egypt on a field trip. Immediately, Roland volunteered his services as her photographer. The account of his meeting with Beryl that Roland gave Lee shows him in a wonderfully comic and inventive frame of mind: ‘What do you think of folklore in Egypt? I never thought of folklore anywhere until Romania and now it has become a key industry in my life. My friend . . . has great need of a photographer to go with her . . . and, believe it or not, has asked me to go with her. So darling, in the capacity of a folklore photo bloke I’m coming to Cairo.’33 In this enterprising disguise, Roland arrived in Egypt on 30 January 1939. He was dismayed to discover that Lee had misunderstood the date of his arrival and had gone off on a lengthy desert trip. In a letter she had mentioned that she would be staying with a friend at a cotton farm at Beni Kora, near Asyut, two hundred miles south on the Nile. Undeterred, Roland caught a train and then walked to the farm carrying his suitcase. The full heat of the afternoon sun beat down upon him, but nothing was going to keep him from his beloved. Lee’s expedition returned to Cairo without her. For years, Roland had been in the habit of looking for amusing pieces of jewelry. ‘These I had offered to girl-friends, feeling that their acceptance was for me the symbolic equivalent of an orgasm.’34 In his suitcase, Roland had such a gift for Lee: a pair of Cartier gold handcuffs. Lee was delighted. She wore them as bracelets, but she was always ready to use them for their intended purpose to gratify her lover’s bondage fantasies. Roland also presented her with the manuscript of The Road is Wider than Long. Only at this time did Roland realise that he had been entertained in 1927 at the Villa Al Beit by Aziz and his then wife, Nimet. Although fully aware that Lee and Roland were lovers, Aziz was hesitant about releasing her from their marriage because he felt that she needed to be with someone who would provide her often-fragile ego with full support. Lee was not sure what path she wanted to follow. Roland knew what he sought, but, for the moment, he had to settle for being Lee’s sometime lover.

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In order not to shame Aziz, Roland kept up the pretence of being de Zoëte’s photographer.35 In this guise, he and Lee travelled to the oasis of Siwa, about four hundred miles to the west on the border with Libya. Siwa was renowned for its folk dancing, and thus a perfect place for de Zoëte’s research. The travelling party consisted of Roland, Lee, Lee’s sister-inlaw Mafy Miller and a photographer. The two cars followed desert tracks and were often accompanied by hot winds. There was much sweating, cursing, jolting and jouncing. Backs ached and feet quickly swelled. The Siwans are Berbers, much more culturally aligned to Libya than to Egypt, which has a negligible Berber population. Consequently, Arab rule from distant Cairo remained tenuous and was marked by several revolts until a 1928 visit by King Fu’ad. Siwa is built upwards, and the mud buildings, some five storeys high, rise above the date palms like giant anthills. Lee took many photos. So did Roland, but he was also inspired to make some watercolours of the bizarre landscape (Fig. 49). Back in Cairo, Lee and Roland travelled along the Nile to the ruins of Memphis and Saqqâra, and then out to the Red Sea. Roland

Figure 49. Siwa.

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the traveller was brisk and efficient; in contrast, Lee was both impetuous and disorganised.36 Roland pleaded continually with Lee to leave Egypt with him.37 War was coming, and he wanted her with him. Lee remained uncertain. She may not have loved her husband, but she felt a strong sense of loyalty to him. She was far from sure that she wanted to embark on yet another long-term relationship. Their parting at Alexandria, where Roland boarded the Marco Polo for Venice, was desperately sad. ‘What a lot of shitty water there is between us since yesterday,’ he dejectedly told Lee. ‘What a long way it is from here to Siwa, what a long way to anything I love without you.’38 In Paris, Roland, in order to distract himself from being parted from Lee, lunched with Man Ray and Éluard, visited Man Ray’s exhibition and purchased the silver-point Eyes and Hands, attended Breton’s show of Mexican folk art where he met Frida Kahlo, lunched with Picasso and Dora Maar, dined with the Hungarian photographer Ylla and visited a bordello with Éluard. Upon arriving back home in March 1939, Roland had to cope with a bout of tonsillitis as well as an attack in the press on the Moore statue in his front garden. Three newspapers claimed that the statue had caused offence to his neighbours.39 A letter from Valentine informing him that his search for pleasure would end in despair also upset him, as he confided to Lee. ‘It may be good tactics for her but I am still greedy. There is a lot I want to squeeze out of life and yet, as you know darling, nothing counts for much to me unless you are in with it too.’40 Usually, Lee was not vacillating. In this crucial instance, she was. Her indecision was partly motivated by her desire to avoid hurting Aziz. She contemplated moving to London if her sister-in-law stayed there. ‘Everything will be smooth if there isn’t a war,’41 she claimed, while knowing full well that there was going to be one quite soon. From London, Roland pleaded: ‘don’t forget you’re coming to me’.42 By May, he was even more confrontational: ‘If it’s war scares that make you hesitate, all I can say is that here everyone is so used to them [threats of war] that they are beginning to treat them as weather forecasts.’43 Lee booked passage to England on the Otranto, but she was so jittery that she could not sort out the transportation of most of her photographs.

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Aziz, undoubtedly aware that his marriage to Lee was over, drove her to Port Said, where they said their goodbyes. Aboard ship, she remained in a muddle, but eventually told Roland, ‘I’m never returning to Egypt . . . I’m glad that finally I’m coming back to you.’44 Stress about the approaching war, and about being separated from Lee, revitalised Roland. In 1939 he contributed two works to the ‘United Artists’ exhibition at the Royal Academy; one canvas attracted the hostile eyes of J. B. Manson, the former director of the Tate. Roland later recalled: ‘One of the [two] paintings was a collage – no objection to that, but the other picture was a sort of abstract form over which I had written the description of an imaginary person, which they did not like. I got a letter from the Royal Academy saying, “Would I please remove this picture and send another picture, if possible without writing”.’ Words such as ‘arse’ and ‘flesh’ had drawn Manson’s ire. ‘So at Lee’s suggestion,’ Roland recalled, ‘what I did was to go down town and to get a card in deaf and dumb sign language from which I chose a four letter word S-H-I-T, and painted a row of hands saying this, and titled it From the Housetops. They accepted that at once, in fact they hung it exactly opposite an enormous portrait of His Majesty the King.’ This change seems to have mollified everyone until one of the cleaners at the Academy, who was deaf and dumb, started to hoot with laughter when he saw the picture. Trying to make trouble, Tom Driberg, who wrote the ‘Hickey’ column in the Daily Express, asked the architect Edwin Lutyens, the President of the Academy, what he intended to do about this turnabout. Lutyens responded: ‘Oh, let’s keep it – it may bring in a few more people.’45 Roland’s June 1939 co-exhibition with fellow surrealist Ithell Colquhoun at the Mayor Gallery was more significant to him than any brouhaha he had caused at the Academy. Among the twentyseven works on display were Night and Day, Good Shooting, Octavia, Captain Cook's Last Voyage and Conquest of the Air. In the work of many artists, deep personal conflicts find egress in strong paintings, as do moments of intense happiness and self-realisation. This is particularly true of Roland. Night and Day (1937) (Plate 12) celebrates his discovery of Lee. The idea for this picture originates in a letter Lee sent to Roland in

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which she told her lover that she was going to a dance for which she would like to paint her body. Could Roland send her some body paint? He did, and then asked her: I wonder how your dance went off? You . . . must have looked unbelievably beautiful. I imagine you nearly naked with probably bricks painted all up your legs, moss growing on the tops of these towers, a serene blue sky for your body with two cotton white clouds as your breasts, two black pigeons as your hands and the sun itself as your face.46

That comment, of course, describes the inspiration for Night and Day perfectly. Antony Penrose’s interpretation of Night and Day captures the full complexity of this bold but calm image: ‘Her body is divided into the elements of earth, air and fire. Her legs are earth – appropriate as Lee was well grounded. Her body is air, perhaps a comment on her ability to remain aloof, and her face has become the sun in keeping with the strength and radiance of her intellect and personality.’47 The separate parts are meant to be entirely complementary, but this canvas nevertheless shows Lee as someone who compartmentalises the various parts of her existence. Beacus Penrose at the Wheel (1937) (Plate 13), another major painting from the late 1930s, may be, as Antony Penrose has suggested, ‘an allegory for the binding weight of grandfather Peckover who would have so disapproved of his grandson’s velvet smoking jacket and his wild ways’.48 There is an additional way of looking at this well-turned canvas. Beacus, who was a serial womaniser, may appear to be in command at the wheel, but is he really? What about the naked woman at his feet? Is he not a man whose sexual feelings are not under control? If a reading of Beacus is pushed in this direction, it could be argued that the painting is self-reflexive and that Roland is ruminating on his own sexual adventures after his parting with Valentine. Had he perhaps unwittingly hurled himself into new and dangerous emotional territory? The landscape in Octavia (1939) (Plate 14) is the background for the rendition of the half-body of the woman turned away from the viewer; red hair (similar in hue to the woman in Beacus) is intermingled with chains; spikes protrude from the remnants of her chest;

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this thorn imagery – in contrast to that in Winged Domino – is much more menacing. The picture suggests that sexual relationships are fraught with danger. Before, Roland had been concerned with a lack of sexual connection to his wife and the resultant problems. Now he had to deal with new issues in attempting to find a meaningful relationship with a ‘real’ woman.

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Chapter Ten

Grim Glory (1939–1945)

An impatient but gratified Roland drove his Ford V8 to Southampton to meet Lee’s ship in April 1939. When she arrived at Downshire Hill, she might have been surprised to discover that her former lover Man Ray was a fellow houseguest (Fig. 50). The next day Roland took her to the Mayor to see his joint exhibition with Ithell Colquhoun.

Figure 50. Man Ray, 1934. Carl Van Vechten.

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Four months later, on the way to see Picasso in Antibes, the couple stayed with Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington at their farmhouse in St Martin d’Ardèche. This remote place seemed lost in time. Max had sculpted birds and fish on the exterior; Leonora had furnished the inside with her version of a bestiary. The concrete monsters on the exterior were supposed to guard the inhabitants. After Roland and Lee’s visit, Max was arrested by the French as a ‘hostile alien’ and sent to a camp. With the assistance of Éluard and some other friends, including Roland, who wrote in support of Max’s release and kept in close touch with Leonora, Max was set free, but the Germans arrested him after they took over France because his art was considered degenerate. He escaped, and absconded to America with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim, whom he married in 1941. After Ernst’s imprisonment, Leonora fled to Spain, where she suffered a severe breakdown.1 At Antibes in the summer of1939, Picasso attempted to be jovial: the war, he blithely claimed, was merely a plot to prevent him from working. At that time he was painting Night Fishing at Antibes. Two of Picasso’s nephews, having escaped from Spain after the final defeat of the Republicans, suddenly appeared. Despite their recent ordeal, they remained in high spirits. On 1 September, the day Hitler invaded Poland, Roland and Lee drove north to Saint-Malo, where the next day they caught the boat to England. On board ship, Roland ran into his artist friend Julian Trevelyan. The two of them wondered ‘how either of us could be of any use in an occupation as completely foreign to us as fighting’. They speculated that their knowledge of painting could be put to use in designing camouflage.2 Trevelyan remembered Roland’s almostdevil-may-care attitude: We talked of the future and what it would have in store for us, and Roland declared that for his part he would make no move to get himself a job, but would wait to be caught up automatically in the great machine of war, and would let himself be pushed where it wanted to push him . . . Next morning in the train to London, Roland came into our compartment, and rather charmingly and shamefacedly confessed that he had not meant quite what he said the night before.3

The three arrived at Waterloo station on 3 September to hear the first air-raid sirens and see silver-gray barrage balloons in the sky.

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England had declared war on Germany. Sirens howled, but the day was sunny. Lee tore up the letter awaiting her from the American Embassy ordering her to take the next available ship home. London that autumn was a place preparing for a long siege. Gas masks, sand bags and air-raid shelters provided ominous harbingers of what was about to descend from the sky. Since Downshire Hill was sufficiently distant from the city and the docks not to be an obvious target for bombs, Roland could ‘watch with feigned detachment the great fiery cloud that enveloped the city below, surmounted by the beams of searchlights and the fireworks of the anti-aircraft barrage’. He did not see himself as a ‘born hero’. In fact, he soon learned that he could easily be overcome by fear that made him ‘crawl like an animal, hair standing on end and shaking in uncontrollable terror’.4 In the company of others, Roland was able to maintain his composure, and Lee, who ‘innocently enjoyed the stimulus provided by danger, was an invaluable support’.5 Roland also endured the consequences of war in other ways. The London Gallery had been closed since July 1939 and its contents moved to (supposed) safety at Taylor’s Depository in Pimlico. Eighty-three paintings were housed there, including nineteen Magrittes, thirty-one Ernsts and six Delvaux. In December the warehouse was hit by German bombs and burned to the ground. All the works were lost: two-thirds of them were from Roland’s collections. Since Taylor’s was not responsible for war damage, Roland received only a small amount of government compensation. Before this, a portion of his personal collection had been sent to Alec’s house, Bradenham, for storage.6 Friends were bombed out, and came to stay at Roland’s. Among them were Freddie and Pam Mayor and Kathleen McColgan, a hard-drinking reporter for the Evening Standard. Mesens and his girlfriend, Sybil Fenton, lived there too. For the most part, he and Roland got on, but the Belgian, like Breton, was and remained adamantly anti-Stalin and, therefore, anti-Éluard. Lee adopted two stray cats, Jeep and Taxi, and she was given a goose named George as a birthday present. Unfortunately, George developed an addiction to gin and tonic, a mixture that played havoc with his digestion. He was packed off to a farm.

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One guest remembered the relaxed and congenial atmosphere of the house: ‘Downshire Hill made a terrific impression on us – the whole house, especially as this was a time when everything was so bleak and miserable. It was the visual splendour of the pictures, not because it was splendidly furnished. I remember there was a photograph of hands pointing upwards together glued to the dining room ceiling. Roland said it had taken ages to get it just right.’7 The Hitler War put Roland into a deep-seated conflict. For almost a decade he had been actively engaged in combatting Nazism in a variety of activities, especially in arranging the English tour of Guernica. From early childhood he had been indoctrinated with pacifism. He may have no longer considered himself a practising Quaker in the fullest meaning of that word, but he had been born such, and he could not simply shrug off that inheritance. Beacus, however, had no compunctions about joining the Royal Navy. From 1939 until the end of the war, Lionel moved to Canada to become Director of Psychiatric Research and Medical Statistician for the Province of Ontario. Alec was too old to enlist, although the army requisitioned Bradenham Hall. The Air Raid Protection Corps provided Roland’s first involvement with the war effort. At first, he found wandering around his neighbourhood in the dark in a tin hat amusing, but soon this task became tedious. He did not like admonishing those who had let a chink of light shine through their blackout curtains. There were more sinister aspects of this job: learning how to deal with the aftermath of the incendiary bombs that rained down on London. Since the main target areas were the docks in the East End of London, he and his colleagues could only watch in horror as the sky in the southeast of the city turned orange and red as fires erupted. They were helpless bystanders as they beheld the searchlights seeking to uncover the bombers.8 In searching for a way to remain a non-combatant but to do something more useful for the war effort, Roland recalled his conversation six months earlier with Trevelyan. In September 1939, Roland, together with Trevelyan, the artist Bill Hayter, the illustrator John Buckland Wright and the Hungarian-born architect and furniture designer Ernö Goldfinger founded the Industrial Camouflage

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Research Unit. Their premises at 7 Bedford Square were rented from Goldfinger, who served as ‘technical advisor’ until early in 1940, at which point he was replaced by Denis Clark-Hall, another architect. Sybil Fenton was the Unit’s secretary. The mandate of ICRU was to obtain contracts from companies anxious to know how they could camouflage their factories from aerial bombing. Goldfinger was instrumental in receiving a contract from the Player’s Imperial Tobacco Company in Bristol, apparently the only commission the group ever attained. After leaving the Unit, Goldfinger, well known for his explosive bad temper, complained that his premises and equipment were being badly treated: ‘I was horrified to see yesterday that you had used the large drawing boards for making models on, as this is one of my best boards.’9 He later claimed that ICRU was the biggest con he was ever involved in. There were similar bad feelings on the part of Roland and his colleagues. In May 1940, Buckland Wright wrote to Goldfinger: ‘Mr Penrose requests that his foot steel rule should be returned to him at the earliest possible convenience.’ Goldfinger had also requested a model aircraft, the property of his son, be returned. On this matter, the illustrator observed: ‘several members of the Unit have suggested a use for it which might be to your best advantage but you would have to detach the wings before employing it in this manner’.10 Goldfinger’s secretary wrote a letter expressing outrage at this rude letter. There was also the matter of overdue rent. By the end of July, the Unit had disbanded. Julian Trevelyan provided this recollection of the ICRU: ‘we were soon busy making models and painting them with abstract patterns so as to merge them, so we fondly hoped into background’. Theirs was a ‘perfunctory ritual . . . much of it done in an uncoordinated freelance way’. He gave examples: ‘the little corner garage in a housing estate was quickly painted in wiggly lines, and so were the laundry and even the roof of the cinema. People seemed to think that green stripes were a charm that somehow brought them immunity from the unknown hazards of war.’11 The artists may have enjoyed this new kind of painting, but they did not really know what they were trying to accomplish. They possessed no genuine knowledge of what camouflaged buildings looked like in air reconnaissance photographs. They also did not appreciate the difference between protecting buildings from day and night bombers.

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The Imperial Tobacco project resulted in a ‘scheme that was in effect a huge abstract picture painted over the roofs and chimneys of an industrial town’. The proposal was never put into practice. Roland’s experience with ICRU led him to become, in 1940, a civilian lecturer in camouflage at the Home Guard school at Osterley Park in the London borough of Hounslow. The original building on this site was a manor house built in the 1570s for the banker Sir Thomas Gresham. Two hundred years later, when the original building was falling apart, its new owner Sir Francis Child hired Robert Adam to remodel it. The house is of red brick with white stone details and is approximately square, with turrets in the four corners. Adam’s design, which incorporates some of the earlier structure, is highly unusual, and differs greatly in style from the original construction. One side is left almost open and is spanned by an Ionic pedimented screen that is approached by a broad flight of steps and leads to a central courtyard, which is at piano nobile level. In these splendid grounds the writer and military journalist Tom Wintringham was allowed to train the first members of the Local Defence Volunteers (forerunners of the Home Guard) in May and June 1940. He set out to teach the theory and practice of modern mechanical warfare and guerilla warfare techniques and, using the estate workers’ homes scheduled for demolition, to give instruction in street fighting techniques. Major Wilfred Vernon taught the art of mixing home-made explosives while the Canadian Bert ‘Yank’ Levy, who had served under Wintringham in the Spanish Civil War, taught knife-fighting and hand-to-hand combat. Despite winning world fame in newsreels and newspaper articles around the world (particularly in the United States), the school was disapproved of by the War Office and by Winston Churchill, and was taken over in September 1940 and closed the following year. Roland continued his involvement with artistic activities during the early days of the war. On 13 June 1940, the day the Nazis entered Paris, the ‘Surrealism Today’ exhibition at Zwemmer’s opened for three weeks. The window display, which was designed by Eileen Agar, John Banting and Conroy Maddox, contained a miniature bed with rumpled sheets spiked with a dagger. Next to the bed was an armchair transformed into a huge black woman. Roland painted the shop window with the banner title SURREALISM spanning the glass.

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The Studio’s response to the exhibition suggested that the surrealist faction had been especially prescient: ‘Clearly the movement must, from the beginning, have been something more than an outbreak of Parisian futility . . . one cannot help wondering whether the surrealists did not instinctively sense whither the European society in which they lived was leading and whether their movement was not, in fact, a criticism of that society.’12 There were negative responses, however. According to the reviewer in the Observer, surrealism ‘gives no hint of the great human response to horror, ignores the heroism and nobility of the human soul’.13 In the Sunday Times, Eric Newton was caustic: ‘Shocking bad taste . . . I itch to deliver a hearty physical kick in the parts to the artist who has nothing better to do than to trip up my tattered emotions.’14 Another contentious issue was brewing before the war – the British Art Centre. This was the name Peggy Guggenheim and Herbert Read had given to their project to found a British equivalent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Penrose and Mesens were interested in such an institution, but they were also unsure of participating in any venture with the feckless Guggenheim. Assistance came from the cosmetic magnate Helena Rubinstein, who offered the use of part of a building in Berkeley Square as a gallery and office space. Read and Guggenheim were already considering buildings in Soho and Portland Place when Roland and Mesens suggested Rubenstein’s site, with the proviso that Mesens become the director of the new museum. That offer was rejected for many reasons. Guggenheim wanted to be in charge; she did not wish to work with Rubinstein; she considered Mesens to be an enemy; she did not wish Roland’s collection to be joined to hers, perhaps rivalling it. Mesens, who accused Read of having sold out to Guggenheim, informed Roland that he had to take the bull by the horns in order to wrest control away from Guggenheim, but Roland was never as intransigent as Mesens. On 4 August 1939, he told Read: ‘I am still convinced that it is impossible for the scheme to have the influence it should if it is under the supervision of one sole patron . . . If Peggy Guggenheim is to be in a position to dictate the policy of the Museum your position will certainly not be an enviable one since her dislike of Surrealism which is no secret and her judgement of the merits

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of young painters will certainly undermine the work you have been doing to educate the public.’ Roland was diplomatically saying no to Guggenheim and Read, but he did not wish to alienate Read. He added: ‘As you know, since I have been living in London, I have counted a great deal on collaborating with you and am very disappointed to discover now that in this scheme, which should have been the most important so far attempted, insuperable difficulties of a personal nature should be dragged in to separate us by a third person.’15 Mesens had an extremely narrow agenda, in that he saw the museum as a chance to showcase British Surrealism and put behind him some friction that had arisen over an abstract art exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune in 1939. He also wanted to distance himself from any personal ties to Guggenheim, with whom he (like Roland) had had a brief affair. Guggenheim was resolute: this was her project, and did not see any reason why she should give Mesens and Roland a floor of ‘her’ museum. On 18 August 1939 Mesens wrote to Roland observing that he was aware that Read had written to him asking him not to back out of the scheme because ‘ . . . you have so much influence with Picasso and other artists that you could make it almost impossible for us to carry on’.16 Mesens was scathing about Read. Mesens allied himself firmly to Roland and saw the opposition as ‘La Guggenheim’ and Kenneth Clark, whose house in Portland Place was now mooted as the quarters for the museum. With Clark involved, Mesens claimed, it would become a museum devoted to his favoured artists: Augustus John, Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson. Roland, attempting to steer a middle course, suggested that he and Mesens obtain broad-based support for their museum. Only in this way, he told Mesens, could they ‘gain the ascendency over P. G. and Co.’ He even suggested that they print a brochure clearly outlining their objectives, listing the names of supporters and an estimate of the required funds. His exhortations to Mesens fell on deaf ears; Mesens, anxious to confront Read, accused Roland of being apathetic. Mesens even composed a short operetta, Un peu de droiture S.V.P. (A Little Backbone, Please) to shake Roland into submission. In turn, Roland was unflappable: ‘We must bear in mind the assets that we have – collections,

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London Bulletin, connections – and not lose them in grandiose projects for which the moment is not propitious.’17 Mesens, who called a meeting at the Barcelona restaurant in Beak Street on 11 April 1940, remained incensed by the Read–Guggenheim venture because, he argued, switching tactics, surrealists should not be involved in activities that were not completely surrealistic. Such endeavours, if pursued, would eventually water down their movement. Roland remained adamant that there should be no divide between himself and Read. This was to prove a wise decision when they revisited the idea of a modern museum after the war. There were more personal concerns. In September 1940, Roland was startled when Valentine telephoned to tell him she was stranded in London. From India, she had been trying to return to her parents in Gascony, but after the fall of France in May–June 1940, the British ship she was travelling on to Marseille could not put into port and so Valentine’s ship was re-routed to Southampton. Her ex-husband suggested they meet at the Three Horseshoes, a pub in Tottenham Court Road frequented by surrealists, to sort things out. Roland was delayed arriving at the assigned time. When he did, Valentine leapt up. She was glad to see him, but was afraid of encountering Lee Miller. ‘But,’ he pointed out to her, ‘that’s Lee you were talking to.’ The usually reticent Valentine blurted out: ‘Oh! But she’s wonderful!’18 When Valentine was bombed out of her hotel soon afterwards, Lee insisted that her new friend stay at Downshire Hill. Valentine remained in London for nearly a year, and enlisted as a soldat de troisième classe in the French Free Army. As such, she became a driver for senior officers. She was later posted to her brother’s unit in Algeria before returning to London for the remainder of the war. Much to Roland’s surprise, Valentine and Lee got on very well. During the dark days of the Blitz, the group of three took comfort in each other’s company. In some ways, Roland’s life had come full circle. Lee, confined to London in the extremely cold winter of 1939, cut off from her former home in Egypt and obviously bored with little to do, volunteered without pay at Brogue (as British Vogue was known) on New Bond Street, then became a freelancer and eventually found

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more permanent work with the magazine when Harry Yoxall, the managing editor, obtained a work permit for her. After the government brought in severe paper rationing in April 1940 for publishers, the last issue of the London Bulletin was published. Brogue was under similar constraints, and it attempted to modify its contents to suit the times – and the paper it could obtain. Lee soon became a good friend of Audrey Withers, the magazine’s Oxford-educated editor. An astute journalist, Withers realised she needed to convince the Ministry of Information that Vogue was important to the war effort. In order to accomplish this, she modified the magazine to fit the conditions of war, and she had the good sense to know that any adaptations would be in need of constant modification. At first, her magazine suggested alterations that a woman could make to her wardrobe or lifestyle to take into account the fear and paranoia that enveloped a Britain possibly on the edge of extinction. In essence, she found a way of combining the fleeting face of fashion with eternal verities. Lee’s first photo for Brogue was ‘Military Alliance’, in which airforce-blue tweed cloth was conjoined with the severe martial cut of the suit worn by the model. She did a spread of two women who remained ‘Still Smart despite All Difficulties’, and another of ‘Camouflage Clothes’. After the Blitz began in earnest, she photographed the bomb damage at Brogue’s office. The accompanying headline ran: ‘Here Is Vogue in Spite of All’. Lee also photographed for such regular features as ‘Bargain of the Month’ and the ‘Vogue Pattern Book’; there were portraits of celebrated women and actresses who agreed to act as fashion models; she took pictures of accessories such as hats, shoes and handbags. More than anything else, Lee’s eyes remained ‘wide open’ to the daily lives of Londoners, as can be seen in the small book of photos, Grim Glory – Pictures of Britain under Fire, which was featured in the May 1941 Vogue. These photographs were characterised accurately by the American broadcaster Edward R. Morrow as ‘pictures of a nation at war. They are honest pictures – routine scenes to those of us who have reported Britain’s ordeal by fire and high explosives. These Englishmen have bought survival with their tender-roofed old buildings; with their bodies and their nerves. This little book offers you a glimpse of their battle. Somehow they are able to fight down their fears each night; to go to work each morning.’19

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The horror of war unleashed Roland’s creativity as a painter, perhaps most strikingly in Black Music (1940) (Plate 15). ‘There were days and nights when Londoners’, Roland recalled, ‘showed their humanity and good humour as never before or perhaps since. In the repeated din of warfare I painted among others, [this] small picture.’20 Emerging from the blacks and browns are the remnants of a musician grasping his cello. The headless figure is desiccated; his right arm ends in a sharp, pointed piece of metal; his two legs look ethereal, as if they are incapable of bearing any weight; the wing at the canvas’s upper right probably symbolises the German planes that are cascading bombs down upon London. The cello in the middle picture area, mainly white, suggests that art has the power to help humankind survive in even the most tragic of situations. In this poignant, melancholy canvas Roland enshrined his response to the chaos of war. He felt that one of the worst things about the Blitz was the noise, which sounded to him like demented music.21 Culture as he knew it was in danger of being eradicated, but he felt that individuals, especially artists, could challenge the power of despair. Once again, his Quaker childhood gave him sustenance to believe that the individual could prevail in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances. Just as his forebears had eventually triumphed over religious persecution, he believed that England, against the odds, could win. After Roland’s stint teaching military camouflage at Osterley Park, he enlisted in the 19th Battalion of the Home Guard Middlesex Regiment in September 1941, and in June 1942 was posted to the SE Army Field Craft School. In July 1943 he was discharged from the Home Guard and on 10 July received an Emergency Commission as a Second Lieutenant; on the same day, he was posted to the Camouflage Development and Training Centre in Farnham, Surrey. Two days later, he was appointed local Captain and posted to the Eastern Command Camouflage School in Norwich. Roland’s posting to the camouflage unit occurred after Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery eavesdropped on a lecture he was giving to a large group of Home Guard officers. He was summoned to meet Montgomery, who told him he now had a commission in the regular army.22 Roland received other appointments and promotions, but his basic work was as an instructor in camouflage.

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In 1941, Roland published the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage, which provided guidance on the use of texture and colour for protection from aerial reconnaissance. To an old soldier, the idea of hiding from your enemy and the use of deception may possibly be repulsive. He may feel that it is not brave and not cricket. But that matters very little to our enemies, who are ruthlessly exploiting every means of deception at the present time to gain their spectacular victories. They can only be stopped by new methods, however revolutionary these may appear.

Roland’s 112-page book ingeniously applies many things he had learned as an artist to his new pursuit. He shows how careful observation – a key part of image-making – is essential to disguise. He also emphasises that countershading and disruptive patterning are frequently found in flora and fauna: for him, camouflage was all about applying principles from nature. In warfare, fixed positions (i.e., buildings) could be integrated into the landscape and thus concealed by using nets and screens or tarred sandbags covered with earth or rubbish. Roland argued that such re-arrangements of nature were part and parcel of any artist’s repertoire. ‘By using decoys and dummies we shall be able to draw the enemy’s attention away from our vital points’; ‘by the use of camouflage and smoke screens our real positions and movements can be hidden’ from the enemy. Texture was more important than colour. Surprisingly, green paint to represent trees and forests was to be avoided because it contained too much blue, and would eventually yellow. He made some recommendations wittily and comically: ‘A mixture of soot and flour will make a good paste which sticks to the skin. By some who live in county districts cow-dung has been advocated, and for those who have the courage to use it, it can be highly recommended in spite of its unpleasantness, since it retains good colour and texture when dry.’ The Manual demonstrates that although Roland may have begun his adventures in camouflage in an amateurish manner, he had learned a great deal in a short amount of time. Later, Roland provided a matter-of-fact, modest account of his war service: ‘for two years I was occupied playing boy-scout games with the Home Guard, giving lectures and demonstrations all over

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England and Wales in preparation for the invasion that never came. But owing to my close links with the army camouflage that had absorbed a number of artists [John Lake, Roland’s major], actors, fashion designers [Oliver Messel] and even a conjurer [Jasper Maskelyn] into its ranks, as soon as the menace of invasion had evaporated, I was given the rank of captain and, to my surprise and embarrassment, over-night I found myself in command of the Eastern Command Camouflage School, with its headquarters in the elegant eighteenth-century Assembly Rooms in Norwich.’23 In all the venues in which he served, Roland’s aims were straightforward: ‘Applying the principles of cubism to the optical disruption of form obtained by covering a surface with patterns, it was possible, given the right background, to make an object disappear as a moth does on the bark of a tree.’24 During his lectures, he liked to use his ‘startle slide’: a colour photograph of Lee lying on a lawn naked but for a camouflage net; when challenged about this unorthodox approach to pedagogy, he responded: ‘if camouflage can hide Lee’s charms, it can hide anything’. That experiment almost went awry. Roland had been supplied by a cosmetics firm with a dull matt green ointment, and had been asked to test its effectiveness. Lee, a willing guinea pig, had stripped and covered herself with the paste. ‘My theory was that if it could hide such eye-catching attractions as hers from the invading Hun, smaller and less seductive areas of skin would stand an even better chance of becoming invisible.’ The experiment was deemed a success until Roland tried to remove the paste from his hands and discovered that soap and water turned dull green into vivid electric green. Roland felt he might have permanently disfigured Lee, but she was unperturbed. ‘Did you use hot or cold water?’ When he told her hot, she took a bath in cold water that ‘happily did remove every trace of the ointment’.25 Roland remained in England during the war except for a twomonth posting to Italy in the spring of 1944. During that stay, he watched the shelling of Monte Cassino. Later, in Naples, Vesuvius provided what appeared to be an even more menacing display, ‘belching out mountainous fiery clouds prophetic of the atom bomb’.26 Roland would have been reminded of his stay in the same country at the end of the Great War. He would also have recalled his earlier determination: ‘in spite of the appalling confusion with the war now

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over, that there was a chance for a new era to begin in which the healing vigour of the arts, so evident in those Italian villages, could again assert its importance’.27 If at its outset, Roland had claimed that he would passively allow this war to come to him, his subsequent actions show he followed a very different course. He joked about his war: ‘I knew I would never be much good at killing people, so I did what I could do best.’28 Roland once confessed to Herbert Read that he had a great reluctance to shoot people. His friend, who had served in the army during the Great War, replied that shooting people was preferable to being shot at.29 Roland and Lee were also involved in their own war. Their relationship never ran along conventional lines. Although a forceful, determined person, Roland was never as frenetic as his partner. The war unleashed Lee’s creativity in startling new directions as soon as she began working for Brogue; it also brought her into contact with the American photographer David E. Scherman, almost ten years younger than her. Born in Manhattan, Scherman grew up in New Rochelle, New York and then attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1936. He eventually became a photographer for Life magazine. In 1941 the young man had become legendary because of his report on the destruction of the Zam Zam, an unarmed passenger ship on its way to Africa that had been sunk by a German raider disguised as a merchantman. A passenger on the ship, Scherman took photographs that confirmed, when published in Life, the identity of the German ship, which was subsequently sunk by a British warship. Lee met Scherman on Dean Street, where he and a group of Time-Life journalists had set up shop. On the evening they met, Scherman drove Lee back to Downshire Hill. ‘Its walls were completely covered with what I thought were absolutely first-rate copies of the works of Picasso, Braque, Miró, Tanguy, Chirico, Brancusi, Giacometti, Tunnard, Max Ernst, René Magritte and a dozen by Roland Penrose himself. Only they were not copies, she explained to me patiently.’30 Scherman was quickly smitten with Lee. By February 1942, she was contemplating sharing quarters with Scherman and some of his colleagues because Roland was often away. After she discussed this matter with Roland, they invited Scherman to join them at Downshire

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Hill. The house was, he quite soon discovered, ‘mind-boggling, and so were Roland and Lee’s regular soirées, the guest-lists of which read like a Who’s Who of modern art, journalism, British politics, music and even espionage, though we didn’t know about the latter until years later. Communists, Liberals and Tories drank and jostled one another.’31 Scherman was small, fast-moving and wise-cracking, and completely unlike most of his English colleagues. He was in almost every conceivable way the opposite of the tall, often languid, aristocraticlooking Roland, who he insisted on calling ‘Rollers’. Quite soon, Davie, as Lee called him, was sleeping with her when Roland was away on assignment. ‘It was a ménage à trois,’ he recalled, ‘but Roland was in the army, so it soon became a ménage à deux.’ Roland accepted the situation because, he said, ‘I was very fond of Dave and admired him greatly.’ He was piqued nevertheless when he came home to find his friend’s pyjamas under his pillow. Since Lee and Roland believed in open relationships, Lee’s bedding of Scherman had to be acceptable to Roland. For Lee, her fellow countryman was a bit like a younger brother. Lee had the pleasure of being loved by two men – and being able to have sex openly with both. If there was a touch of the forbidden in her relationship with Scherman, that stigma was lessened by the frankness with which all three participants dealt with each other. Scherman, Roland realised, would do his best to protect Lee during a bombing raid (Fig. 51). Lee tutored the relatively inexperienced Scherman in the ways of lovemaking, but the relationship was a reciprocal one: Scherman, adept in the photojournalism techniques of Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstadt and Robert Capa, knew all about their ‘exact instant’ approach, but he also believed that a good photographer could reframe a shot. His motto was, ‘You invent a good picture.’ Scherman taught Lee a new way of seeing. At Brogue, Lee and Scherman collaborated on ‘photodramatisations’, wherein a true situation could be cleverly restaged. With Roland’s assistance, for example, Scherman did a photo essay on the Home Guard’s capture of a mock French village. Through

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Figure 51. Scherman, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, Hampstead, 1942.

Scherman, Lee also came into contact with American photojournalists, including Bourke-White – whom she had known in New York – and Martha Gellhorn. ‘I suggested’, Scherman later recalled, ‘that [Lee] too, a perfectly bona fide Yank [like himself] apply for accreditation to the US forces as a war correspondent. She was an expatriate of twenty years and the thought had never occurred to her.’ The accreditation came through Audrey Withers’ efforts on her behalf: she became Brogue’s official war correspondent on 30 December 1942.

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When D-Day arrived on 6 June 1944, Lee was anxious to witness and photograph the action first-hand. Again, she had Withers’ support, even though it might not be immediately clear why a fashion magazine was covering the war. Withers’ response to such a criticism was direct: ‘It was all very well encouraging ourselves with the conventional patter about keeping up morale, but magazines – unlike books – are essentially about the here and now. And this was wartime.’ Remembering what magazine she was working for, Lee ordered a fancy uniform that she hardly ever wore (she was almost always in battledress and looked like a GI), and was off to cover a US evacuation hospital back of Omaha Beach in Normandy.32 Later in 1944 she returned to France to cover the siege of St Malo, and then accompanied the US Army to Paris, where she photographed the Liberation. On that day, she called upon Picasso, Éluard and other survivors. She recalled: Picasso and I fell into each others’ arms and between laughter and tears and having my bottom pinched and my hair mussed we exchanged news about friends and their work, incoherently, and looked at new pictures . . . I found Paul Éluard: he was talking on the telephone in the back room of a libraire. He didn’t notice who had come into the gloomy little den and waved for silence. Then he noticed my uniform, and froze a little. He hadn’t been on sitting terms with a ‘soldier’ for a very long time . . . There was almost nothing to say to each other – stupid things about how I had traced him . . . idiotic remarks on the weather.33

At the flat of Yvonne and Christian Zervos, Lee photographed Nusch and Paul Éluard in front of the unstretched canvas of Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes. Nusch, emaciated and frail, seemed like a ghost – she would die the following year. She and her husband had spent years in hiding from the Gestapo because of their work for the Resistance. Roland, determined not to be left out of all the joyous excitement, obtained leave, and on 28 September bluffed his way onto a supply plane to Le Bourget. He headed for where Lee was staying at the Allied press headquarters in the Hôtel Scribe, where Lee and Scherman were sharing adjacent rooms. Hers was crammed full with photographic equipment and looted weapons. When Lee received the news of Roland’s imminent arrival, she took off all her clothes and announced: ‘I’m going to have a good clean bath for this!’

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To be able to return to France was, simply put, intoxicating. Roland had been in intermittent contact with his great friend Éluard, who was mobilised in the Intendance (Quartermaster’s Office) at Mignères (Loire) and demobbed in 1940 when he went to Paris. He began resistance activities in 1941. Two years later, he helped organise the Comité national des écrivains. From November 1943 to February 1944, a friendly doctor in a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban hid him. He then returned to Paris and started the clandestine journal L’Eternelle révue. On 3 April 1942, Éluard had published ‘Liberté’, a twenty-onestanza quatrain devoted to places, real or imagined, on which he re-inscribed the word ‘freedom’. The poem, obviously without a censorship visa, was part of a clandestine collection of verse. The text was smuggled into England from Argentina, and Roland translated it into English for the benefit of the London Gallery’s Bulletin; officials at the Ministry of Information probably became aware of it when the poem was sent to them for clearance, and, as a result, and with the encouragement of Gaullists resident in England, the RAF dropped thousands of copies on occupied France. Roland was later concerned that in promoting the use of the poem in this way, he might have subjected his friend to greater attention – and thus danger – from the Vichy government and the resident Germans. During this post-war visit, Roland gathered material for In Service of the People, An Account of the French Resistance Movement Compiled from Books, Newspapers and Reviews and Published Immediately after the Liberation of France. Éluard gave Roland a large collection of clandestine publications, which he stuffed into his bag. The resulting book contains writings by, among others, Sartre, Éluard and Aragon. Jacques Decour had founded the journal Les Lettres Françaises: he and his printer had been killed, but the periodical survived. Roland wrote: ‘These letters, written in the anguish of waiting for death, were some of the earliest and most potent forms of resistance literature. They spoke with such eloquence of the courage among young and old alike.’ The book’s simple cover shows the Cross of Lorraine printed in tricolour. In addition to Decour, Max Jacob and Robert Desnos had been murdered; Lou Strauss-Ernst, Max’s first wife, had perished at Auschwitz. In the midst of joyous relief, Roland could feel the presence of the absent, those who had not made it through.

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For too long, Roland had been deprived of this magnificent city: its familiar smell, its architecture, girls on bicycles and rides in horse cabs. The darkened streets were again bubbling with life. ‘Most of all’, he treasured dining ‘again by candlelight’ with old friends (Fig. 52). My first evening in the old high-windowed studio of Picasso, surrounded by a mass of new paintings and sculpture, a dozen of my old friends were there. I had never wept tears of joy until then. Questions followed. What had I been doing? What had they? Four years of agony of different brands had to be crammed into a few minutes. They were all in tremendously high spirits, their enthusiasm hid at first glance the signs of strain they had been through. Much worse, more sustained than I had ever imagined.34

Figure 52. Reunion in France in Picasso’s studio, 1944. Left to right from back: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso, Nusch Éluard, Paul Éluard, Elsa Triolet.

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Chapter Eleven

Post-War Blues (1945–1947)

If Roland had a good war, Lee had a spectacular one in which she came fully into her own as a world-class photographer. After the Liberation of Paris, from her base at the Hôtel Scribe, she covered the Alsace campaign, and on 30 April 1945 she entered Dachau concentration camp after its liberation by the Americans (shortly before the German surrender). In Munich that night she visited Hitler’s apartment, and was photographed in his bathtub by Scherman. She photographed the trial of Marshal Pétain in August. In the autumn of 1945, after Scherman returned to Paris and then the States, Lee followed the GIs into Austria. The photographs she took of dying children in a Vienna hospital are both chilling and horrifying. The break from Scherman was difficult for her. She certainly missed quipping with him, but her feelings for him went much deeper. The two were both dedicated photographers, always on the alert for the perfect picture. As such, there was a competitive edge in their relationship, but Lee realised that her fellow American understood her better than Roland. On his side, Scherman was well aware that he could not live with Lee. He was even disinclined to continue working with her. In July 1945, Lee returned to England. Roland had to be away in Norwich for much of her stay. When Lee and Roland were together, they fought. He wanted her to remain with him in England – she wanted to continue with her work. Audrey Withers possessed an excellent understanding of Lee’s dilemma. ‘She was reluctant to abandon the adventurous life in which she had found her true vocation, and sensed, rightly, that

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she would never again have the opportunities it had given her.’1 In the midst of a heated quarrel, Lee told Roland: ‘I’m not Cinderella. I can’t force my foot into the glass slipper.’2 She stormed out of Downshire Hill and back to Paris. Two months later, in September 1945, in a calmer frame of mind, she wrote – but did not post – a letter to Roland in which she tried to sort things out. I haven’t forgotten you. Every evening when I could take the time and certainly have the interest to write you I think that to-morrow I’ll know the ultimate answer or that the depression will have lifted, or my exaltation ebbed or whatever – so that I’ll be able to write you a more coherent impression containing some sort of decision – whether it be that I’m staying or coming home, licked. The moment never comes. . . . I’m leaving for the Austrian trip tomorrow morning, Saturday, at dawn with a great deal of dread and boredom. Davie is hanging round waiting for me to get off because he knows that if he doesn’t, I’ll never leave.3

By the end of 1945, Lee remained paralyzed. Did she go forward – alone – with her photojournalism, or did she return to Roland in England? She became incommunicado from Roland, her family, her husband in Egypt and the staff at Brogue. Roland often called at Withers’ office in hopes that she had gleaned some information about Lee. Meanwhile, another complexity was added to an already byzantine situation. Roland had begun an affair with Gigi Richter, a Germanborn conservator who had spent the war in the States and had only returned to England in 1945. She had studied in Italy and England before enrolling at Harvard. Her father, George Martin Richter, was an art historian specialising in Renaissance art. Unlike Lee, Gigi was quiet, refined and gentle. She and Roland took sedate walks on Hampstead Heath. Again unlike Lee, she drank very little – a glass of sherry was her limit. Just as Lee remained taken with Davie, Roland was deeply attached to his new love. However, he considered his connection to Lee to be the most vital he had ever experienced. In this spirit, he wrote an eloquent, impassioned plea to her.

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January 15, 1946 Darling, For so long I have tried to understand your silence. A silence which not only touches me deeply but, so I’m told affects your dealings with your office, your parents and Aziz. Darling you left me last August after a stupid row, saying . . . that you would return at least every two months and would write. Since then I have received one letter and one Christmas Cable. I can’t count the letters and cables I have sent you – but I imagine you have received more than I have. I have wanted to know for so long what you were doing and thinking, but no clue to that has come through. I still hope it will. You might even arrive out of the clouds at any moment – but I am not prone to believe in ghosts and you darling, by your own behaviour, have become a ghost. Whether I like it or not you have made yourself [into a ghost] no more, no less. My cables, my letters remain unanswered and I am worried – then tired of having a phantom. Our pact, our pact made from the whole bottom of my heart was one which gave you always your liberty. Every hour spent with you was an hour of supreme happiness – every hour without you was just too bad. But now these hours without you have taken big proportions and there is no sign that the future will be any better. How do you wonder that my hopes, my fancy should not stray, as indeed yours must most certainly done also? Darling Lee, I ask you for an immediate reply – cable me as soon as you get this – what are you doing, when are you coming home? My reasons for asking are vital. You asked me before leaving if I had some girl I loved as well as you – now I have. Someone you don’t know – have never seen and who is here – real – no ghost. This is my last appeal – not as a poem this time but with all the love and devotion to you that you know – I hope – so well. In the spirit of that understanding we had together from the start and which if kept by us both is the only true understanding, do, my Lee, answer what has happened to you and what are your feelings about the future. I don’t love by halves and I don’t hate those who I have loved but I must know to whom my loyalty is due – if you refuse to answer I shall take your silence to be your reply. But should you answer, my darling, you can put to rest, in your own terms, this heartache which is all due to the immense love that you have kept alight in me for so long. Lee – my darling – answer Roland.4

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Lee did not respond. When this letter reached her in Budapest, she ignored it. She had just witnessed the execution by firing squad of László Bárdossy, the fascist prime minister, and had decided to press on with her work until Scherman, who had heard about Gigi, cabled her: ‘GO HOME’. Her reply was even shorter than his: ‘OK’. If Lee had held out from answering Roland because she held any illusions about a future with Scherman, those hopes were dashed. Meanwhile, Roland, who had been demobbed, travelled to Paris, where he visited with, among many others, Picasso and Éluard. On 16 February, Lee met up with Roland.5 She was a physical wreck: her face was haggard and chalk-white, her gums were bleeding. Roland embraced her and immediately took her back with him to London. Gigi moved out of Downshire Hill.6 The psychic crisis that enveloped Lee in 1945 and 1946 had so many causes that she was incapable of sorting them out. She had found her métier as an artist, and she felt, rightly, that women were often encouraged to put aside their talents in pursuit of wifedom and motherhood. For her that was not an appealing prospect. She was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and her appetite for taking photos had disappeared. Lee was in love with Davie, but, like him, she now knew that they had no hope of living any semblance of an ordinary domestic life together. As in the case of Gellhorn and Hemingway, relationships between hardboiled newspaper reporters and photographers did not easily bend to any semblance of convention or traditional notions of companionable bliss. What Lee witnessed at Dachau and in Vienna was truly horrific. She saw the worst aspects of the human condition literally pressed to her face. A glimpse of what she beheld can be seen in this passage where she recalled a particularly ghastly event: ‘For an hour I watched a baby die. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons . . . I’d thought all babies looked alike, but [those were] healthy babies: there are many faces for the dying. This wasn’t a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator.’7 Lee loved Roland, but she must have feared that their open approach to sexual fidelity might ultimately undermine their relationship. She had established a strong connection with him, but she did not know if it would be immutable.

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There were further considerations. A family friend had raped Lee when she was seven years old, and she had contracted gonorrhea. As a young woman, she had posed in the nude for her father. He had asked her to do so even though he was well aware of what had transpired when she was a child. As a professional model, she was well aware of how women are viewed as commodities by the fashion industry. In other words, from early on in life, Lee had been valued and misused because of her extraordinary beauty. Although she had enjoyed sex with a number of men, a part of Lee was wary and suspicious of them. She wanted to believe in love, but she knew it could be fleeting. In 1946, she wanted to continue photographing because it offered her a way of existence she found comforting. The world might have been continuing to spin out of control, but she had attempted to place some order on that chaos through her photographs. She could no longer do this. But then, there were the claims of the heart. Wisely or not, she chose love. In making her decision, Lee remained silent about the childhood abuse she had endured. Very concerned about exposing the sufferings of others, she concealed from Roland the trauma to which she had been subjected. Perhaps she could not bear to share this experience with anyone. Nevertheless, her silence erected a barrier between them. Moreover, in conversations with Roland, Lee never emphasised the horrifying events she had witnessed at Dachau and in Vienna. In many ways, he was helpless to assist her because he never had a full understanding of her inner demons. Reunited, Lee and Roland flew to New York City on 19 May 1946. On the surface, everything seemed to go well. The dealer Julian Levy lent them his apartment, and the Condé Nast staff greeted Lee as a returning hero. Levy’s apartment, which was also his gallery, was delightfully mysterious to Roland: ‘The door from the lift opened unexpectedly into rooms crowded with fantastic surrealist works such as Cornell boxes, early work by Dalí and wartime paintings, new to me, by Max Ernst, Tanguy, Man Ray, with dozens of objects and paintings by other artists whom I was soon to meet.’8 Roland was elated to have the opportunity to rekindle his relationship with the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who likely warned him, as he had done Read, about the dangers he would face if he backed any kind of proposal to open a museum of modern art in London. Barr, two years younger than Roland, became

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director of MOMA in August 1929, at the age of twenty-seven. Like Roger Fry, he was a fierce proponent of the post-impressionists, but his most enduring accomplishment was his Picasso retrospective of 1939–40, to which Roland had lent some pictures. Although he had already backed off on such an approach, Roland was taken with MOMA’s collection: ‘Realizing that it was on a far greater scale that anything that could be dreamt of in London, consistently indifferent to all matters concerning the visual arts and still enfeebled by the war, this achievement nevertheless roused in me a longing to attempt some similar kind of folly at home.’9 Barr would also have expressed his gratitude to Roland for allowing his Picassos to be sent to MOMA during the war. On the train to her childhood home in Poughkeepsie, Lee pointed out to Roland the schools she had attended. Theodore Miller made a good impression on Roland, who called him ‘a highly skilled and inquisitive engineer’ and a ‘benign atheist’. Lee had nevertheless, he realised, become a ‘menace to discipline’ because of her father’s zealous over-control.10 The couple took drives up the Hudson, and to everyone’s surprise, Lee took a special new pleasure in cooking. During their stay, Lee remained on edge. John, Lee’s brother, recalled: ‘She was not the same after the war. Her health had suffered and so had her looks.’11 During a visit to Bill Scherman, David’s brother, she was so much not her usual self that he wrote to his brother about the change. Somewhat insensitively, David responded: ‘She is getting old and with it getting fat.’12 Roland’s affair with Gigi had continued, and she was also in Manhattan, where Roland visited her several times. This would have added greatly to Lee’s sense of insecurity. She was a sophisticated person who understood full well the ways of the world; she was also aware of the compact she had made with Roland when they met. She may not have expected sexual fidelity, but she obviously regretted that Roland continued to see Gigi. After all, she had returned to Roland with the expectation that his affair with Gigi would come to an end. For Lee, sexual fidelity was one thing; emotional fidelity was another. Roland, well aware that Paul Éluard had loved Nusch but had bedded many women, considered his behaviour proper for a committed surrealist, someone whose instincts carried him simultaneously in different directions. Another ex-girlfriend presented a problem. In March 1946, shortly before the Penroses arrived in the States, Peggy Guggenheim’s kiss-andtell autobiography, Out of This Century, had been published. Among

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the many transparent disguises in the book was the one of Roland as Donald Wrenclose; Roland did not mind so much the private revelations about himself, although being called a bad artist wounded him. Lee and Roland saw Peggy, Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba, and Max Ernst, whom they were shortly to visit in Arizona. On 23 July, the couple flew to Phoenix, Arizona and then drove to Oak Creek Canyon near the town of Sedona, where Max lived with his new wife, the artist Dorothea Tanning. The landscape amazed Roland. Ernst and Tanning ‘were happily building a house for themselves in a remote part of Arizona, and the surroundings were astonishingly like the most fantastic landscapes Max had painted before ever seeing the Wild West. It was as though he had designed the great red mountains and canyons himself’ (Fig. 53).13

Figure 53. Roland and Lee in Arizona, 1946.

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The Grand Canyon was a disappointment to Roland because it was filled to the brim with mist on the day he visited it, but the Painted Desert he found inspiring. He was most impressed by the Hopi reservation, ‘where from a house-top we joined in the compulsive rhythms of the masked Katchina dancers’.14 A bit later, in the ‘vast, shapeless metropolis’15 of Los Angeles, Roland and Lee visited her favourite brother, Erik, and his wife Mafy, whom Roland had met in Cairo. Man Ray and his new wife, Juliet, were also there. They met some movie stars, including Gregory Peck; Lee took photos of Stravinsky. For Roland, the highlight of their stay was the surrealist collection of Walter Arensberg. Although Roland’s first visit to the United States was a great success, he was glad to be returning home, though he recalled, ‘there was no thought on the part of either [himself or Lee] that we should live there. Even Lee had become more European than American.’16 That autumn Lee continued to work for Brogue; but her work, Audrey Withers felt, had become lacklustre compared to what she had previously accomplished. In February when she was in St Moritz on assignment, Lee wrote to tell Roland that she was pregnant: ‘Darling. This is a hell of a romantic way to tell you that I’ll shortly be knitting little clothes for a little man . . . So far no resentment or anguish or mind changing or panic, only a mild astonishment that I’m so happy about it.’ She added: ‘MY WORK ROOM IS NOT GOING TO BE A NURSERY. How about your studio? HA HA.’17 Taking note of the not-too-subtle hint, Roland arranged to trade 21 Downshire Hill for the larger No. 36 across the street. Once the move was completed on 28 February 1947, Roland and Lee discovered that their new home, devoid of carpets and curtains and the fuel necessary to heat it, was stone cold. They smashed up pieces of furniture, bed legs and the bases of sculptures to burn in the fireplace. Lee’s pregnancy was difficult: she had pneumonia, and then a viral condition that resembled mumps. She had nurses in attendance day and night. Unkind gossip suggested that Lee had become pregnant in order to entrap Roland; but doctors had earlier assured Lee that she could not become pregnant because her previous abortions had rendered her infertile.

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‘This baby business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,’ she joked. ‘If anyone ever mentions to me again how much I’m going to love it once I have it, I’m going to sock them in the nose.’18 Then the dreadful winter finally came to an end. As Roland recollected, ‘Spring, however, arrived and with it Aziz, who was at last able to come to London with the intention of giving Lee a divorce in Muslim style. He did this with grace and efficiency and frequently dined with us in an unconventional manner. Valentine was staying with us at the time and Lee, who was confined to her bed, gave dinner parties for four – Aziz, Valentine and myself sat round a card table at the foot of her bed while we listened in enchantment to the stories in Arabian Nights’ style that Aziz could spin endlessly.’19 On 3 May, a day when the pear trees in their garden were in full bloom, the couple married at the Hampstead registry office. The witnesses were the managing editor of Vogue, Timmie O’Brien, and her Australian war hero and journalist husband Terry; the painter John Lake; and Sylvia Redding, studio head at Vogue. The only others in attendance were Valentine and Aziz. Since having children at the age of forty was considered risky, Lee decided to have a caesarean. On the night before she was scheduled to give birth, she wrote to her mother, asking what her thoughts had been when she was about to give birth to her: ‘Did you worry whether I’d be a monster? . . . Did you know you’d love me?’20 On the morning of the day of the operation, 9 September, she wrote instructions to Roland in the event of her death. She also reflected on what she had done with her life. I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute, all my life – I had a wonderful time,’ but I know myself, now, that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection. Above all, I’d try to find some way of breaking down, through the silence which imposes itself on me in matters of sentiment. I’d have let you, Roland, know how much and how passionately and how tenderly I love you. Next week, if I’m here, I’ll probably be as offhand again as in the past, or, at least, seem to. Does it puzzle you? You know that I love you, don’t you?

She added: ‘I accepted your life with Gigi as gracefully as possible, to prove that I loved you, and the fact that your love for

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me was diluted and weakened was unimportant as long as you were happy.’21 This pronouncement was an all-encompassing one in which the writer revealed her deepest fears. Although she insisted that she would not, given a second chance, have done things differently – only more intensely – she nevertheless acknowledged her extreme vulnerability. She often acted in an abrasive manner, and she was well aware that she might return to this kind of subterfuge after the birth of the baby. She was also telling her husband that she had endured his relationship with Gigi although she had been deeply hurt by his behaviour. Antony was born later that day. Roland, waiting at home, recorded in his diary ‘a morning of great beauty’.22 Éluard, who was staying with the Penroses, wrote a short poem inscribed on a drawing: ‘La beauté de Lee aujourd’hui / Antony / C’est du soleil sur ton lit’.23 In a less sentimental mood than his friend, Roland wrote in comic fashion to Lee’s parents: ‘He is so ugly, snout like a pig, hands like a bruiser and the toughest looks I have ever known.’24 The baby was often called Butch, but his given names were Anthony William Roland (he later dropped the ‘h’ to become Antony). Roland later told his son that he had furnished him with this name because St Anthony loved temptation and so did he. In so doing, he bestowed it on him as a blessing. At the time, there was a ‘Temptation of St Anthony’ competition set up by MGM to promote the film The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, starring George Sanders and Angela Lansbury: the winner would have his canvas shown in Technicolor in the film. Among the contestants were Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Paul Delvaux. Max Ernst won. According to Roland, Ernst came by the prize honestly: he painted the best picture because of his tremendous susceptibility to temptation.25 Lee’s confession to Roland pinpoints the emotional crossroads she confronted in 1946 and 1947. She had returned to Roland after he had pleaded with her to do so. Upon her return, he had continued his affair with Gigi. She did not feel she had the right to insist he terminate that relationship, because she had lived her sexual life in a very unconventional manner – and so had Roland. She also wanted Roland to be happy. In their subsequent life together, Lee usually tolerated Roland’s various girlfriends by becoming pals with them.

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Nevertheless, she became so emotionally eviscerated that she lost interest in sex. As a young man, Roland’s sexuality had taken him in a variety of directions: an affair with Dadie Rylands; under the tutelage of Varda, a series of encounters with women; and then a chaste marriage to Valentine. In the process of separating from his first wife, he had seen a number of women. With Lee, he felt, he had found true love. This may have been so, but he simply could not control his libido, even though he had pursued and won her. Roland made a distinction between love and sex. Love was forever; for him, sex was an ongoing pursuit of a number of women. In 1946 and 1947, he was in a particularly tricky position: he was in love with two women, and could not choose between them. He did not really do so, and, as consequence, he deeply wounded his second wife, who was suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder that crippled her emotionally and sexually. Terry O’Brien felt that there ‘was no great depth in the relationship between Roland and Lee. I think Roland was in love with the idea of Lee. He was happy to climb into bed with other women – so was Lee with other men. It seems that some of the Surrealists often seemed to fall in love with an ideal – a woman who was beautiful, unconventional or eccentric, like Lee.’26 O’Brien’s opinion of the relationship between Roland and Lee is one echoed by other friends; it is not, however, one shared by all members of their circle. What does seem certain is that Roland felt perfectly free to have sex with other women and yet remain emotionally committed to Lee. His belief in surrealism as a way of life in which contrary instincts can live together allowed him to do this. Sometimes, though, Roland maintained what might appear a double standard. When he and Lee visited New York after the war, they met Peggy Riley (born Rosamond Margaret Rosenbaum): the ‘classical perfection of her beauty’ attracted them, and they became good friends with her. Rosamond worked as a European features editor for Vogue. In 1948, she married the art dealer Georges Bernier, and together they founded L’Oeil, a magazine that became a leading art journal. Later, in 1969, when Georges Bernier left his wife for another woman, John Golding recalled: Roland ‘felt passionately that Georges Bernier shouldn’t have walked out on Rosamond. He thought he was a shit.’27 For Roland, sex was one thing,

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love another. Bernier should not have abandoned the woman he was supposed to love. Roland may have been upset by his wife’s struggles, but his artwork took on a whole new direction in a canvas such as First View (1947) (Plate 16). This rich polychromatic canvas is fully alive with wonder at the idea of creation: Lee’s enormous belly is seen as a repository of fecundity. She is an earth goddess in both, but in Faites vos Jeux she is knitting. Here, Roland is alluding to the faithful Penelope awaiting the return of Ulysses. Lee had a tendency to compartmentalise her feelings in order to have some sort of control over them. Roland may be alluding to this in Unsleeping Beauty (1946) (Plate 17), where the woman’s body, in a manner reminiscent of Picasso, is divided into segments. In order to survive, Lee carefully chose which part of herself to show to a particular person. This was her usual way of operating, but this approach was disintegrating in 1947. Here, there is no prince to assist the beauty.28 Of even greater significance in understanding Roland’s complicated feelings about Lee is Abstract Composition (Portrait of Lee Miller) from 1946 (Plate 18), a canvas that is reminiscent of Night and Day, painted almost a decade earlier. There, her face expresses the warmth of the sun, her body – with clouds floating in a blue sky – suggests detachment; her red legs imply she is of the earth. The three colour schemes display three sides of the subject. Abstract Composition reprises this arrangement, in that the standing figure is also divided into three: the countenance is now a greenish yellow, the torso is blue and the area near the feet is bordered by a passage in deep red. However, the face and body of the subject are now segmented into jarring shapes in the manner of Unsleeping Beauty. In Night and Day the woman’s body is arranged into a pleasing shape displaying her comely anatomy, whereas in the later canvas the various parts of the subject’s body are divorced from each other. In Night and Day, the woman makes her own light with the solar radiance emanating from her face; in Abstract Composition, that radiance has vanished and the only light falling on her countenance comes from the outside. Three years later, in The Third Eye or The Eye of the Storm (Portrait of Lee Miller) (Plate 19), the vibrant colours of Unsleeping

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Beauty have been swapped for blacks, blues and whites. A vertical format has replaced the earlier canvas’s horizontal one. In this canvas, the body is segmented, but the focus of the picture is on the huge eye. The change in colour scheme may well signify that the relationship between Roland and Lee had by now become more subdued and less intense. In referring to ‘the third eye’, Roland is alluding to the notion that spiritual insight can be accessed by visionary, rather than physical, means. The other title signifies something completely different: the eye of a storm obviously refers to the centre of a cyclone or hurricane. During the years Roland was married to Valentine, the two had attempted to access their third eyes. This approach had failed, and Roland might be referring to this. In his relationship with Lee, her rage at his behaviour had risen to the surface. Her third eye was angry at him. Roland was using this portrait as a way of externalising his struggles with his two wives. However, the figure in this painting looks like a Cyclops from Greek and Roman mythology. In rendering Lee in this manner, Roland suggests how profoundly distanced from her he feels. In his imagination, she had become a monster rather than a beauty. Roland also struggled with what he considered the monstrous side of his own personality in the powerful Self Portrait (1947) (Plate 20). The wolf-like head and the reds in this watercolour might allude to the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Roland’s wolf-like countenance is smeared with blood, as if he has indeed consumed his prey. Roland lived his life according to what he considered surrealistic principles – ones that went against conventional standards of morality – but he may have begun to feel that he had paid a high price for doing so.

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Chapter Twelve

Re-defining Modernism (1946–1953)

In 1946, in the midst of his negotiations with Lee, Roland had been engaged in another kind of struggle. Before the war, there had been a great deal of discussion about the establishment of a museum of modern art in London. Herbert Read had attempted to start one in co-operation with Peggy Guggenheim. Roland and Mesens had made counter-moves. Nothing had happened, largely because of the approaching war. By 22 January 1946, the differences between Read and Mesens had been sufficiently mended for them – together with Roland – to send the following letter to ‘interested parties’: ‘A meeting of a few of those interested in the creation in London of a centre from which a Museum of Modern Art could ultimately be planned will be held at the office of the London Gallery on Wednesday, 30 January at 5 p.m.’ The agenda included two items: ‘to discuss the desirability of founding a London Museum of Modern Art [and] to deliberate on the best method of forming a nucleus of those interested in this project, and providing it with facilities and premises, so that it may become the germ of a greater activity.’1 At the meeting of what was to become the Museum of Modern Art Organizing Committee were Roland, Read, Mesens, the wealthy collector Peter Watson, the publisher and collector E. C. (Peter) Gregory and the Hungarian-born film director and producer George Hoellering, manager of the Academy Cinema. In a nice surrealistic touch, twelve Herbert Reads were voted onto the committee.2 The cubist collector Douglas Cooper – who in World War II had joined the Royal Air Force Intelligence unit and been sent to Cairo as an interrogator, a job at which he was enormously successful in squeezing out secrets from even hard-boiled prisoners – attended the

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second meeting of this group. A bête noire to both Read and Roland, Cooper had a decided agenda: he acknowledged the work of the Tate, the BBC and the Arts Council but claimed that there was a serious gap in the way such national institutions presented the arts to the public. Not a single one, according to him, gave a comprehensive picture of the evolution of art during the twentieth century. In particular, he loathed the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) and did not wish it to be used as a model for the proposed new institution: he was especially suspicious of MOMA’s decision to include the studies of textile design and arts and crafts as part of its mandate. As a result, MOMA, according to him, ‘swamped itself by indulging in this sort of over geared cartel of modernism’.3 Most importantly, he was concerned that cubism would play second fiddle to surrealism if Roland had his way in establishing a museum. Rarely did Cooper express doubt about himself or his opinions. He was from a wealthy family whose fortune had been made in Australia. The origins of his riches were shrouded in mystery, most likely by Cooper himself. What seems certain is that one Thomas Cooper went to Australia in 1759 – probably a decision made for him by the authorities – and there joined forces with a Mr Levi, with whom he founded the Waterloo Warehouse. The profits from that venture were used to buy real estate in Sydney. Daniel Cooper, the second son of Thomas, became the first speaker of the New South Wales Legislate Assembly, and was created a baron in 1863. Eventually the title passed to Douglas’s grandfather, who settled in England. From his estate, Douglas received his substantial fortune. Throughout his life, Douglas Cooper bristled at any suggestion that he and his money had origins in the Antipodes. He was educated at Repton, Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Freiburg. By the time he turned twenty-one in 1932, he had decided to devote one-third of his income to collecting the four major cubist painters – Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger – in every phase of their development from 1906–7 to 1914. His devotion to these artists was unbounded. At that meeting in 1946, Cooper objected to the use of the premises of the London Gallery: the proposed museum should not be associated with a gallery. Nor did he like Hoellering’s offer to use the basement of the Academy Cinema. What Cooper really wanted was to make the Tate and the British Council ‘look as silly as they are – and this does not mean compromise,

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but making things clear to the ordinary person by giving him the necessary fodder’.4 He clearly desired an institute that would pugnaciously challenge all other competing bodies. Cooper’s goals may have been the opposite of Mesens’, but both men were determinedly confrontational. Their antics ultimately resulted in the majority of the members of the committee siding with the more rational and politically nuanced opinions of Roland and Read. Roland made it clear that he thought wealthy persons should be approached for initial support, but that this initiative, as much as possible, should state specific goals. The group finally came up with a provisional policy statement: ‘Such an institution as we have in mind should be international in scope, should cover all the arts with a view to promoting their interrelations and should be open to experimental manifestations which are outside the scope of commercial enterprise and not yet given official or public recognition.’ At the next meeting the question of the scheme’s name was debated. Both Cooper and Roland were against the use of the word ‘museum’. When Roland proposed the word ‘centre’, Mesens objected because he thought such terminology was already associated with other, small, amateur groups. Quite soon, Mesens began to feel the entire venture was going in the wrong direction. He made a distinction between ‘gentlemen of leisure on the Committee’, as opposed to ‘businessmen’ like himself and Hoellering: ‘I feel that we could have seen eye to eye on more than one point of my original scheme, but now that the baby is born and its godfathers seem to be so full of ideas different from those of the people who have some practical sense, we can only expect the baby to be carried by them in turn – I think, to be frank about it, that the whole thing has gone astray because Herbert Read has undergone some influences which inevitably have led to the present pretentious state of affairs.’5 At the group’s seventh meeting on 21 May 1946 at Chelsea Town Hall, Read, back from a visit to the United States, reported that he now saw their project in a new light. There was too great an emphasis on Trustees and ‘wealthy protectors’ at MOMA; they should also be cautious about having a permanent collection – such works might make their proposed institution too static and, ultimately, too large. He also attacked the use of the word ‘museum’: this implied

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that their creation might become moribund and lose its emphasis on experimentation. That spring, the committee accepted a statement of policy written by the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson with a preface by Read, which was substantially milder than Cooper’s. Hoellering became concerned that Mesens, his die-hard surrealist colleague the filmmaker and actor Jacques Brunius, and Cooper were impeding the work of the committee. In other words, they were grinding their own axes, with little genuine concern for the success of the project. By 11 November 1946, after many further discussions and financial considerations, it was decided that there would be two major exhibitions in the first year. The first could be titled ‘The Post-War Art of 1918 in England’ and cover the ‘most revolutionary tendencies of that period in painting and sculpture and will include ballet & stage design, architecture, book production & films. It is thought that this exhibition will give an opportunity for comparison with our present post-war problems.’ The second would ‘illustrate some of the most outstanding sources of inspiration in the visual arts of this century, such as Negro, South Sea and Mexican sculpture, the “primitive” painters, the machine & scientific discoveries’. These two exhibitions would be illustrated by a catholic selection of various modern schools – cubist, futurist, Dadaist, surrealist and abstract. Douglas Cooper resigned at the next meeting. By February 1947, the organising committee had increased in number to fifteen members. Read made the first public announcement of the existence of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in a letter of 26 June 1947 to The Times. He invited those interested to write for a copy of the Statement of Policy; he received three hundred requests. Not quite as successful was his appeal for at least 500 donations of £100 each. In his curmudgeonly way George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Times asserting that since hygiene, rather than art, was the cause of the marked improvement in England during the past 100 years, the proposed Institute might be better off if it devoted it devoted itself to cleanliness rather than such shibboleths as artistic small talk and fine art scholarship. Peggy Guggenheim wrote to Roland from New York: ‘The day before I got your letter [asking for a substantial contribution] I decided to send you the minimum modest sum of £100. Sorry to disappoint

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you but I can’t do £1,000 now as you had hoped.’ She added somewhat inaccurately: ‘I have my own baby here – to console me for the one you stole in London.’6 The meetings of the organising committee in 1946 and 1947 were devoted to practical matters such as fund-raising, publicity and the search for suitable quarters, but they also established the basic, fundamental manner in which the ICA would operate. It would not have a museum; it would host exhibitions; it would be open to a plurality of modernisms; and lectures would be a vital part of its mandate. From these seeds many dissensions would later emerge. Roland’s own views of what the ICA could – and should – accomplish can be seen in some reflections of his close friends from that time, the journalists John and Cynthia Thompson: ‘Roland had this idea of it being a social meeting place for artists. It would replace the cafe life in France that he had known – he talked of it in those terms. He wanted to evoke Paris, with the writers, poets and artists meeting.’7 Just as Roland had discovered himself as an artist in France many years before, he wanted to provide a similar opportunity for his fellow countrymen. Surrealism was but one of many forms of modernism that the ICA would embrace. Mesens was not really content with that, and he agreed with Brunius that Roland was a suspicious character within their movement. In fact, his anthology of Resistance writings was used as evidence against him, as can be seen in Brunius’s letter to Mesens of 25 March 1945. It seemed to me inevitably pointless to suffer the pain of a discussion caused by the publication of his tricoloured book under the sign of the Cross of Lorraine. It simply remains for you to rule whether he can continue to be used as a sleeping partner. I know how much this question is serious and distressing for you and I share your anxiety. If you consider, which I believe would be useful, that you must maintain a contact with Penrose that will enable you to publish something good, to open the gallery, I agree in advance.8

The essential point raised by this letter is the question of cohesion. If the surrealists did not unite under the banner of Breton, they would be deviating from the cause they claimed to be supporting. At the

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core of the dispute remained Breton’s support of Trotsky, as opposed to Éluard’s pro-Stalin stance. As the war wound down in England, this imbroglio surfaced again when Toni del Renzio challenged Mesens and the other leaders of the English surrealist movement. Del Renzio, who had spent his childhood in Italy before fleeing when he was about to be sent to fight in Abyssinia, arrived in London by way of France early in 1940. He attended some of Mesens’ Barcelona restaurant gatherings. Soon after settling in London, del Renzio became convinced that English surrealism was dying: ‘War or no war, there was nothing being done about surrealism. Hitler had to be defeated, yes, but surrealism also had to carry on.’9 Shortly thereafter, in March 1942, he started the magazine Arson, which he called a spectral and surrealist review with the aim of providing ‘testimony of a vital life lived among the ruins not only of numbed houses but of exploited people’. Arson was the first surrealist publication in England since the London Bulletin and, as such, challenged Mesens’ position as the chief spokesperson for surrealism in the United Kingdom. Despite del Renzio’s acknowledgement of Mesens’ assistance, the two were soon at loggerheads. Roland was on sufficiently good terms with del Renzio to allow some paintings he owned by French surrealists to be shown in the exhibition Surrealism (27 November – 15 December 1942) organised by del Renzio, in which works by, among others, Maddox, Colquhoun, Agar and del Renzio were shown. Mesens refused to assist the upstart. The battle between the two was more territorial than a difference of opinion on surrealist issues. With the consent of the Belgian, del Renzio wanted to launch an enquiry among the English surrealists to ‘take stock of who is with us and who against’. According to Maddox, Mesens was perceived as being lethargic. Mesens did not respond, but he did reply caustically to del Renzio’s surrealist section in the anthology New Road 143. In Horizon, Mesens, Brunius and Roland wrote a letter accusing the Italian of being a ‘buffoon [who] has smuggled himself into the surrealist wagon’. Roland may have signed this letter to keep peace with Mesens. In the December 1943 issue of Horizon, del Renzio accused Mesens (incorrectly) of supporting ‘that dismal renegade Éluard, with whom, as long ago as 1939, Breton and the surrealists found

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it impossible to continue any dealings’; he then accused the English surrealist of procrastination. Also, del Renzio labelled Mesens as senile, and suggested that ‘younger and livelier men with reputations neither to make nor to lose should become the voice of surrealism’.10 Mesens counterattacked in March 1944 in Idolatry and Confusion, in which he and his co-author Jacques Brunius attacked Éluard and accused del Renzio of being nothing more than an opportunist.11 Del Renzio’s fierce attacks on Mesens eventually solidified rather than demolished the Belgian’s control of what was left of the movement. However, many tensions remained, some of which later bubbled back to the surface at the ICA. There is no doubt that there were real issues involved in the quarrels between Roland and Mesens on one side and del Renzio on the other. However, these disputes were also generational: young men often seek to replace or overthrow older men who themselves, when younger, attacked father figures. Surrealism itself was fast waning in post-war England. John Piper, an artist whose work Roland intensely disliked, was in the forefront of a group of artists that included John Minton, Michael Ayrton, John Craxton and Keith Vaughan, who imposed a neo-romantic gauze on the English landscape.12 This soon became a powerful movement, one that Roland considered retrograde. As a young man in the late 1940s, Desmond Morris, the eminent zoologist, painted in a surrealist manner and discovered to his dismay: ‘After the war, Surrealism was dead in the water. People wanted the simple things in life, pleasant things like flower paintings, nothing strange – they had had enough of that in the war!’13 Although Julian Trevelyan had exhibited at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, he too felt that surrealism lost its impetus after 1945: ‘It became absurd to compose surrealist confections . . . when German soldiers with Tommy-guns descended from the clouds on parachutes dressed as nuns.’14 Del Renzio and Mesens were not prepared for these momentous shifts. During a visit to Roland at Downshire Hill, the young Eduardo Paolozzi saw ‘a home overflowing with bizarre books, African carvings, peculiar documents and strange indescribable objects reflecting Penrose’s admiration for Breton and Ernst. The Surrealist literature there and at Zwemmer’s bookshop pointed to the making of unconventional materials and images.’ The Scottish-born artist was reflecting

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on examples of what might be called high modernist surrealism. To his eyes, ‘it was a happy return to my familiar Scottish street culture, to the cigarettes and film stars pasted in scrapbooks during my childhood’.15 Soon, Paolozzi would claim rubbish as the essential material in his art. His use of surrealism is a perfectly legitimate one, but it differs markedly from the kind of surrealism that Roland collected and painted. To survive, surrealism had changed its guise. Roland, who liked many kinds of art, reluctantly accepted the new state of affairs, even in the case of surrealism. He could do this because he was and remained a surrealist in his style of life – and never in the group’s politics, however much he shared their wider principles. Earlier, Breton had labelled Roland a ‘Surréaliste dans l’amitié’. Taken literally, Roland was not, according to Breton, a diehard surrealist in partisan terms, but a person who was very hospitable to surrealism. Years earlier, when living in France, Roland had not felt welcome at surrealist meetings, but he had never allowed this to bother him because he sought to be someone who took what he wanted from the movement – he never became involved in doctrinaire wrangles. This was the reason he could remain affable with both Éluard and Breton, even though those two were bitter enemies. For Roland, surrealism’s power remained intact, but he recognised that post-war Britain was a very different place from that of the previous decade. Nevertheless, he supported the ICA as a place where surrealism could have a secure standing. English surrealism remained in a serious state of disrepair in 1948, and this was a vexing issue for Roland. However, the teething problems at the ICA were monumental. Although he had serious reservations about Cooper’s volatile temper, Read suggested at the November 1947 meeting of the Executive that the cubist collector be invited to write the catalogue for the ICA’s first exhibition. Hoellering declared that he had already had enough of him. Other members felt that Cooper would not be content merely to write a catalogue, but would try to take the whole thing over. Read rejoined that he had made his suggestion only because Cooper was very good at such tasks, and it would be awkward if they did not have his co-operation and support (Fig. 54).

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Figure 54. Douglas Cooper with Picasso at La Californie, 1961, photographed by Edward Quinn. The sculpture is Femme au chapeau.

At the Executive Meeting the following month, it was learned that Cooper had written to Freddy Mayor warning him against the new Institute and claiming (correctly) that the ICA’s first exhibition was being held in the basement of a cinema. Now thoroughly irritated, Read suggested that Cooper be warned that legal action would be taken against him if he continued his efforts to wreck the show. On 6 December, he tried a more diplomatic approach to the high-strung Cooper: I hear that you are trying to sabotage the ICA exhibition. It is rather difficult to construe this as a friendly action. I can understand your refusal to lend your own pictures, since you do not approve of the policy of the committee. But why make such a fuss about it? The exhibition will be held – there are sufficient promises of loans already to ensure that. You only succeed in making it difficult for your friends to explain your actions. Be tolerant, dear Douglas & learn to suffer fools, if not gladly, passively.16

‘40 Years of Modern Art: A Selection from British Collections’ was held at George Hoellering’s Academy Hall in Oxford Street from

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5 February to 6 March 1948. Roland had canvassed fellow collectors and obtained 127 works, including three Braques, four De Chiricos, two Dalís, three Matisses as well as pieces by Bacon, Freud, Nash, Nicholson, Sutherland, Hepworth and Moore. MacBryde and Craxton represented the neo-romantics, who embodied in their work a mixture of nostalgia, surrealism and landscape. When the show opened on 5 February 1948, F. E. McWilliam’s large sculpture – a surrealist nude, subsequently bought by Roland – on the bombsite adjacent to Academy Hall attracted a lot of attention; traffic was held up. The resulting headlines in the newspapers read: ‘Warped Lady’, ‘The New Look?’, ‘Oh Dear! Is This Another New Look?’ and ‘You Never Know What’s Waiting for You Round the Corner.’ The organisers were prosecuted because the entrance to the show blocked the pavement, and there was an ensuing scuffle at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, where the ICA’s case was heard by a sympathetic magistrate. According to Roland, there was even a group of colonels with top hats and umbrellas who went round the exhibition proclaiming their rage at ‘disgusting’ modern art. According to Roland, this was an ‘ambiguous’ exhibition because the ICA wanted to ingratiate itself with the entire artistic community: ‘We were starting from blank and without prostituting ourselves we needed to find some allies.’ In his opening speech, however, Read stressed the innovative aspects of the ICA: Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult playcentre, a workshop where work is joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naïve idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest.17

Eric Newton in the Sunday Times was enthusiastic: ‘The best of modern art is eclectic. And this is merely a way of saying that the diverse streams are now beginning to amalgamate into a more or less recognisable mid-twentieth century style. Perhaps this is the moment for the institute of contemporary arts to step in and lend a hand.’18 The Scotsman was parochial: ‘Out of 67 names in their notice, 42 are almost certainly foreigners.’19

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Despite a lively press, the show attracted only 16,000 visitors, with no substantial increase in membership. Expenses had run to £2,500 while only £1,783 was taken in. On its own terms, the exhibition had been a blockbuster and, the ‘buzz of the International Surrealist exhibition could be felt in London once more’.20 The next exhibition at the Academy Cinema, ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art – A Comparison of Primitive and Modern’, opened on 21 December 1948. In a speech given the week before the opening, Read warned that the title was not meant to be frivolous, since the aim of the organisers was to juxtapose primitive and modern art. The 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition had included sixteen Oceanic subjects, whereas the ICA show had 126 such artefacts from Melanesia, Australia, Africa and prehistoric Europe. Alongside these were sixty-four works by thirty-two artists, many of whom had been represented in ‘40 Years’. Roland wanted the poster advertising the exhibition to show one of the Cycladic statues from the Ashmolean next to a great Giacometti nude that he thought resembled the ancient one. However, the curators at Oxford claimed that ‘they would rather see themselves dead than their beautiful Cycladic sculpture [be] compared to a piece of modern nonsense’.21 Further snags arose when MOMA agreed to lend Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Alfred Barr made this enormously important painting available in gratitude to Roland for having lent some Picassos from his collection during the war. Barr was embarrassed because he had been forbidden to send the painting by air: one of his trustees was an aeroplane executive, who pointed out that the risk of loss or damage by air was fourteen times greater than by ship. After the painting had made the slow crossing by sea, there were more complications. No one had thought to take accurate measurements for getting the huge canvas down the curved concrete staircase of the Academy Cinema. As Roland recalled, ‘The only way to get it in was to make a hole in the wall, which we did by making it from the bombed site outside’ (Fig. 55).22 Robert Melville in the Studio was favourably impressed by the confrontation between primitive and modern: ‘The restraint of

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Figure 55. Roland and Ewan Phillips in 1948, with Demoiselles.

the modern work contrasted sharply with the barbaric violence of the primitive carvings but shared their power to convey invisible forces.’23 He was also fascinated by the deep pools of shadow that fell across the avenues between objects, giving the viewer a sense of descending into an initiation chamber. Generously, he did not mention that visitors were constantly walking onto the pebbles which had been packed in front of the uncased exhibits to prevent touching and pilfering. As a result, the room was filled with an unnerving crunching sound. David Sylvester in the New Statesman was dismissive: he believed that it was extremely difficult to prove an affinity between fears that are childlike – as expressed in primitive art – and those that are self-conscious, as in modern art. Eric Newton in The Times did not

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think that any genuine connections between primitive and modern had been made: Where then lies the connection between this urgent magic and the fascinating formal discoveries of a Picasso or a Henry Moore? A psychologist, presumably, could answer, but I am no psychologist. Footnote: Quite soon I hope to receive an invitation from the Gold Coast to attend the opening of an exhibition showing the influence of Landseer and Alma Tadema on West African sculpture.24

In the Observer, Douglas Cooper was, not surprisingly, damning: ‘In terms of quality the so-called “primitives” are outstandingly higher, for the modern works have been unintelligently selected.’ Having learned that the Arts Council had given £400 towards the cost of the show, he exploded: ‘If the Institute of Contemporary Arts (a dilettante body) hopes for genuine support it must begin to cultivate seriousness. Once again it has made a mock of the British public and modern art.’25 At the private view, Peter Watson, with his habitually harrowed look, painstakingly removed the drinking glasses that had been placed in the open spaces of the Moore sculptures. In about 1948–9, Roland painted Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads? (Plate 21). In this self-portrait, very much indebted to Ernst, the figure’s torso is encased in armour. This probably alludes to the necessity of needing strong protection to ward off the slings and arrows being cast at him by people such as Mesens and Cooper. The rectangular view into the lower part of the torso shows the bowel in tightly coiled knots – it may be an allusion to his earlier problems with his ulcer. The steel penis with matching steel balls refers to his virility. The two eyes at the top stare in different directions. This is a reference to the divisions within himself that Roland experienced on a daily basis.26 Although Roland favoured surrealist art, and wanted it to have a secure footing as part of the ICA, he remained open to all other manifestations of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he did not appreciate being bullied by the likes of Mesens and Cooper. After the war, Roland’s attention to the London Gallery waned because of the huge amount of time he devoted to the ICA. The gallery had reopened on 10 December 1946 on 23 Brook Street with an exhibition

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of twenty French and English surrealists. Mesens did everything in his power to keep the fire of surrealism alive, but surrealism after the war had become, as we have seen, a tough sell. In May 1949 the Gallery held a one-man show devoted to Roland’s recent work. Among the forty-two paintings and drawings on show were Faites vos Jeux, First View and Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads? This would be his last one-man show for thirty years. Early in 1946, at the time plans for the ICA were assuming shape, Roland translated Picasso’s surrealist play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (1941) into English. A year later, on 21 February 1947, Desire Caught by the Tail had its first public performance at the London Gallery. For Roland, this was a key event: he was hoping to make a vibrant piece of contemporary drama available in an England that had not recovered from the war. He remained keen to make the jewel-like efforts of his ‘brilliant surrealist friends’ accessible to others.27 It was therefore with regret that in 1950, Roland closed the doors of the gallery; the heavy losses it had sustained forced his hand. Behind the scenes, Roland and Mesens continued to quarrel frequently and bitterly. The gallery’s final shows were devoted to Wilfredo Lam,28 John Craxton, Austin Cooper and Desmond Morris. Peter Watson, Anton Zwemmer, Mesens and Roland gathered one morning to auction the remaining stock: Mesens bought many of them, Roland and Zwemmer a few each, while Watson bid for nothing. The amount realised was risible. Another reason for closing the gallery was Roland’s dislike of George Melly, who had replaced Sybil Fenton Mesens as the gallery’s secretary. Melly, recently demobbed from the navy, was frequently drunk on the job on those occasions when he bothered to show up. Although he disapproved of Melly, Roland was deeply grateful to him in one instance. One afternoon during the Craxton exhibition, a couple stood in front of one of the works debating whether to buy it. Suddenly, another visitor hissed, ‘It’s rubbish!’ This was Douglas Cooper. Startled, the would-be buyers left. For that action, Cooper became persona non grata at the gallery. When Cooper chose to ignore the embargo, Melly confronted him and eventually grabbed him by ‘the back of his collar and the seat of his expensive

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bespoke overcoat, frog-marched him to the door, and pushed him out into Brook Street’.29 Internal acrimony at the ICA remained rife. Geoffrey Grigson, who could be as oppositional and difficult as Cooper, was furious when he was asked to resign from the organising committee: ‘I propose thinking that the resignation of Mr Roland Penrose be also called for, on the grounds that his position as a minor painter, buttressed by wealth and indeed by taste, and his sincere energy in furthering the ICA, does not outweigh his zealous pursuit of compromise which is making the ICA ridiculous to those very artists it should help.’ There had been too much compromise in selecting the entries for the exhibition, Grigson was arguing. Mesens felt that not enough young artists had been chosen, and that the exhibition as a whole was too conservative. Jack Beddington, the director of publicity for Shell in the 1930s – who had commissioned posters by, among others, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper – had been invited to join the organising committee because of his expertise in advertising. He was soon at loggerheads with both Mesens and Grigson. On 10 May 1948 he wrote to Roland: ‘I thought the last meeting of the ICA was absolutely deplorable and convinced me that you would never get any distance with your objects until your associates learn manners and loyalty. It is quite impossible to run any kind of organisation . . . with people who are not prepared to yield to anybody else. I think Mesens’ outbursts were revolting and I am inclined to think that he has been your evil genius from the start . . . All these people are grinding their own axes. Your first step must be to dissolve the ICA as it now stands.’30 One matter that the committee managed to agree upon was the selection of thirty-four-year-old Ewan Phillips as first director of the ICA. He had trained as an art historian at the Courtauld and helped organise the 1938 exhibition of German art at New Burlington Gardens. He had been involved in the 1939 scheme to open a museum of modern art in London and, after the war, had worked in Germany as a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Officer. The search for premises was a much-debated issue. Even by 1949, Phillips, the energetic, resourceful Julie Lawson (usually called Tommy) and another staff member worked on an enormous table in

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a dusty, book-lined room in the Fitzroy Street flat of Edward Clark, a member of the managing committee. At the meeting on 5 May, Read announced that John D. Rockefeller had given an unsolicited gift of £2,500 to the Institute. He also called attention to a flattering article on the ICA in the New York Times; he did not bother to mention the reporter’s qualms about ‘40 Years’: ‘will such displays antagonize and bewilder rather than attract the broad effective patronage which art [in London] so desperately needs?’31 Read and Roland knew full well that the continual squabbling within the committee would lead to the demise of the ICA. Read proposed that a smaller organizing committee would offer a more streamlined and peaceful way of running the young organisation. The committee was duly trimmed to five members. Roland and Read had met fierce opposition from Mesens, Cooper and Grigson in the establishment of the ICA. By the early 1950s, they were facing – Read in particular – a new band of opponents: the Independent Group. The name had popped into the head of Dorothy Morland, the new director of the ICA, when she had to write down a booking in her diary.32 Morland, who had been appointed interim director when Ewan Phillips resigned in 1952, stayed on for the next sixteen years. After attending the Royal College of Music she briefly went into repertory theatre, but that career came to a halt when she contracted tuberculosis. While she was recuperating in Switzerland her consultant was Andrew Morland, whom she later married. During the Spanish Civil War, she and her husband came to the assistance of refugees, to whom they provided accommodation and moral support in their London home. Through her friendship with the architect Maxwell Fry and his second wife, Jane Drew, she met Peter Gregory and was drawn into the orbit of the ICA. Although she had strong ties with both Roland and Read, she often, with considerable tact, supported the upstarts in opposition to them. Up to 1951, she worked as a volunteer at the ICA and was appointed Public Relations Officer in 1952. Her first five years at the ICA were exhilarating: ‘My association with the main members of the Management Committee was an inspiration to me. I grew to love them – Herbert Read, Roland Penrose and Peter Gregory . . . [They] were visionaries, idealistic and

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unassuming.’33 And yet she often disagreed with the way they treated the young. Morland had consummate political know-how, and she was a peacemaker: she was careful to do everything in her power to maintain harmony between opposing camps by using her position to modulate the concerns of each group. She respected Read and Roland, but at the same time, she was sympathetic to the needs of the young. In dealing with fledgling artists, she saw her role as that of a ‘reliable godmother’.34 Richard Hamilton was under the impression that the word ‘Independent’ derived ‘from the idea of rejecting the mother image of the ICA. That it was a resentment of the ICA actually bringing these people together at all, and so we said, all right, we’ll be together but we want to be independent of the ICA.’35 Read’s formalist, archetypal aesthetics were particularly oldfashioned, in their opinion. Roland’s views on art were not totally dissimilar from those of the Independent Group; but he was, of course, significantly older than them. As such, he too became a target for their resentment. These artists and critics (Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, Toni del Renzio, Richard Hamilton, Rayner Banham and, later, Lawrence Alloway) were truly independent in that they, in Oedipal fashion, wanted to overthrow father figures. The intellectual origins of this rebellion came from an unlikely source. While at the Slade, Richard Hamilton had become intrigued by the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948), particularly Growth and Form (1917). As Hamilton recalled, Nigel Henderson ‘suggested one day that, since we were near, we might drop into Roland Penrose’s for tea, and there make free of Roland’s library’. Roland became interested in Hamilton’s research and reported on it to the ICA Management Committee meeting on 13 April 1949. He thought it might be a suitable exhibition for the ICA to sponsor at the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition. Read did not like Hamilton’s proposal, and claimed that there were too many bids for the 1951 exhibition. He also observed correctly that since the Festival was supposed to be devoted to 100 years of British achievement, the Hamilton project might be too narrowly focused. The Committee nevertheless agreed to ask Hamilton and Henderson to submit a written proposal. Seven months later, when a synopsis had been received, Hoellering claimed it was too naïve.

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Roland agreed that the proposal needed to be tightened, but maintained his support. Read had come round: the proposal had possibilities, if properly exploited. Growth and Form claimed that the causal relationship between things was accidental and ephemeral, and thus challenged any kind of teleological interpretation of the world and human existence. For Thompson, there were ultimately no logical connectives that explain human life and existence. For Read, such a point of view went directly against his belief in ‘eternal forms’ and archetypes. For Roland, Thompson’s work made perfect sense because in surrealism he had found an aesthetic system that embraced randomness and illogicality.36 Le Corbusier, a long-standing admirer of Thompson, attended the Growth and Form exhibit at the ICA and exclaimed that Hamilton’s ‘ensemble of scientific samplings was the work of a poet . . . I was enchanted . . . This exhibition has moved me deeply, for I found in it a unity of thought which gave me great pleasure.’37 When Morland suggested that the members of the Independent Group be invited to meet the great architect, Read quashed this suggestion. For one section of the exhibition space, Hamilton constructed a three-dimensional grid on which he placed ‘models of minute organisms, radiolara and sponges’ taken from Thompson. In 1951, any hint of rebellion was mitigated because Hamilton’s experimental work had been accepted and praised. Morland worked quietly to make peace between opposing forces: ‘she encouraged new ideas, often against management opposition’.38 However, she was placed in a precarious situation. She was quite willing to defend the Independent Group, but she soon found herself at loggerheads with one of its members, Lawrence Alloway, who was appointed assistant director in 1955. When she attempted to smooth things over, he responded by becoming obstreperous: ‘At the beginning,’ Morland recalled, ‘I found him an exciting person to work with as he was full of new ideas and very much in touch with the younger groups of artists and writers. He had a stimulating, sharp, clear mind, but he was extremely ambitious.’39 The patrilineage continued its dominance in a new way and she was placed in the impossible position of attempting to allow every person his say. The problem was that the various participants shouted at each other rather than talking to each other.

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The Independent Group had no belief in an ideal world beyond the present one. They decided to make do with the actual physical world that presented itself to them, and gradually they became convinced that American culture presented the most satisfactory material world extant. American magazines became crucial, as Banham recalled: ‘We goggled at the graphics and the colour-work in adverts for appliances that were almost inconceivable in power-short Britain, and food ads so luscious you wanted to eat them.’40 From 24 February–22 March 1959 the Tate Gallery staged ‘The New American Painting’, which included examples of abstract expressionism. Before that, such paintings were on display at the ICA. Although Roland was not as threatened by the Independent Group as Read, he thought of modernism in terms of certain great contemporary, well-established masters such as Picasso, Miró, Ernst and Man Ray, with whom he had become close friends. Hamilton, Alloway and other members of the Independent Group looked at culture far less hierarchically, and looked beyond Europe to the United States. These young men did not necessarily validate past accomplishments as much as they were interested in discovering what they could discover and draw upon in popular culture. Roland did not fully appreciate this approach, although as a young painter he had used surrealism in a similar way. As a Quaker, Roland valued his own inner light, and he extended that courtesy to others in a way that the shy, reticent Read could not. Roland, a much more accessible person than his close friend, may have been part of the Old Guard, but he was extremely approachable and took special pride in hearing – and sometimes incorporating – opinions differing from his own. The ICA also organised another exhibition for the Festival: ‘Ten Decades: A Review of British Taste, 1851–1951. A Festival of Britain Exhibition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art by arrangement with the Arts Council of Great Britain.’ The Arts Council provided a grant of £1,500. (The ICA did not sponsor a show devoted to contemporary British art because the Arts Council had mounted the ‘60 [modern British artists] for 51’ show.) The reviewer of ‘Ten Decades’ in the Times was irate: ‘the exhibition resembles nothing so much as a large provincial art gallery the successive directors of which have not been allowed to relegate any of their predecessors’ purchases to the cellars.’41

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Roland’s own interests are reflected in an exhibition he organised in 1953: ‘The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head’, which offered a diverse assortment of oil paintings, photographic reproductions and artefacts from a wide range of ages and cultures – chosen, the catalogue states, according to the criterion of ‘emotional content’. Paleolithic sculptures, tribal masks, and the celebrated Mexican rock crystal skull from the British museum were, in a typically surrealist manner, contrasted with works by Bosch, Klee, Brancusi and Picasso’s cubist masterpiece, Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. The historical breadth of the exhibition was intended to establish continuity between different times and places. As underlined by the ‘wonder’ and ‘horror’ in the exhibition’s title, the head signified the powers of which man was capable as well as the weaknesses to which he was susceptible: ‘The head is not only man’s most dominating feature, in the physical sense – the seat of his controlling intelligence, the lodgment of his vision and hearing – it is also his most vulnerable feature’, the catalogue explains. Richard Hamilton and his wife Terry undertook the layout and mounting of the exhibition. The inclusion of some examples from popular culture may be Roland’s tacit acknowledgement of the Independent Group’s influence upon him. Lee helped her husband with his research, and he acknowledged this in the dedication: ‘To my wife, without whose help this essay could not have been written.’ When the exhibition went on tour, an advertisement was placed in The Times requesting submissions. A columnist in the Yorkshire Evening Post responded with glee: ‘Have you a shrunken head in your lumber room? A dead shrunken head of course . . . If you can oblige, get in touch with [the ICA] at their Dover Street Offices.’42 Lee got in on the act by providing a display of scrapbooks, which included ‘the poster of a girl wearing a huge camera and staring through its lenses . . . an enormity which brought to mind a Zapotec funerary urn.’43 The sweep of this exhibition was not unlike ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art’, but this exhibition was a turning point because Roland recognised that the ICA did not possess the resources to mount blockbuster exhibitions in the manner of the Tate; this show, as Anne Massey observes, ‘was concerned with the meaning of imagery, rather than making stylistic connections. Given the iconographic and didactic purpose of the show, many of the selected images were reproductions of art works, cropped and taken from

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existing publications.’44 This cost-cutting exhibition became the model for many future shows. Three years earlier, in December 1950, the ICA had moved into its first real home at 17 Dover Street. Lord Harewood presided at the inauguration. Well before that, in May, the first exhibit on Dover Street had been devoted to James Joyce, and had been opened by a reluctant T. S. Eliot. The first official exhibition at Dover Street, ‘1950, Aspects of British Art’, displayed a range of work in which three kinds of art were represented: realism, neo-romanticism and international art with a strong emphasis on surrealism. Once again, Roland and Read were attempting to integrate all forms of modernism and not exclude any. Roland took comfort in the ICA’s new home: ‘we began to feel more at home and that we were established in London, and the opening in Dover Street was a very important event . . . at that moment [the new premises] seemed vast’.45 The Evening Standard sarcastically called the new headquarters, designed by Jane Drew with curtains by Terence Conran, ‘Advance Guard HQ’. A year later, the Glasgow Herald claimed that the ‘too-too arty air of the Institute of Contemporary Arts has often an unhappy effect on anything shown there, infecting quite blameless matter with the contagion of hi-falutin’ nonsense’.46 Since the ICA was perceived as cliquish, this fuelled public suspicion that the place was a den devoted to the recherché. Memberships remained difficult to sell, and the funding from the Arts Council did not go very far (the annual maintenance of Dover Street ran £3,000 over the income from subscriptions). There was another difficulty that slowly rose to the surface – one that overlapped the problems with the Independent Group. From its outset, the ICA had welcomed American art – and money. Even before the official opening on Dover Street, the New York City based balletomane Lincoln Kirstein paid for the catalogues for the exhibition ‘American Symbolic Realism’ (July–August 1950). Part of the American response to the Cold War was to launch a brand of art that could effectively counter Soviet Realism.47 Abstract Expressionism was chosen, and the ICA was seen as the perfect place in England to use for its promotion. Read had long been uneasy with any form of corporate scholarship, but Roland at first saw no conflict between American money and British culture. Early in 1951,

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Pat Dolan volunteered his services to ‘improve’ the image of the ICA. Specifically, he suggested that Princess Elizabeth be used as a fundraising figurehead. A furious Herbert Read wrote to Philip James of the Arts Council: Roland will tell you of the approaches that have been made to us by a certain Pat Dolan – the smoothest operator I have ever come across. He has offered, on terms, to get all the money we need, and is confident that he can raise half a million for a British equivalent of the Museum of Modern Art . . . Roland is somewhat sold to the idea. I am very skeptical – indeed, I see the beginning of the end of any ideals I ever had for the ICA . . . I do not believe that we could possibly maintain any degree of independence if we become a charitable dependency of Big Business . . . it makes me all the less confident that we should be allowed to conduct the Institute as an outpost for experimental art.48

Read felt that the decision not to have a MOMA in London was in danger of being abolished. He was also concerned that experimentation and Big Business would not mix. Roland did not share Read’s reservations. Dolan’s scheme was accepted in March 1951 after Roland threw in £1,000 to further it. As part of the package deal, Roland proposed that Anthony Kloman, ‘not at all the aggressive type of American’ and the brother-in-law of the architect Philip Johnson, become their director of public relations, a position he took up the following month. Kloman soon came up with the idea of the ‘Picture Fairs’ whereby artists, celebrities and unknowns were persuaded, mainly by Roland, to contribute works. The works were exhibited and tickets at £25 each were sold. Roland frequently bestowed works from his own collection, and he often bought tickets for friends as presents. Kloman believed strongly in the importance of media saturation in glossy magazines and corporate sponsorship from firms like Shell. Read’s fears about an American presence at the ICA were justified. There were at least five exhibitions in 1952 and 1953 that were devoted to American art, including the 1953 ‘Opposing Forces’, in which Jackson Pollock was shown in England for the first time. During the winter of 1952–3, Roland asked Alfred Barr to give a lecture at the ICA. Barr suggested a title: ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’ Roland suggested a more neutral title: ‘Is Art Political?’ Although Barr was a

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well-known opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy, he was avowedly anti-Stalinist. Finally, Barr, obviously aware of the American presence at the ICA, decided not to give any lecture: ‘I doubt the propriety of my talking on a subject which will seem to a lot of our English friends more American anti-Communist propaganda.’49 Kloman was the moving force behind the ‘Unknown Political Prisoner’ competition, an idea he brought back from the States in May 1951. This contest had a covert agenda in that, in celebration of those persons who rebelled against totalitarian regimes, the ‘open’ society of the West was being contrasted to Soviet repression. At first the suggestion was rebuffed, but the tempting offer of £16,000 from the United States –£1,000 of which was to go to the ICA as a management fee – was accepted a month later. Jock Whitney, the publisher of the International Herald Tribune, donated the funds. The competition brought dubious distinction when well-known sculptors such as Lipchitz, Epstein, Zadkine and Marini did not submit work (Moore was an advisor and therefore was ineligible). The maquette by Reg Butler – an assemblage of cage, scaffold, guillotine, cross and watchtower – garnered the £4,525 top prize. The ICA became a major focus of public outrage when a stateless Hungarian refugee smashed the maquette while it was on display at the Tate. A casual suggestion by Butler that he would like to erect a large version of his entry on the cliffs of Dover led to a stormy scene in Parliament. Covert American political power was being exerted to control the exhibition schedule at the ICA. At the same time, the members of the Independent Group had fallen in love with American culture. Roland was not particularly bothered by any CIA influence at the ICA, but, although committed to France as the birthplace of surrealism, he always favoured the promotion of English-born painters and sculptors. Eventually, Roland was not favourably disposed to Dolan, who lost interest in the ICA when he saw that he could not use it to his advantage. Once again, Roland felt, his nation was being left out of the mix – this time by the insensitivity of American interests. After all, he very much wanted England not only to be a country which produced good art, but also to be one in which the genuinely modern was understood and appreciated.50

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Chapter Thirteen

A Pastoral Retreat (1949–1953)

By 1949, Roland reflected, the ‘urge to live closer to nature had become increasingly compulsive. I had known the Sussex Downs since my youth. They had enchanted me during the first world war when, harvesting in my uncle’s fields, I had found nightjars in the woods, and since then the Downs had tugged at my heart.’1 From the time he was a young child, Roland had been sensitive to settings. He had been distraught when his parents left the pastoral setting of St John’s Wood for Oxhey Grange, a place he felt was contaminated by industrialisation. A bit later, he had taken refuge at Herstmonceux, his uncle’s farm. In the early years of his marriage to Valentine, the couple had lived in places removed from urban centres. After the war, moreover, London seemed to Roland a place of muted glory. The sad state of the metropolis reminded him that his native land had moved down several notches in the world’s estimation. England may have won the war, but a spirit of defeat pervaded. Hampstead no longer seemed the refuge he had once cherished. The O’Briens saw a lot of the Penroses during and after the war. Terry had vivid recollections of Roland and Lee: ‘She was a much more outgoing character – there was so much of Roland that was hidden. He was quite subdued – even when he had had a few drinks he wasn’t loud or aggressive . . . when he did break out there was a sense of naughtiness about it, a sort of “I’ll write shit on the wall” and then giggling about it.’2 Lee could be extremely abrasive and inform her husband he was ‘talking shit’. In such instances, Roland would smile and change the subject. Only once did Terry see Roland lose his temper: when he expressed a very negative opinion about

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Roman Catholics. Once this outburst had ended, he mumbled: ‘I don’t know why I lost my temper.’3 Roland’s ability to accept the frailties – and sometimes the brutalities – of others was revealed in an incident at Downshire Hill. One night at a party, Dylan Thomas was roaring drunk. The South African poet Roy Campbell was also there, and, obviously having had too much to drink, hit Roland on the shoulder as he was leaving. The blow knocked Roland over. A friend, witnessing the scene, helped Roland up and offered to go after Campbell. ‘No, no, let’s forget it,’ Roland replied.4 For many reasons, Roland was in search of some sort of change that would enliven him. So when Harry Yoxall, the founder of English Vogue, alerted the Penroses to the availability by auction of a small dairy farm and accompanying house in the Downs, they attended the sale at the George Hotel in Hailsham on 16 February 1949. Prices post-war were at all-time low. For £22,500, they acquired 200 acres, the house, cottages and farm buildings for twenty-nine cows.5 As soon as they had made their new acquisition, Roland and Lee motored four miles to see Farley Farm at Muddles Green in the parish of Chiddingly. On their previous visit, the house had been clothed in fog; on the day of the sale, bright sunshine displayed their new home to full advantage and they were treated to the rolling green panorama of the South Downs. In the shadows they could see the 70-metre-tall Long Man (also known as the Wilmington Giant or the Green Man). For someone with surrealist inclinations, this was a propitious omen. The large farmhouse had a stark but nevertheless welcoming façade. The oldest part, which became the kitchen and dining room, dated from c. 1735. A Georgian front overlooked the garden side while a later Palladian-style façade faced the road. The house’s interior was a lot less formal than its exterior. Roland, who throughout his life remained impervious to extreme heat and cold, made letting in light his top priority. On the south elevation he had dormer windows installed in the attics, enlarged the windows of his bedroom and put in French doors from the sitting room to the brick courtyard. It took Lee years of complaining to get the kitchen modernised. It was only ten years after the purchase, and following much persuasion from Lee, that central heating was installed (Figs 56, 57 and 58).

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Figure 56. Exterior of Farley Farm.

Figure 57.View from Farley Farm, photographed by Lee Miller.

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Figure 58. The sitting room, Farley Farm. Picasso’s Portrait of Lee Miller (1937) is above the fireplace.

Quickly, Roland sold 36 Downshire Hill and took a lease on 11A Hornton Street, a small flat in a row of Edwardian houses in Kensington. After Hampstead the flat felt cramped, although much of the collection and furniture had been moved to Farley Farm. While the renovations to the farmhouse were being completed the Penroses lived on Hornton Street; their stay there was longer than anticipated, because the post-war shortage of building supplies meant work on the farmhouse progressed slowly. They would stay in London during the week and then drive to Sussex on the weekends. When work on Farley Farm was complete, four-year-old Tony stayed there all week with his nanny. Roland painted a mural that filled the inglenook fireplace. In the centre above the fire, the head of a bright sun god stares out, with the Downs behind him. This Apollo-like figure radiates warmth and light. To the left, planets drift languidly in their orbits, and on the door of a cupboard to the right a full moon illuminates a path in the dark night. On either side are nooks in which cornucopias are painted. The sun and the moon act like Penates, household gods

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protecting the house and its inhabitants. In constructing this room, Roland wanted the Long Man and the natural world in which he existed to reside at Farley Farm. Put another way, he desired a pagan deity to inhabit his new home. Most of the furniture Roland chose was antique French provincial, which jarred by design with the modernist paintings on the wall: the conventional and the innovative each had their place. Iris, a barebreasted ship’s figurehead from Cornwall, lived next to the front door. According to Roland, she had unveiled her breasts to defend herself against the charge of immodesty. The fireplace may have been the most self-conscious decoration at Farley Farm, but the house’s charm also resided in the wide assortment of objects inhabiting the tops and insides of bookcases, collector’s cabinets and Roland’s desk. There were, among many others, Picasso ceramics, an Oceanic ladle handle, an ancestral wooden plaque from New Guinea, a bronze head from India, Mexican folk art pottery and quartz crystals. The walls were covered with paintings, including some by Roland. The overall impression was of diversity, of objects linked together by serendipity. Just as Charleston embodies many of the Bloomsbury ideals in the decorations lavished on it by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Farley Farm is the surrealist equivalent. Charleston’s walls, décor and artwork bespeak the artist-owners’ obsession with lavish floral and abstract designs in a variety of highly saturated colours. As such, it can be said to embrace a post-impressionist aesthetic. From the outside, the house is warm and inviting; the interior confirms this first impression, especially in the way the warm colours embellishing its walls and fireplaces enhance this feeling. Farley Farm’s fireplace and the house’s vast array of nooks and crannies filled with a wide assortment of treasures reflect Roland’s pursuit of a very different aesthetic ideal – one of randomness, chance and karma. From the outside Farleys – which is now a museum and archive – looks like a conventional farmhouse. Inside is a different story. The visitor is confronted – almost overwhelmed – with a wide variety of paintings and artefacts nestled side by side. The relationship between the various pieces of art is deliberately random and haphazard. This is interior design surrealist-style. Charleston and Farleys are houses in which the auras of two very different forms of modernism are reflected (Plate 22).

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Roland was delighted to be able to divide his life between the city and the country. Lee, a more urban person, had grave doubts. ‘Fuck living in the country,’ she would exclaim.6 The poor plumbing particularly outraged her; when it worked, it delivered a trickle of brown water. All in all, the house for her was ‘too goddamn cold and uncomfortable’.7 Although Roland remained characteristically generous in most aspects of his life, he could be mean in small matters such as paying for sufficient heat to make the house snug. On the other hand, he liked to be generous surreptitiously. He once gave a hard-up friend £1,000. When the friend said that was a generous amount to loan, he replied: ‘I’ve never lent any money to anyone in my life – it was a gift, and if I get it back, that’s wonderful.’8 Despite his ardour for country life, Roland was briefly pulled off stride by the retired colonel who called on the new arrivals to inform them that the Conservative Party customarily used Farley Farm for their garden parties. He told Roland where the cars would be parked and recited the various other protocols that would be used. Roland quietly interjected: ‘But, Colonel, I always vote Labour.’ The colonel, taken completely aback, retorted: ‘Then you won’t find many friends around here.’ As he stormed off, Roland assured him: ‘I think I’ll manage.’ Buying a working farm was one thing; working it effectively was another. Roland felt up against the wall on this issue, as he reminisced: ‘Strutt & Parker [land agents] produced a whole range of bright young men in flat caps and green wellingtons and I did not like any of them – they were all too glib. Then we found this bear of a man, a real son of the soil, who I knew right away was the right person. We walked round one Saturday and I asked him: ‘Could you make this pay?’ He said: ‘it’s a poor old farm, much neglected. It’s going to be very difficult as it is in a terrible state.’9 Peter Braden ran the farm smoothly and efficiently for the next thirty-seven years. There were several hiccups, however. The Ayrshires, possessed of magnificently curved horns, were in danger of hurting each other – and the farm staff. With Roland’s permission, Peter dehorned them. When Lee observed the wounded heads of these animals, she was incensed. She upbraided Peter: ‘I wish I could pull out all your teeth so that you would know how these poor animals feel!’10 The farm manager also learned never to take Roland near any wet path in a field in any tour of inspection: he would immediately suggest that

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poplars be planted, ‘as they do in France’. Such plantings would have turned the land into a plantation unsuitable for cattle. The Chiddingly Post Office Stores, run by the Robinson family from Derbyshire, was, Tony remembered, ‘the most wonderful Aladdin’s cave of goods. Hessian sacks of potatoes, dried peas, beans and other bulk goods stood with their necks rolled down, waiting for their contents to be scooped into cones made of newspaper. Produce from the gardens of the village spilled from boxes on the floor, and brooms and mops hung from above.’11 Mr Robinson, an opera lover, would sometimes disappear without warning to France to pursue his passion. Mr Robinson’s son, John, delivered Lee’s weekend order on Friday evenings and stayed for a glass of wine. Mr Jupp, the baker, appeared regularly with his huge wicker basket; the arrival of Mr Russell the fishmonger attracted the attention of the family cats; there were also regular deliveries from the off-license in Hailsham. When the film director John Huston was staying at Farley Farm, he announced that he wanted to hunt. Roland attempted to arrange this but, in the end, only a rabbit came out, which the film director did not manage to shoot.12 Roland was also hopeless when it came to domestic chores. Sometimes he would offer to help with washing up after a meal, but he did not know where anything went. He had no idea how a toilet cistern worked.13 There were sometimes parties that might have shocked the locals, as Terry O’Brien recalled: ‘Sometimes in the early days there would be topless dinner parties at the farm – if there were some close friends there who wouldn’t object, Roland might suggest having one. The women would be topless, the men in jackets, candle-lit. I think Roland saw it as a sort of joke, like that painting Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Timmie and Sonia Orwell took part.’14 Among the other guests at Farley Farm were John Hayward, the scholar, bibliophile and poet who had at one time been T. S. Eliot’s flatmate. Hayward, who had muscular dystrophy, was a wheelchair user, and had a biting sense of humour often directed at himself. Roland would drive him down from London, but John once told him: ‘Why not put me on the train in the guard’s van, after all I am no more than a trunk.’ Hayward had a ‘compulsive need to tease’ that surfaced frequently, Roland recalled. ‘Our mutual friend [the writer] Jim Richards had been at the same public school in Norfolk

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[with Hayward] long before he became Sir James, editor-in-chief of the Architectural Review . . . and yet John delighted in referring to him as ‘my fag’, whereas it was obvious that it was John who was permanently the fag of misfortune.’15 As far as Roland was concerned, one of Farley Farm’s first visitors was its most important: Pablo Picasso, who had previously visited England in 1919. When he visited England in 1950, enticed there by the hope of [the Second World Peace] Congress [in Sheffield] that was thwarted by a Labour government scared of Communist infiltration, I met him at Victoria Station. He was one of the three delegates allowed into England and could not understand why he had been admitted while friends of his . . . had been turned back. This worried him but not to a degree that prevented him from enjoying the entertainment provided by friends in London and the Sussex countryside with us.16

Picasso designed the poster – showing a white dove – for this event. The Labour government’s clampdown on participants was severe: only two or three of the sixty French delegates were allowed entry. A perplexed and shaken Picasso accepted Roland’s invitation to stay at Farley Farm. The following day he travelled to Sheffield, where, instead of talking about politics, he recounted how his father had taught him to paint doves. He ended his speech: ‘I stand with life against death; I stand for peace against war.’ The Sheffield conference was supposed to last from 13–19 November, but was closed by the English government after one day because of its perceived pro-communist bias. Picasso decided not to travel to Warsaw, where the conference reconvened. He attended a reception in his honour, and at another event some art students rapturously received him. However, in order to register his disdain for the English government’s actions, he refused to visit the Art Council’s exhibition devoted to his recent paintings and sculptures. To Roland’s delight, the great man returned to Farley Farm before travelling on to France. He had also enjoyed his visit to the Hornton Street flat, but it was the countryside that entranced him, as Lee recalled: At our farm in Sussex, Picasso found the world was very English; the landscape of downs with Constable clouds, the prudish Long Man of

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Wilmington, left-handed driving, red and white Ayrshires, open log fires, whisky and soda night cap, hot-water bottles, cooked breakfast and tea. A tinned plum pudding, holly-wreathed and flaming, was indeed English, very English, superb and quite unimaginable.17

Picasso roughhoused with Tony. Not one to lose a skirmish gracefully, he bit the three-year-old, when Tony bit him. Among the souvenirs with which Picasso returned to France were postcards of the Brighton Pavilion, peaked school caps, a photograph of Roland’s great aunt Priscilla Hannah at the 1875 Bath Peace Congress and a toy red London bus (Fig. 59). Picasso inaugurated the ICA Visitors’ Book with a design featuring four suns and three winged bulls. During this stay, visitor and host, who had known each other for fourteen years, began to tutoie each other. Roland felt he had achieved a genuine breakthrough in his relationship with Picasso – at long last, they had become friends.

Figure 59. Pablo Picasso and Tony Penrose.

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This was not the case with Roland and Lee. Whether in London or Sussex, they bickered. Lee drank heavily, and when she did so, she because caustic and abusive. She did not really have to look after her son’s daily needs; from early on, Tony had had a full-time nanny. Emotionally, Lee could not deal with a baby, toddler or young boy. Tony’s presence may have brought to mind her own sense of helplessness as a young girl many years before. Tony the child was susceptible to the whims of adults – including hers. She might have been reminded how her own vulnerability had been desecrated when she was a child. Roland was an attentive and loving parent, but he was also in some ways a traditional father who shied away from too much intimacy with his young son. Both Lee and Roland, in different ways, were too preoccupied to raise their child. Lee simply could not bond with Tony, whereas Roland did not think it a father’s role to be involved in the day-to-day life of a youngster. When Tony was four years old, in 1951, Patsy Murray arrived after the departure of the boy’s latest nanny. She was supposed to remain for only two weeks, but she stayed and became, as Tony recalled, ‘virtually his mother’.18 As a child, Patsy had been brought up in a commune-like atmosphere in Doddington in Kent on the estate of Josiah Oldfield, the vegetarian and pacifist. There, she had become used to a rigid and vigorous work ethic. When she left Oldfield’s service she trained as a children’s nurse and, on the recommendation of a friend, she made her way to Farley Farm. In addition to looking after Tony, Patsy ran the household, although her mother, Paula, who had arrived earlier, was the official housekeeper and Patsy’s title was nurse. Although Lee liked cooking and entertaining, she loathed housework. Lee and Roland soon became comfortable with the completely reliable and totally unshockable Patsy. Patsy was an unmarried mother, and gave her one-year-old daughter Georgina into foster care with a working-class couple twenty-five miles away from Farleys. In that way, Patsy could have employment and keep up regular contact with the little girl, whom she visited most Thursdays. This arrangement, which lasted until Georgina was ten, came to a sudden halt when the woman who looked after the girl suffered a serious stroke. Roland asked Georgina, who had visited Farleys from time to time, ‘Would you like to stay?’ The child was

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delighted to accept. For her, Roland was – and would remain – the father she never had. For the next eight years Georgina lived at Farleys with her mother, Tony, Lee and Roland. She noticed that the Penroses sometimes quarrelled fiercely. She witnessed Lee’s drunken outbursts. And yet she was also very much aware that Roland and Lee got along well for long stretches. She and Tony had sibling rivalries, but the two youngsters usually managed to sort out their differences. Georgina observed that her mother got along well with Roland, but Patsy did feel that he could be a bit difficult about trivial household expenses, although he was always generous about substantial ones. Patsy put Roland’s attention to small sums of money down to his religious heritage: she felt that Quakers had an inborn sense that resources, no matter how small, should never be wasted. Georgina felt that all four residents of Farley Farm – including herself – were inclined to ignore Lee, especially during her outbursts. Lee made it quite clear that she was bored with living a life reduced to what she considered trivialities, and in such moments she could be especially castigating. But there was another side to Lee. In any kind of emergency, especially when someone asked for her help, she quickly swung into action and would do everything in her power to find a solution or to be of assistance. As a child, Georgina also noticed that Roland made sure his home and its contents were never treated as if, as she put it, they were ‘precious’: despite the valuable objects with which Farleys was filled, Roland did not wish it to become a museum. The works of art were simply part of the fabric of the place. A frequent visitor to Farleys was Man Ray. After the war, in 1946, when the American artist was financially pressed, the Penroses purchased a chess set from him of anodised aluminium and wood. The pieces are abstract, but the bishops, in keeping with the artist’s sense of mischief, are stylised flagons of wine. Later, to lift Lee’s oftendepressed spirits, Ray gave his former lover a number of paintings specially designed to entertain her. The philosopher Freddie Ayer, who visited Farleys a number of times, held an opinion of the Penroses shared by many: ‘They made an attractive contrast: Roland, reflective, reserved at first acquaintance, essentially an English country gentleman; Lee, an outgoing

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American, quick in her sympathies, racy in speech, with an infectious zest for life.’ Ayer’s point of view was held by some of the Penroses’ friends, but others, as already indicated, saw the situation very differently. Lee’s creativity as a photographer was briefly revived at Farleys. For example, she used the Chiddingly Post Office Stores as the setting for a fashion shoot. Her most sustained effort was ‘Working Guests’, a spread for Vogue in July 1953. (This project may have been inspired by Picasso’s visit three years earlier.) Among others, Alfred Barr is shown feeding the pigs; Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning take up the roles of electrician and gardener; the artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg – in England for his show at the ICA – wrestles with a garden hose; the actress Vera Lindsay harvests cabbages with a knife clenched between her teeth. Barr claimed that the role assigned to him by Lee was completely appropriate: at MOMA, he was quite used to casting pearls before swine.19 In the final photo in the series, Lee, all her work having been done on her behalf by her guests, has a restful nap. Tongue very much in cheek, she informed her readers: ‘I’ve devoted four years of research and practice to getting all my friends to do all the work. There is scarcely a thing, in or out of sight, from the woodpile to the attic water tank, from the chair coverings to the brined pork and the contents of the deepfreeze, without the signature of the working guest.’20 Lee’s outstanding eye remained intact. Her photographs were excellent, although they did not reach the heights of her wartime work. She could no longer work to deadlines. Often through the night, she had to be babysat by Timmie O’Brien, who soothed her tantrums and outbursts and constantly refilled her glass. Roland, behind his wife’s back, asked Audrey Withers not to give Lee further assignments: ‘I implore you, please do not ask Lee to write again. The sufferings it causes her and those around her is unbearable.’21 Withers, who felt Lee’s work had run its course, observed: ‘Lee came into her own during the war. It had an extraordinary effect on her. Afterwards nothing came up to it. She was not meant to be married, have children, or live in the country. She thought she wanted security but when she had it, she wasn’t happy.’22 Lee was not bothered by the lack of work, but she was furious with her husband when

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she found out what he had done. Finding a balance in their relationship remained a constant struggle for husband and wife. Roland was also alienated from Alec because of his elder brother’s complete lack of interest in the visual arts. If Roland tried to tell him about his work, Alec would soon turn the discussion to his own academic pursuits. Alec, Roland also felt, considered his lifestyle superficial and frivolous. In Roland’s imagination, Alec embodied the old-fashioned Quaker values of James Doyle and Josephine. In many ways, his brother was a father figure against whom Roland rebelled. Despite their disagreements, however, he loved his brother and was distraught when he died on 22 August 1950. Later, Roland told Tony: ‘Losing Alec was the first time I was really touched by death.’23 Roland attempted to keep close to another remote person, Pablo Picasso. To celebrate the artist’s seventieth birthday in 1951, the ICA held the exhibition ‘Picasso: Drawings and Watercolours since 1893’. Peter Gregory’s firm, Lund Humphries, published the catalogue, with a cover featuring the grasshopper-bull drawing that Picasso had done in 1950 for the ICA Visitors’ Book. After putting the final touches to the Picasso exhibition while in Paris, Roland, Lee and Tony travelled to St Tropez for the wedding of Paul Éluard to Dominique Laure on 15 June 1951. Picasso, who was also present, had taken a great interest in the upcoming ICA exhibition because it would emphasise his drawings, about which he was fastidious. When he saw the catalogue, the artist was aghast: one of the drawings was a fake. He would not allow any discussion of the matter because he was certain the culprit was Jean Cocteau. The lender of the fake was Sybil Mesens. Considering the level of tension that existed between her husband and Roland at this time, there is the strong possibility that Mesens engineered this fiasco in order to embarrass Roland. Éluard, in the absence of Picasso, delivered the lecture opening the exhibition at the ICA: ‘Today, Picasso, the youngest artist in the world, is 70 years old.’ Paul and Dominique stayed a week with the Penroses. Just over a year later, on 18 November 1952, Éluard died of an angina attack. Roland was distraught. The following month, on 18 December, he travelled to Vallauris, where Picasso warmly received

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him. Roland was so overwhelmed by grief that he did not mention his dead friend during his brief visit. It wasn’t until 4 February 1953 that he could bear to touch on the matter in a letter to Picasso: ‘I wasn’t able to explain to you why I wanted to see you so urgently at that moment. It was something very personal for which only you have the magic cure. It was Paul’s death – and the worst of it is that I couldn’t even say a word to you about it.’24 Much more than Alec, Éluard had become Roland’s brother. Roland had idealised the French poet, although not in the same way he venerated Picasso. With Éluard, he had maintained a friendship between equals. Like Roland, Éluard was a womaniser. He had feet of clay. Roland added: ‘Love of humanity was inseparable from sexual love. Paul loved women with a rare intensity not only for their beauty but also for their femininity.’25 In writing those two sentences, Roland could have been depicting himself. The simple memorial service he arranged at the ICA was very much like a Quaker service. In Roland’s mind, the death of Éluard left an enormous gap that only Picasso could fill. He visited with Picasso in order to maintain touch with Éluard through the ‘magic cure’. The psychic process is difficult to unravel, but, at some level, Roland had to be assured that the values Éluard had held dear were still somehow thriving if Picasso were alive. When Alec died, a significant part of the old order had died with him. That was a relief. When Paul died, however, it seemed possible that the world of art to which Roland had dedicated himself was in the process of destruction. That he could not tolerate. By 1953, Lee had lost most of her interest in taking photographs and centred her artistic inclinations on cooking, an activity taken up by other women, such as Elizabeth David, in an attempt to discover a new kind of pleasure in post-war Britain. Valentine, who now lived at Farleys, often acted as a buffer between Roland and Lee. Roland remained connected to his first wife and her literary career. In 1962 she published her Gothic novel, a retelling of the story of the vampirish Hungarian serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, who according to legend had bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. The book enjoyed great success in France and was translated into English by Alexander Trocchi under the title The Bloody Countess. When Valentine had difficulty finding an English publisher, Roland intervened on her behalf (the book was published by Calder and Boyars in 1970).

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Lee remained tolerant of Roland’s various girlfriends because he never fell in love with them. If he had done so, her position would have been seriously undermined. When Roland encountered Diane Deriaz at the ICA, things changed markedly (Fig. 60). Significantly, Diane introduced herself to Roland at the insistence of Éluard in about 1951 – as Roland recalled, ‘In the early days in Dover Street it was not unusual for me to take my turn at the entrance to the ICA. One evening I was selling tickets for a lecture to be given by Le Corbusier when my attention was suddenly distracted by the arrival of a tall young girl whose blue, wide awake eyes transfixed

Figure 60. Diane Deriaz.

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me, eyes as piercing as they were deep, so deep that you seemed to be looking through them to the sky. “C’est Paul Éluard”, she said, “qui a insisté pour que je vienne vous voir si je venais à Londres.” ’ Earlier, moved by reading some poems by one Didier Desroches, Diane, then working as a trapeze artist, had written to the author in care of his publisher. Only then did she discover that she was in touch with the famous Éluard, writing under a pseudonym. He invited to her Paris, where they began an affair. He travelled ‘to many cities in France to watch her scintillating performances as she risked her life every night in the limelight of the crowded big top’. In the summer of 1953, while Roland and Lee were staying with Dominique Éluard in Saint-Tropez, Diane was among the other invited guests. At first Lee enjoyed Diane’s company, but when she realised that Diane could be a danger to her, ‘the welcome guest’ became ‘unwittingly the hated enemy’.26 If Éluard had had his way, he would have married Diane, but the Communist Party considered her politically suspect and morally suspicious. By beginning an affair with Diane, Roland was in some ways reconnecting with the dead Éluard. Roland was aware that Diane slept with both women and men, and he may have felt that his own bisexual impulses mirrored hers. When David Gascoyne met Diane in Roland’s company, she ‘seemed the masculine part of the relationship. She was tough. Roland was a gentle man.’27 There were certainly traditionally masculine sides to Lee’s personality, and in Diane she realised that she had encountered a formidable opponent. There was also a markedly passive side to Roland, especially in his relationship with Picasso. That aspect of his personality would become more marked later in the fifties. In 1953, Diane worked as an air hostess for Air France and travelled widely. She and Roland would often meet in Paris or London. Despite Lee’s fears, Diane was protective of her own independence and did not wish to be tied down by domestic responsibilities. Roland saw Diane whenever he could, but she refused to entertain the idea of marrying him, when he proposed such a possibility. Things came to head at Christmas 1953, when Farley Farm was filled with guests. Among them were Valentine, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and Dominique Éluard. The dining room was fraught with unspoken tension, and, suddenly, Diane fainted. Roland pleaded with Patsy to do something, whereupon Valentine angrily announced

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that there was nothing wrong with Diane. ‘Look, she is still pink in the face!’ Diane revived quickly, but Lee took off for her bedroom and did not return. Roland pleaded with Diane to wed him, but she laughed off his proposal. She did not wish to disrupt his marriage, and she valued her freedom. In fact, she thought his proposal to send Lee and Tony to the States to live with the Millers preposterous. Roland continued to meet with Diane, but in the future she did not frequent Farley Farm. Its tranquillity had been severely disrupted.

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Chapter Fourteen

Life with a Virtuoso (1954–1966)

In 1953, Victor Gollancz invited Roland to research and write a life of Picasso. Modestly but accurately, Roland realised that he might indeed be able to write a good biography: ‘In setting out to write the life of a painter I found some advantage in having started life as a painter myself and in consequence being sensitive to the visual origins of emotion.’1 At that time, Roland’s conviction that a plurality of modernisms had to be embraced became, if anything, stronger: I have always taken a very keen interest in the developments of the visual revolution in this century. Three things are chiefly responsible for that revolution. One is Cubism, another is Surrealism, and the third is Picasso. Those three things are factors which make for something new in our outlook in the visual world because they all make for a breakdown of the old watertight compartments and for a union between science and the arts, between the sophisticated and the primitive, between emotion and calculation.2

This credo calls for a new realignment of values, a truly multidisciplinary approach to the study of art. It also reinforces some of Roland’s long-held values: he was an important collector of cubist works; he was a surrealist both in his style of life and in his practice as an artist; he venerated Picasso as an artist who transcended any kind of labelling. That winter Roland visited Picasso in Perpignan, where Picasso was staying with the Comte and Comtesse de Lazerne at their country mansion – a place the artist liked because it was close to France’s border with Spain.

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As they were leaving the beach on 16 September, the day of his arrival, Roland broached the question of a biography with Picasso: ‘I told him that I wanted to write a book about him. His reaction was more encouraging than I had dared to hope. He seized me with both hands and his black eyes looked deep into me as he said, “C’est vrai? C’est bien.” ’3 His breath taken away by Picasso’s affectionate enthusiasm, Roland explained that he had a publishing offer but that he had been wracked by indecisiveness as to whether he was worthy of this great task. From the outset, the Picasso biography caused Roland great anxiety, as he confessed to Alfred Barr. There is a problem on which I would very much like a word of advice from you. I have been asked by a big London publisher to write a 100,000-word life of Picasso, illustrated. The idea seems to me absurd unless I can spend some five years with that as my major preoccupation, and even then there are so many books on Picasso already published . . . Also I have not much confidence in my own ability as a literary genius. Neither have I fancied myself as an author & particularly not on such a scale. If you with your immense ability and experience could give me an idea as to whether or not you think it worthwhile – I mean, if there would be any interest in such a book or if it would be submerged in an ocean of much more competent works. It would mean, should I accept, cutting down on the time I spend working for the ICA, which is a serious matter but a choice that I shall have to make.4

This poignant letter of 21 August 1954 reveals Roland’s deep desire to write the book Victor Gollancz had offered to commission, but it also points to his genuine doubts as to whether he was up to the challenge. Roland idolised Picasso. Convinced that the Spanish artist was the greatest artist of the twentieth century, Roland, as a proponent of modernism, felt that a biography of this remarkable man would chart the history of Western art in the twentieth century. He saw the project as a vital one, but he was deeply worried that he would not be able to do the subject justice. Roland wrote to Barr because Lee was in the States visiting her dying mother. He told Barr: ‘Maybe if Lee can get away from her mother’s sickbed she could meet you in NY and you could have a

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talk with her about it. Naturally her cooperation would be essential in every way and so far I think she is doubtful about it herself, but the idea only cropped up after she had left and we only discussed it by letter.’5 Here, in the midst of a crisis, Roland reveals his dependence on Lee. Despite their difficulties, he relied on her judgement and acumen. They may no longer have been husband and wife in a traditional sense, but they remained close allies. Domestic tribulations between Roland and Lee would be alleviated by work on the Picasso biography. Picasso was very fond of Lee, who began to act as her husband’s secretary. The Penroses discovered a new way of reconnecting with each other. And yet Lee, understandably disturbed by Roland’s obsession with the Spanish artist, sometimes referred to herself as a ‘Picasso widow’.6 In her dealings with Picasso, Cooper’s companion John Richardson offered his opinion that Lee assumed the rights of a former lover: ‘Roland, as Boswell, was always saying, yes sir, no sir; Lee did as she pleased.’7 Difficulties between Lee and Roland may have been ongoing, but Roland’s dedication to the Picasso project kept him busy. He spent large amounts of time in Spain and France. Within a week or so of Roland’s arrival back in England from his meeting with Picasso, Barr’s reply arrived, obviously too late to affect Roland’s decision whether or not to go ahead with the project. Not surprisingly, Barr was positive: ‘I’d be very interested in reading whatever you have to write about Picasso. I hope you go ahead so that I can plagiarize.’ Joking aside, he stated that his only misgiving was that Penrose might be too ‘devoted’ to Picasso and thus unable to produce a sufficiently objective account. He also thought that the great artist was far too uncritical of his own work and allowed substandard work to enter the marketplace. There was also Picasso’s ‘bland indifference to what seems to me the frightfully serious predicament of the artist under the Communist tyranny’.8 Roland, in his response, acknowledged that Picasso’s membership in the Communist Party presented a serious challenge. The Spaniard had joined the party after the liberation of Paris. In this instance, he was in part following Éluard’s lead. He gave large sums of money to charities supported by the party, and attended its 1948 Congress of Intellectuals for Peace Roland’s veneration of Picasso remained unstinting, even though the eclectic Picasso had only briefly worked within the surrealist

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tradition. At one point during Roland’s research on the biography, Picasso even told him exactly what he thought of surrealism: ‘Cubism is me. It is not another “ism”. We wanted to go deep into things. What was wrong with [the] Surrealists was that they did not go inside, they took the surface effects of the subconscious. They did not understand the inside of the objects themselves.’9 Putting aside the important claims surrealism had made upon him personally, Roland attempted to come to a full understanding of all aspects of Picasso’s career, especially his cubist and neoclassical periods. The resulting book, narrated from what Roland felt was Picasso’s point of view, shows a remarkable understanding of a genius at work. Picasso could be excessively bad-tempered. In addition, he had many supplicants ready to do his bidding, and he did not mind being both haughty and withholding to them. He saw his hauteur as his natural right as a genius. Roland tried to blind himself to instances of Picasso’s insensitivity – and, sometimes, cruelty. According to his lights, he had little choice but to accede to the Emperor Pablo. Otherwise, he would have been banished from his court. What kept Roland engaged was his conviction that he was writing an important book that might capture the genesis of the greatest works of art made in the twentieth century. Once again, he sacrificed himself upon the altar of art. Because he had decided that his real vocation was as a promoter of modernism, he allowed himself to succumb to Picasso’s delusions of grandeur. Idolatry had its limitations. Picasso the man was manipulative, cunning and, at times, treacherous: Roland did not really want to engage with these aspects of his subject’s psychological reality, since he revered Picasso and did not wish the saint to fall from his pedestal. But during the course of researching the life, Roland eventually came face to face with the ‘real’ Picasso in his interviews with the artist’s lovers, friends and dealers, and in conversations with Picasso himself. He came to know the genuine Picasso and accepted him for who he was. However, he did not feel that he could describe that person in print. The draft contract with Gollancz, dated 5 November 1954, called for a book of between 100,000 and 150,000 words with the delivery date of 1 May 1957 – allowing half the amount of time Roland had originally planned to devote to the project. Quite soon afterwards,

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he discovered time was of the essence, because a French writer had been commissioned to write a rival account. Having received Picasso’s endorsement, Roland began his research by visiting Malaga, Madrid and Barcelona. He read a great deal and began to keep notebooks in which he recorded his findings. Among the first persons he interviewed were Clive Bell and Lydia Keynes. As Lydia Lopokova, she had known Picasso during his involvement with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during the early years of his marriage to Olga Khokhlova. In Paris, Roland visited Picasso, who was dealing with the fallout from his break with Françoise Gilot; the Spaniard was also wounded by the death of Matisse in November 1954. Roland subsequently spoke to a wide variety of people: among them, Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s secretary and the author of two books about him; Dora Maar; Michel de Brunhoff, the editor of French Vogue; the artist’s cousin Ricardo Huelin y Ruiz Blasco; Man Ray; the museum director Georges Salles; the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler; Gertrude Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas; the artist and teacher Pierre Baudouin; Georges Braque; and the artist’s early lover, Fernande Olivier. Roland met several times with Maar, who proved to be particularly helpful because of her propensity to link Picasso’s art to his life. Every time Roland visited Picasso he would meet Jacqueline Roque, who had become Picasso’s companion in 1953. Roland carefully recorded what he was told in interviews, and used them to enhance his understanding of the Spanish artist. His working method was to conduct interviews and then visit Picasso. When Roland began the biography Picasso was living in Vallauris in Provence, but in 1955 he had moved to La Californie, a villa in Provence. (After the biography was published in 1958 Roland visited Picasso at Vauvenargues Castle near Aix-en-Provence, and then from 1961 at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins.) Before each encounter with Picasso, Roland would prepare questions, but he would sometimes back off when Picasso did not seem in the mood to discuss what the biographer wanted to know. At these meetings, he did not reveal what he had learned, but he very understandably felt the need to keep in touch with the subject himself as the fundamental building block in constructing his life. The process became a necessary but subtle one, in that by touching base with Picasso after uncovering new information about him, Roland was regarding him with an altered gaze. During these visits, Roland also

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saw the artist at work and was continually amazed anew at the passion and energy that he observed. Time alone with Picasso was hard to come by, however. One day as he lunched alone with Picasso and Jacqueline, she told Roland: ‘Now’s your chance, you can bombard him with questions just as you like.’ Given that opportunity, Roland found it difficult to know where to begin. Before he could start, Picasso informed him: ‘If you ask me the wrong questions, I shall give you the wrong answers.’10 Roland sometimes had to compete for Picasso’s attention with others. Picasso particularly enjoyed pitting Roland against Cooper and indulging in mischief-making. When the documentary Le mystère Picasso premiered at Cannes in 1956, the artist arranged for Roland and Lee to be placed in the same box as Cooper. Sometimes Roland would arrive by appointment wherever Picasso was staying, only to be put off indefinitely because the artist was too ill to see anyone – or simply did not wish to be bothered. What Roland might not have guessed at the outset of his work on the biography is that he might observe a very flawed individual. He certainly did not wish to see such a person, and so instead he beheld a strong and determined character who pressed on no matter what impediments got in his way. The strength of his personality lies in accord between his impulses and his actions. He never looks vague or at a loss. Doubt and conflict are always present at the back of his mind but there is always a clear determined decision, which at the last moment seems to triumph. Everything with him is a paradox . . . He is the great performer who masters the perilous accidents that lay in his path, placed there often by his own invention. His hand never trembles but his inner spirit is in turmoil.11

When he caught glimpses of the vulnerable side of Picasso, Roland worried about him: ‘Today’s collapse is very worrying chiefly because the cause is unknown and the only cure suggested is rest, which gives him all the more opportunity for his hypochondriac tendencies and his morbid thoughts.’12 In turn, Picasso came to be candid with Roland about some of his phobias: ‘After lunch I talked to him in bed for a while. He was annoyed about the way people sponge on

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him . . . He is annoyed at having to give money when he has spent all his life giving his lifeblood in his work.’13 Picasso’s fragility was not off-putting to Roland, who came to appreciate the personal cost the artist had paid for his talent. If anything, his compassion for a fellow human being was aroused. Roland told Barr how Matisse’s death had intruded on Picasso’s day-to-day existence: ‘Picasso has been working – as always – a series of interiors and some colossal nudes . . . The series of interiors is, I think, very important. He has allowed influences from Matisse to filter in . . . He goes through periods of fatigue and depression which are sad to see – when he feels age creeping over him he becomes frightened of death and terribly diminished in his melancholy.’14 Of course, in Matisse’s passing Picasso foresaw his own. Once again, Roland was a witness to the anxieties that impinged on the older artist. Despite the compassion Picasso aroused in him, Roland’s insights remained clear-headed, as in this reflection that he did not put into print: ‘Power is an important factor in his character. Pleasure in having it, fear of losing it. Fear of others having power over him.’15 Roland could only have written such a passage because his relationship with Picasso brought him into contact with his own dark side. Like Picasso, he could at times be self-centred and emotionally ruthless. For example, he was well aware of how Lee was upset by his relationship with Diane, but he continued to see his mistress on a regular basis. Roland did not wish to hurt Lee, but he persisted in behaviour that had such consequences. Like Picasso, he realised, his character was a composite one. As he witnessed the neurotic, unvarnished side of Picasso, another strong emotion was released in Roland. Since Cambridge, he had not slept with a man, but there was within him the capacity to be attracted to other men in a homoerotic way. Picasso unleashed anew this side of Roland. In February 1956, Roland composed a poem in which the feminised voice of the speaker talks of her desire to be mastered by the masculine principle, obviously Picasso.16 In a prose poem written at the same time, the female voice begs: ‘Destroy me. I need to be destroyed.’17 In lovemaking, Roland liked to establish control by placing his female partner in handcuffs. Here, in assuming the female voice, he

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is asking to be so dominated. The erotic play that is described in these two pieces of writing involves sexual activity that leads to the speaker being ‘broken’, ‘dismembered’ and ‘destroyed’. The masochistic speaker asks for the lover to act in a sadistic manner. These two poems suggest that not only was Roland sexually attracted to Picasso but wanted to be dominated by him. As he drew closer and closer to Picasso, Roland could not help confronting his own sexual nature. He took great pleasure in dalliances with girlfriends; earlier, he had been desperately in love with Lee and, in 1953, he was very much taken with Diane. Yet his sexuality was a conflicted one, and he tried to deal with his strong erotic feelings for Picasso by writing about them. Moreover, in asking Picasso to shackle him, he was the one asking to be handcuffed.18 This division within himself reflects perhaps the other split in Roland between being an artist and an apostle of modernism. He was essentially a person of contradictions, and he was wise enough to recognise the partitions within himself. Picasso’s own sexuality is treated in a very low-key way in the published biography, although Roland knew a great deal about this issue, as he confided to the artist Anthony Hill. One afternoon, Hill recalled, ‘Picasso said it was time to go out for a walk. This meant for Picasso being chauffeured around the countryside looking at it from the car. He saw a pretty girl in the street and told the chauffeur to stop the car. He then indicated to Roland to sit in the front. They drove on and Roland started hearing groans from the back and thought at first that Picasso was having a heart attack!’19 In addition to working incessantly on the biography, Roland collected the photographs, drawings and other material for the exhibition, ‘Picasso Himself’ at the ICA (and afterwards, MOMA) to commemorate the artist’s seventy-fifth birthday. He also wrote the accompanying short and heavily illustrated Portrait of Picasso. He correctly saw this small book as being a sort of dress rehearsal for the much more substantial biography that would be published two years later. In about October 1957, the writer Hélène Parmelin was among a group, including Picasso, attending a tauromaquia in Nimes. To her surprise, she witnessed a very different Roland Penrose as the evening wore on: ‘There was Penrose, who was an English writer,

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and who sang Russian songs in Spanish in the backs of cars when he had drunk Bandol wine and it was pouring cats and dogs after corridas.’20 Parmelin may have been astounded to see Roland’s extremely Gallic side find its way to the surface. That part of his personality had made him an ideal replacement a year earlier for Frank McEwen at the British Council in Paris. In the spring of 1956, Philip Hendy, the director of the National Gallery and chairman of the Arts Panel of the British Council, phoned Roland: ‘I am imploring you on bended knees. We want you to take on Frank McEwen’s job.’21 Roland found the request daunting. He would be replacing a very successful incumbent. The post was a half-time one, and he still had the Picasso biography hanging over his head. Lee was very encouraging. She was happy at the prospect of spending summer and fall for the next three years in Paris. Of course, Roland’s new responsibility in Paris meant he had even less time to work on the biography, but at least he had a base in France from which he could travel to continue conducting interviews. Roland may have accepted this post in part because he was well aware that this position was in danger of being axed; he willingly supplemented its small salary.22 The British Council had been founded in 1934 to promote ‘cultural propaganda’ and, of course, Roland had long been committed to this kind of undertaking. Seven years younger than Roland, McEwen had studied art history in Paris with the renowned Henri Focillon, but his teacher had recommended he become an artist. He tried his luck and eventually exhibited his work at the Goupil Salon and the New English Art Club. However, in due course, he became an art restorer. Through his contacts in the Resistance and the French government in exile in London, McEwen then worked from November 1942 at the headquarters of the Allied Forces during the war. In January 1945 he was transferred to the newly created British Council, where he mounted successful exhibitions of Moore, Turner and Sutherland. By 1952 he had become obsessed with African culture, and decided to leave the Council in 1956 later to explore his new passion for Shona art. McEwen had excellent contacts. In addition to Picasso he knew Matisse, Brancusi, Léger and Le Corbusier, plus the entire surrealist

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group. Roland’s qualifications for the job were similar to those of his predecessor. ‘On my arrival,’ Roland recalled, ‘I was hurried off to a dinner to celebrate the award of the Guggenheim Prize to Ben Nicholson.’ British sculptors like Moore and Armitage were beginning, he noted, to obtain favourable notices in Paris. ‘In painting I was glad to be able to support Graham Sutherland and the turbulence of Francis Bacon disturbed deeply the sensitivity of French intellectuals in February 1957 when they saw it for the first time.’23 There were many delights to sample in Paris, even though it had changed markedly after the war: ‘The old habits of meeting for long and passionate gossip or serious discussions in cafés and restaurants, the excitement of the elegant crowds that gathered every vernissage, the variety in the official and unofficial exhibitions and the erotic enticements of Parisian nights were still there.’24 To his list Roland could have added the proximity to Diane. ‘During so many years and the kaleidoscope changes that are bound to take place in a quarter of a century I was astonished that Diane did not become involved in a love affair which would have removed her emotionally from me. Her unconquerable desire for complete independence had succeeded in greatly diminishing that common craving to marry and she decided to travel through life on her own wings. In spite of this, while she was flying with Air France to distant countries and after her return to Paris, I visited her every time I could.’25 Paris provided Roland and Lee with the opportunity to see old friends on a regular basis. One person into whose orbit they were drawn was Marie-Laure de Noailles. After a brief affair with Jean Cocteau she had married Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. The Noailles financed both Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or (in which Roland and Valentine had appeared) and Cocteau’s The Blood of the Poet (in which Lee had starred). Their home at the celebrated hôtel particulier at 11 Place des États-Unis, decorated by the French minimalist Jean-Michel Frank, was a modernist showpiece. The couple, however, had lived apart since the 1930s. Marie-Laure, who was a painter, may have been Proustian in her grand entertainments, but her snobbery was reserved for her artist friends, including Balthus, Man Ray and Max Ernst. Her parties, Roland reflected, ‘were sometimes like post-war revivals of Le Bal Masqué. On one occasion her guests came as characters from literature; I chose as my disguise the grandfather clock

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that disturbed at a crucial moment the father of Tristram Shandy in his pleasure with his wife.’ In attendance at these events was MarieLaure’s lover, the painter Óscar Domínguez, ‘a strange character from the Canaries where the beaches are black with volcanic sand. He suffered brazenly from that ungainly disease elephantiasis. He had certain practices as monstrous as his appearance.’ During the war, Domínguez forged pictures by Picasso, De Chirico and Ernst. Even Ernst forgave him and after he died by slitting his wrists, his mistress absolved him when she discovered he had stolen a small cubist Picasso from her and replaced it with his own excellent fake. Peter and Ninette Lyon held a lively salon; Ninette, an artist and writer, and Lee collaborated in ‘an enthusiastic investigation into the joys of good and eccentric cooking’.26 The other side to this relationship was Ninette’s affair with Roland. This put a damper on any closeness Lee could feel for the other woman. Another new friend was the Yale-educated artist Bill Copley, who in 1948 had opened the Copley Galleries in Beverley Hills, displaying works by Magritte, Ernst, Tanguy, Matta, Cornell and Man Ray. However, as Los Angeles had not yet caught on to the surrealist scene, the gallery closed after a year. Roland became very fond of Copley and his trademark style: his pictures, Roland observed, ‘consisted mostly of a ubiquitous pneumatic blonde and a caricature of himself in pursuit and often pursued by a spiteful gendarme’.27 Often, Roland had to give speeches. He was not a good public speaker because he found it difficult to speak spontaneously from notes. If he read a talk, he spoke in a monotone. Writing of any kind was an ordeal, perhaps because of dyslexia-associated difficulties. Sometimes, in searching for relief from the relentless series of activities he had to pursue in his new job, Roland would visit Miró at work at the studio of Lacouière on the steep slope below the Sacré-Coeur. There, he witnessed the artist illustrating Éluard’s À toute Epreuve. In moments spent with the gentle, childlike Miró, Roland came into contact with his dead friend and all that he had meant to him. Very much behind the scenes at times, Roland pressed for the recognition of English art. He championed Lynn Chadwick, who had been the runner-up in the Unknown Political Prisoner competition sponsored by the ICA in 1952. Chadwick’s work in constructed metal was not perfectly in accord with Roland’s taste, but he recognised the

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incredible innovations being introduced into sculpture by Chadwick and Kenneth Armitage. Although Roland was not a member of the jury that gave Chadwick the prestigious sculpture prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale, it could be said that he helped set the scene for this award – a major upset, because Giacometti was expected to win. Chadwick felt tremendously boosted by Roland in his capacity as the British Council representative in Paris: ‘He introduced me to people,’ Chadwick recalled, ‘took me to dinner. He took me to Giacometti’s studio.’28 Meanwhile, Roland, when he got back to work on the Picasso biography, had to deal with the outrage of people like Alfred Barr, who were convinced that Picasso should have spoken up much sooner against the Soviet quashing of the Hungarian Rebellion of 1956. He told Roland: ‘Of course I am pleased that he signed the open letter to L’Humanité [the newspaper of the French Communist party] but can’t help feeling a certain sense of disgust that it should have taken him so long to declare what has been so painfully obvious to the rest of the world, namely that the Communist party everywhere is a great deal more corrupt than the non-Communist press.’29 In other ways, the writing of the book became an agonising experience. Roland asked Terry O’Brien to assist him: ‘Roland was a terrible writer to start off with! I remember he asked me to read the draft of the biography. I’d had a bad novel published myself by that time. I thought the biography was tremendously dull and longwinded. I suggested Roland cut down the length of his sentences, otherwise people would lose the thread of what he was saying. I was anxious about telling him – I didn’t want to offend him. Lee said: “Just tell him it’s crap!” Roland talked it through with his editor . . . the information was good but I still thought the prose was dreary. Later, as he got experienced with doing presentations for the ICA, his writing got sharper and better.’30 Roland also had to deal with the exacting Victor Gollancz, who had agreed to extend the deadline for the submission of the manuscript from to 1 May 1957 to 1 October 1957. On 10 July 1957, Roland wrote Picasso: ‘Until October, my book about you must take precedence above everything else, and then I intend to come to see you in reality after having lived with you in my thoughts for so many weeks.’31

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After Roland failed to meet the new deadline, Gollancz reminded him that he had to submit the manuscript by 1 December. Furthermore, he was informed that there was no budget for extra illustrations and instructed to keep his word count as much as possible under 150,000 words. As it turned out, the word count far exceeded that limit and some extra illustrations were squeezed in. By March 1958, the exasperated publisher told him that since Roland had broken all their agreements, any hope of a reasonable profit had evaporated.32 With the invaluable assistance of his secretary, Joyce Reeves, Roland laboured on the book, although he missed the December deadline. He drafted his concluding remarks several times before arriving at this statement: ‘Picasso’s disarming passionate vision and ceaseless energy have continued to widen our horizons. Today his art enriches us and its prodigious variety will provide future generations with a profound joy and an understanding of our human condition.’33 During the years he was working on Picasso and meeting with him, Roland never lost his childlike connection to nature, and he was well aware that he shared this trait with the Spaniard. Once, while driving with his friend John Thompson in the south of France, he suddenly stopped the ‘car dead and got out – he had seen on the road a large caterpillar, brightly striped, about six inches long. He said, “I must take that to Picasso!” ’34 Back home in England, Roland championed all kinds of artists. Penny Slinger and David Hockney both frequented the Hornton Street flat. Slinger, a singer and performance artist who used her own body as a subject, was often arrested on charges of producing and exhibiting pornography: Roland provided bail several times. Roland did not like op art, but he was resolutely polite to Bridget Riley, one of the major practitioners of that specialty. He was suspicious of pop art’s cynicism, but he was chummy with Peter Blake over drinks at the ICA. He also remained understanding when others did not like his own art. The sculptor Kenneth Armitage remembered putting his foot in his mouth at Farley Farm. ‘I was looking at works in the dining room with Roland and Lee. There was one drawing that I said that I didn’t like and Lee said, “that’s Roland’s”. The thing is that I didn’t think of Roland as an artist.’35

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Another artist that Roland supported was the ‘lyrical abstract impressionist’ Congo, the chimpanzee at London Zoo who became an artist under the tutelage of Desmond Morris. Morris had joined the zoo in 1956 as head of a Granada TV film unit and was the presenter of the television show Zoo Time. Congo, at the age of two, Morris recalled, took a pencil and began making compositions. As he began to make more art, the chimp would scream if a picture was taken away from him before he felt he had completed it; if he considered a drawing finished, he would refuse to work on it further even though prodded to do so. Intrigued, Roland and Read visited the zoo and then arranged for the exhibition at the ICA in 1957. Congo’s art attracted a great deal of attention – some of it derisory. It also led to some interesting debates, as Alastair Lawson, who worked at the ICA, recalled: ‘there was a discussion after the exhibition and someone asked Desmond Morris what star sign Congo had been born under! He replied that all the chimps at the zoo were born under the same star in the breeding season. The pictures sold for £40 each I think – it was a great success and all of them sold. Then they wondered what to do with the money – it was Congo’s really . . . so Desmond bought him a wife with it and he gave up painting!’ Roland was sufficiently taken with Congo’s work that he bought some and even sent one to Picasso, who put it on display in his studio.36 As his manuscript took final shape, Roland revisited the very issues that had overwhelmed him at the beginning of his work on the biography. He drafted this foreword: I must warn readers who may expect from this book more than it can give. A biography of a living man is by its nature presumptuous, since his future acts can reverse the truth of any conclusion that the author may be foolish enough to make. No final justification can be found for such a book. It is no more than a trace of a story which must be so condensed that seventy-seven years of the life of a man can be read from birth to old age in a few hours . . . In these respects this book, I tell you, must be a failure. I can recommend it to none, but let me say that, knowing this, I have written it, and I hope that it will be read with appreciation of its inevitable limitations because I have wanted to share with others an experience. It is an experience which has had great importance in my life, enchanting and torturing me

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because it comes from a source which is itself a contradiction – a man, alive amid death, loving cruelly and speaking in silence.37

This foreword was not published; it may or may not have been submitted to Gollancz. As a foreword, it might have been inappropriate, because as a confession of the trials and tribulations that Roland bravely faced, it was not a document that needed to be inserted into the book. As a record of the biographer’s journey of discovery, however, it is of the utmost importance. The suppressed foreword suggests that the finished book was from the outset doomed to failure. The assignment was enormous, perhaps an impossible one. And yet the biographer had soldiered on with his task and completed it. Roland also made it clear that he had to deal with a person who both enchanted and tortured him, a person who retreated into silence and cruelty, a person who was alive and yet dead. In some ways, like Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Roland saw a monster when he finally confronted his Kurtz. Picasso: His Life and Work remains an accurate testimony to its subject’s life and art, in that it is consistently written from the viewpoint of Picasso. When he read the book, Picasso told the author: ‘It’s good, in fact so good that often it seemed to me that we were sitting at the same table and writing it together.’38 Roland attempted to understand Picasso’s subjectivity – why he painted certain subjects, how he saw his role as artist. Mindful of his devotion to the subject, Roland skipped over gossip, hearsay and scandal to create a portrait of an artist removed from much of ordinary human life. This is the book’s limitation. The book’s close attention to reading Picasso’s paintings – the ‘work’ in the book’s title – is its greatest strength. In analyzing the cubist portrait of the German collector and dealer Wilhelm Uhde, Roland claims ‘there is a more austere consistency in the subdued colour, maintained here throughout with no concessions to flesh tones and a unity between the figure and its background, filled appropriately with a chimney-piece and books . . . [the canvas] expresses with unexpected eloquence the dry, loyal personality of Picasso’s scholarly friend.’39 In describing another cubist painting in his collection, the biographer again sensitively uncovers what might be called the painting’s inner world:

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The Girl with a Mandolin . . . can in some ways also rank as a portrait . . . there are signs everywhere of metamorphosis, although the upright figure of the girl holding her mandolin can be recognized without difficulty. Her head, her hands and her breasts have suffered the artist’s willful transformation, and there are arabesque flourishes that soften the hair . . . The picture is in fact such a bewildering combination of those qualities of elegant poise, classical proportions, selection of essential features, sober and subdued colours, that in spite of revolutionary treatment it has the serenity and inevitability of the architecture of the Greeks or of the music of Bach. The human form has rarely been dissolved and recreated with more consummate skill.40

Picasso: His Life and Work fulfills precisely what its title suggests: it explores the connections between life experience and artistic production, although emphasising the latter at the expense of the former. The writing is poised, reticent and sometimes elegant. Considering the enormous difficulties with which Roland put pen to paper, the book is a triumph. However, in the course of researching the biography, Roland had come face to face with the real Picasso. That person frightened him, and he most certainly did not think such a person the proper subject of his book. To have allowed the deeply personal and wounded Picasso into print was a responsibility he would never have taken. He would have considered this an act of betrayal. Instead he wrote a truthful, well-researched account of the artist that explains Picasso’s career from Picasso’s point of view. In itself that resulted in a valuable book, but in the end Roland allowed Picasso the man to evade scrutiny (Fig. 61). Eric Newton’s notice in Time and Tide is typical of the warm press the book received. What makes Mr Penrose’s book not only important but necessary is that not on a single page is Picasso obliterated by his work, yet the difficulties involved in interpreting or explaining his work are never shirked. What Mr Penrose has done seems simple and obvious once he has done it. He explains and interprets the work in light of the man who has produced it. At once half the difficulties disappear (one says ‘half’ advisedly: many mysteries remain unsolved) and one sees that what once seemed perverse and unreasonable is really the

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Figure 61. Picasso and Roland, photographed by Lee Miller.

direct reaction of a fearless creative genius to the situation of the moment. Again and again one of Mr Penrose’s sensible, unemphatic sentences clears away a cloud of difficulties.41

The biography deserved the strong reviews it received, although Roland would have been somewhat dismayed by Douglas Cooper’s notice that appeared three years after the book’s publication. Mr Penrose . . . started off with many advantages over other writers and there was every reason to expect that his book would be revelatory, lively, packed with personal details and especially fascinating on the subject of Picasso’s art. Unfortunately it is not that. Mr Penrose is a dull writer, appears to lack the warmth and imagination necessary

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to encompass and bring alive the complex personality of Picasso, and above all he has failed to write meaningfully about his art, which here occupies a lesser space.

As if supplying an antidote to this poison, Cooper added condescendingly: ‘None the less he has put a great deal into preparing his biography and it is likely to remain for some while the most useful and informative handbook, despite its shortcomings and surprising inaccuracies.’42 As we shall see, the venom in this notice is partially explained by the huge battle that had erupted between Roland and Cooper shortly after the publication of Picasso: His Life and Work. After 1947, the time Roland spent painting declined sharply; after 1950, it came to an almost complete halt for twenty-five years. In some ways, Roland paid a high price for his commitment to the ICA and to the Picasso biography. He was so completely taken up with his role as the defender of modernism that this responsibility dominated his time. There may be other reasons why he did not paint: from 1949, he was heavily involved in the running of Farley Farm. It is impossible to know whether personal circumstances – his stalled marriage to Lee or his pursuit of Diane – contributed to this turn of events. There was a heavy cost to Roland in abandoning his work as an artist. Simply put, it had given him great pleasure. As a young man, he seemed content to be an accomplished minor artist. As an older man, his inner light pointed him in the direction of surrendering his talent as an artist to a greater good. If he could not be a Picasso, he could be somebody who explained and defended Picasso. Since writing was for him a form of torture, his commitment to the biography could be seen as an act of genuine heroism. In 1958 Roland was appointed a Trustee for the Tate Gallery. At that time, when he was putting the final touches on the Picasso biography, he continued his work in France for the British Council. That year he was presented with a new opportunity, but one for which he would pay dearly. At the beginning of February, Roland informed Picasso: I have just got back from London where I spent a couple of days. During my visit I was asked officially to take charge of the organisation

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of the great ‘Picasso exhibition’, which will take place at the Tate Gallery under the auspices of the Arts Council.

I spoke to you about this exhibition when I was in Cannes last autumn and at that time you were in favour of the project. I sincerely hope you haven’t changed your mind because we want to make a really important show, the first of its scale to be held in England . . . As you can imagine I am enchanted and delighted to have been asked to do something so close to my heart.43 Roland’s diplomatic prose merely hints at the difficulties to which the project was subjected from its birth. There was the thorny issue of whether Picasso would remain supportive of a scheme to which he had given formal assent. The artist did not much care for such exhibitions; he had no need of them to raise his already stellar profile as the modern artist, and if he wanted to dig in his heels, as Roland well knew, he could do so. One of the reasons that Picasso might have changed his mind was the insidious influence of Roland’s nemesis, Douglas Cooper. The Art Council’s Art Panel, at its meeting on 27 February 1958, had chosen Roland over Cooper as the curator. At the back of Roland’s mind when he wrote to Picasso to tell him of the Council’s choice was the pressure Cooper might exert on the Spaniard to turn thumbs down to the exhibition. In every conceivable way, Cooper remained difficult to deal with, and this was a crucial factor in the Council’s decision not to place the exhibition in his hands. Cooper had fought bitterly with the Tate’s John Rothenstein and had attempted to have him removed from office; Cooper had also clashed with the Council in 1956, when his recalcitrant behaviour had caused a Picasso exhibition to be cancelled. On the other hand, Cooper had a sterling reputation as a scholar and researcher. More importantly, he lived in Provence and visited with Picasso and entertained him at his Château de Castile, his picture-book-perfect but grandiose mansion near Arles. Picasso took a special pleasure in exchanging malicious gossip with Cooper, and, in comparison, Roland might not have seemed quite as exciting a personality. Moreover, there was Cooper’s collection, which contained an assortment of cubist masterpieces by Picasso.

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Having made its choice, the Panel asked Roland to tread carefully with Cooper and to attempt some sort of reconciliation with him. Roland visited Cooper in July 1958 in order to ask his advice on the selection of works, to request that he lend pictures from his collection and to commission him to write some entries for the catalogue. As expected, all this proved to be heavy going. No amount of diplomacy could induce Cooper to co-operate. In a letter to Roland of 14 August 1958, dog-in-the-manger-style, he called off all negotiations. I have a principle not to associate myself with any exhibition unless I have some measure of control over its organisation. The world of art is nowadays so much in the hands of cretinous busybodies and pretentious bureaucrats that it is the responsibility of those of us who know and can do better to beware. The present potentates can’t help making a mess of whatever they take up, and so they like to call in serious people at the last minute to help them disguise it. But their calls for help should remain unanswered, for by their messes will their incompetence be recognised.

It is very kind of you to suggest that I might like to do some unpaid secretarial work on the catalogue of your exhibition. Unfortunately I have no leisure to devote to part-time activities, for I am fully occupied writing books.44 Four days later, in a letter to William Coldstream, the Chair of the Art Panel, Cooper threatened to make trouble. Picasso, who has recently discussed his London exhibition with me after seeing Mr Penrose, is well aware of all this [the complex situation by which Cooper was supposedly excluded] and regrets simply that the collaboration which he hoped for is opposed by the Arts Council and Mr Penrose, who have apparently made up their minds to disregard his feelings.45

Knowing his enemy well, Roland wrote to Picasso on 25 August to report on the unhappy imbroglio: ‘As you know, I had little hope of succeeding with him because he is profoundly hurt not to have been asked to do the exhibition itself.’ In his letter, Roland made a promise: ‘I fully intend – even without [Cooper’s] pictures – [to make the exhibition] a

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more beautiful and consequently more astonishing selection than has been seen so far.’46 Working on assembling the Picasso show was the kind of work that the hyperactive side of Roland’s personality enjoyed immensely. Joanna Drew, the exhibition organiser, considerably eased Roland’s tasks as curator. She took care of most of the paper work, arranged catalogue production and oversaw shipping. Roland was thus free to assemble the best assortment he could. Picasso was a necessary participant, but it did not help that Gollancz billed Picasso – twice – for the copies of the biography Roland had sent him as a present. After profuse apologies for this gaffe and the requisite grovelling, Picasso brushed off Cooper’s entreaties to spurn the Tate exhibition and agreed to loan thirty-two paintings from 1895–1955, and a further ten or twelve from 1956 onwards. A bit later, he offered to lend the entire series of Las Meninas [a sequence of fifty-eight paintings based on Velásquez’s painting of the same name]. The caveat was that the entire series of paintings be shown together, as well as the nine paintings of pigeons that the artist considered inseparable from the Las Meninas sequence. This late proposal, which increased Picasso’s loan to well over a hundred canvases, was a double-edged sword because the exhibition had already grown beyond the assigned space at the Tate. When pressed, John Rothenstein agreed to allow the South Duveen Sculpture Gallery to be used for the Las Meninas sequence and the North Duveen Sculpture Gallery to house the vast drop curtain from the Ballets Russes. In the States, Roland used Chicago and then New York as his bases in loan-gathering visits to museum directors, dealers and collectors. The Hermitage and the Pushkin were difficult to deal with, and no firm commitment could be obtained from them. (The ten pictures requested from these museums arrived very late and did not go on display until 4 August, a month after the exhibition opened.) Two hundred and seventy loans came from over eighty named lenders and thirty private collections. Work on preparing the catalogue became frenetic. Roland and Joyce Reeves took over the dining room at Farley Farm with masses of small cards attached to photos. Since loans were sometimes withdrawn and substitutes added, the catalogue was in a constant state of reshuffling.

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Probably well aware that Picasso would not attend the exhibition, Roland dutifully invited him. Perhaps he did not expect the rude response he received: Why should I waste my time going to see my paintings again? I have a good memory, and I remember all of them. I loaned a great many of my own canvases to the exhibition, and that gave me quite enough trouble . . . Exhibitions don’t mean a great deal to me anymore. My old paintings no longer interest me. I’m much more curious about those I haven’t yet done.47

There was another setback, one more inconvenient than Picasso’s rebuff. Three weeks before the exhibition was to open, Sam White’s regular ‘Letter from Paris’ column in the Evening Standard rehearsed the bitter dispute between Cooper and Roland for all to see. White had interviewed Cooper the week before at Château de Castile. During that conversation, Cooper untruthfully told the reporter that Roland ‘had not asked to borrow a single picture from his collection’ – moreover, that his offer to collaborate with Penrose had been turned down. The article continued: Both Penrose and Cooper are rich; both enjoy Picasso’s close friendship. There the resemblances end. For whereas Cooper is ebullient and brilliant, Penrose is a much more self-effacing character. Every now and again Picasso, who appears to enjoy the situation, tries to bring his two English champions together. It is a touching sight, often repeated, when he makes them shake hands and, like two errant schoolboys, promise not to quarrel again. Invariably, of course, it is not a handshake after a disagreement, but a prelude to a new round of hostilities. Cooper is a man who has aroused violent enemies in English art circles. And he is convinced that he is being deliberately cold-shouldered over the Picasso show . . . He claims that Picasso himself is disappointed at the scope of the Tate show. He quotes Picasso as saying that ‘only pictures that have already been reproduced or published will be shown. There will be no novelties.48

As he had done two years before, Roland wrote to Picasso telling him about this new fiasco, and assuring him everything was under control.

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Roland’s work for the British Council, the huge amount of time he expended on the Picasso biography and then the Picasso exhibition had reduced considerably the time he could devote to the ICA. Dorothy Morland felt his absence left a big hole. In particular, she felt that the ICA became ‘more splintered and restless’ at this time. ‘Alloway, who was appointed assistant director in 1955 with responsibility for certain exhibitions and their related activities, introduced a further level of structure. He was energetic and ambitious, and the activities of the Independent Group increased and became more organised. But at the same time Alloway created a more diverse feeling within the ICA. He was very hostile to Herbert Read and Roland Penrose. In particular, Alloway thought the critical systems favoured by Read and Penrose were too governed by “aesthetic certainty” whereas he had grown up “with the mass media”.’49 However, despite his inability to be as involved with the ICA as he wished, Roland had the ingenious idea of having the gala reception for the Tate exhibition sponsored by the ICA. This was a wonderful advertising ploy that brought in much-needed funds: 2,000 tickets were sold, at five guineas each. The Duke of Edinburgh attended the gala. There was some concern about seating him next to Lee, but her behaviour was impeccable. Roland took the Duke through the exhibition and noticed that he had a partiality to Picasso’s early work. Later, the Queen asked to be taken through the exhibition. Roland had been advised by Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, who was part of the entourage, to pass over difficult pictures, but the Queen, accompanied by the Duke and the Queen Mother, even expressed admiration for the cubist Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. Towards the end of the tour, two people joined the small group. Turning to Roland, the Queen said: ‘May I introduce my sister Margaret?’ She then observed that she had to leave, but would Roland show the entire exhibition all over again to Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon? All this was grist for Picasso’s mill. He had often told Roland that he had erotic dreams about having sex with Elizabeth and Margaret. He once confessed: ‘If [the English] knew what I had done in my dreams with your Royal ladies, they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!’50

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London, meanwhile, also succumbed to Picassomania. The Daily Mail was gushing in its enthusiasm: ‘In present-day, art-mad Britain, it is not only an event. It is the Biggest Event. Tourists are already flocking to London to see the grand old man.’51 A very relieved and exuberant Roland shared the good news with Picasso: In haste I am writing to give you the first impressions of the Picasso explosion in London. It’s overwhelming. Never before has there been so appreciative or copious a response from the press or indeed the general public. Already over 100,000 people have visited the show. There are queues the entire day until 8 o’clock in the evening when the gallery closes . . . You have conquered London . . . 52

Not unexpectedly, Cooper had put in an appearance, but Roland was able to inform Picasso that he had been firmly put in his place: As for Cooper, he diverts the people in the galleries by proclaiming at the top of his voice that he is the special and personal envoy of Pablo Picasso, sent by you to supervise the way we treat the pictures, and that he was never officially asked to lend his canvases. We all know him and no one pays much attention to all this.53

The reviews of the Tate Exhibition were largely ecstatic. Lawrence Gowing was thunderstruck. The glory of the exhibition is to show Picasso the painter at fulllength in broad daylight for the first time. The effect is stunning: it is as if we had never seen him at all. Suddenly one is aware of something that even the best of earlier exhibitions left half invisible. Firstly and finally Picasso’s paintings are marvelously sensuous physical things. At the Tate all other qualities come second to this . . . If Mr Penrose’s exhibition is not the exhibition of the century it will be surprising.54

David Sylvester, however, challenged the greatness of Picasso’s postcubist work.55 John Golding made the deeply intelligent remark that ‘despite the large number of brilliantly coloured canvases the total impression [of the exhibition] is one of severity and restraint’. He also maintained that Picasso was his most revolutionary as an artist

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when he was most classical.56 All in all, the exhibition revealed that the Spaniard was an artist in whom the experimental and the traditional were perfectly conjoined. Roland may have vanquished London (with the exception of Cooper), but his establishment side had so markedly asserted itself that he had to face the imprecations of his surrealist colleagues. Melly wrote a biting indictment: What are you up to? I hope you will enjoy the little jokes HRH will presumably make in front of the pictures? Perhaps he will suggest that Prince Charles could do better. Honestly, I find the whole concept an insult to a great painter. What are you after? A title?57

Mesens barked: ‘Me, I remain, in 1960, proudly SURREALIST.’58 In the instance of the Picasso exhibition, Roland’s role as promoter of modernism had been so successful that it might seem that he had abandoned his adherence to surrealism. Can someone who has spent much of his life promoting a form of art completely antithetical to the bourgeoisie enter the domain of its enemy? In the years ahead, Roland would be forced to deal with that complex issue. The essential contradictions in Roland remained intact. As Desmond Morris recalled, ‘there would be a big do at the Tate for Princess Margaret with Roland doing his royal bit and then at the ICA office he would be against the establishment, defending the artist’s right to do what he liked. He switched back and forth between the establishment and being the rebel.’ Desmond Morris also observed, ‘I would say that Roland was an intellectual rebel but a social conformist. He dressed like a London clubman, his barber was one of the top ones in Mayfair.’59 On the very day that the Picasso retrospective closed, The Times carried an intriguing story: ‘The trustees of the Tate hope to retain one of the paintings on loan permanently for the gallery if there is sufficient public support.’60 The painting in question was The Three Dancers (1925), which both Picasso and Roland considered as important as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Roland, who had been appointed a Trustee of the Tate a year before, was asked to conduct the negotiations with the artist (Fig. 62).

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Figure 62. Roland, Picasso, Lee and Jacqueline with The Three Dancers, 1960.

Once again, Roland undertook a difficult, cumbersome difficult task involving the often-prickly artist. If that undertaking was not daunting enough, he would be soon be engaged in two other Picassocentred quests: to mount an exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture, and to assist the city of Chicago in commissioning a monumental civic sculpture from him. The great success of the Tate exhibition spurred Roland on, and during the ensuing five years he devoted his energy to these three tricky problems, each subject to an assortment of hitches. His motives, even to himself, were not clear-cut.

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He remained committed to promoting the great artist in every way he could, but what did he receive for his trouble? There was the possibility of receiving Picasso’s approbation, which, when it suited him, he bestowed. There was the chance to best his rival Cooper as the favourite son of Picasso. More than anything else, there was the opportunity to stay connected with Picasso. To some degree, his idolatry of Picasso made Roland feel important – in vital connection to the essence of art. But in another way, it further robbed Roland of his own commitment to making art. Promoting Picasso was easier than creating his own images. Like every other artist in the Picasso orbit, Roland knew he had no chance of surpassing the master. Many artists pressed on regardless; most fell by the wayside. In Roland’s case, he allowed his inner light to become one that he used to illuminate the older man. At the age of sixty, Roland did not want to abandon his own career as an artist, but it was easier to allow his Picassomania to take over. Roland did this even though he had come to a shrewd, accurate appraisal of Picasso’s egomania. On the one hand, he felt energised by his friendship with Picasso; on the other, it drained him. There were many other claims on Roland’s time. There was the ICA. There were other exhibitions he was organising. Often, young artists would ask Roland’s opinion of their work. He attempted to be both honest and respectful. Tony noticed that his father developed a three-tiered strategy in such situations: in his typically kind and friendly way, he would voice one of three reactions. If the work he saw moved him, he would say that it was exciting to behold and encourage the artist to continue in that vein. If the work was mediocre, he would ask: ‘Do you enjoy painting?’ When the answer was yes, he would observe: ‘That is a very good reason for doing it.’ If the work was dreadful, he would pleasantly remark: ‘I can see you really enjoyed doing this.’61 Roland was an enabler. Roland and Lee transformed the existence of the actor, novelist and screenwriter Julian Fellowes, who was ten years old when his family moved to Chiddingly in 1959. A shy child with an interest in the arts, he felt overshadowed by an older brother and quickly connected with the Penroses, who were, in the boy’s eyes, extremely alternative to most of the ‘tweedies’ who inhabited the countryside. If, for example, Roland happened to meet a neighbour

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while out for a walk with Valentine – who lived at Farleys for long stretches – he would ask: ‘Have you met my first wife?’ Most of those so questioned were shocked by this piece of unconventionality. There were exotic delights. The boy was pleasantly startled by the centrepiece placed on the dining table at Farleys: it was not the usual ceremonial goblet, but a silver-plated statue of King Kong. One day, while chatting with Lee in her bedroom, Fellowes noticed a small china cow and remarked how beautiful it was. Lee looked the child in the face: ‘I love that cow. It is one of my favourite things.’ She paused. ‘And now I’m giving it to you.’ Surprised, the boy said he could not understand why she would part with such a treasure. She assured him that the cow would now enjoy a ‘double success’: it would have been beloved by two people who cherished it. Before visiting Farleys, the precocious youngster’s knowledge of painting and sculpture had been confined to the old masters. One day, Roland volunteered to give him a tour of the collection. Fellowes noticed that the pieces of art – the Picassos, the Man Rays, the many pieces of Oceanic art and found objects – were an integral part of the house, and never treated by their owners as remote or forbidding entities. They were there to be enjoyed. He was especially taken with Picasso’s portrait of Lee as l’Arléslienne, and Roland explained to him how that edgy piece of art fully captured Lee’s personality. For the first time, Fellowes realised what modern art was – and could be. As he put it, the ‘scales fell from my eyes’. As he got older, Fellowes noticed that in conversation Lee and Roland had the capacity to make any person they were speaking to seem the most important person in the entire world. He also observed that Roland’s curiosity never abated. When Fellowes was working in films, Roland would quiz him about all the ins and outs of that industry. The smallest detail intrigued him. In the early 1970s, Fellowes penned a novel that he now refers to as ‘utter trash’ and a ‘train-reading romance’. He asked Roland to read a draft, and when he had done so, the older man told him that it was important to be creative, that any such work was an exploration of the self and that he had a duty to complete it. The historical novel – Poison Presented – was published in 1975 under the nom de plume Rebecca Greville.62 Shortly after publication, Fellowes was visiting Lee at Farleys. She walked up to him, obviously hiding something behind her back, and then revealed that she was holding a

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copy of his just-published book, which she asked him to sign for her and Roland. As a young man, Fellowes, when asked what he proposed to do with his life, responded that he wanted to become an actor and a writer. His elders looked at him askance, their manner suggesting that he must eventually come to his senses and do something serious. When he confessed his ambitions to the Penroses, they encouraged him to pursue his goals. Despite many pleasant interludes, there remained Roland’s difficult domestic situation with Lee. The artist Anthony Hill recalled: ‘I think that Lee became a real problem for him. I only met Lee when she had succumbed to drinking. I told Roland that I had had a pin-up of her in American forces uniform – she was beautiful. So it was a shock when I saw her. She used to cut her hair with nail scissors. She was at the bar of the ICA a lot and had an account there, which Roland had to pay.’63 Dorothy Morland, who knew Roland quite well and liked him, nevertheless had a realistic assessment of his character: ‘He was very split: his Quaker upbringing remained with him. He was very reserved about his feelings. I don’t think he was really himself until he had a few drinks when six o’clock came – he needed them to loosen up.’64 She appreciated the earthy, everyday side of him, such as his always staying in Sussex on Monday to meet with his farm manager. Morland also observed Roland’s fierce loyalty to Lee: she felt that his early fascination with her never deserted him. Nevertheless, as a frequent visitor to Farley Farm, she did not like the ‘undercurrents going on’. She and Lee did not get along: ‘I didn’t like Lee really, and she didn’t like me. I wasn’t someone she could have a drink with. I hated her drinking. Roland didn’t mind it. Lee could be very amusing and witty, but she was terribly rude to me sometimes, for example she [once] told me to move out of a photo she was taking of some friends.’65 To a large extent, Roland kept busy so that he did not have to deal with stressful marital discord. On the other hand, Lee was of considerable aid to her husband. She acted as his research assistant; she photographed many of her husband’s meetings with Picasso and Jacqueline, with whom she got along extremely well; she provided

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excellent advice in difficult situations. The couple never agreed to disagree about Diane, but on other issues they remained genuine partners. Roland probably accepted Lee’s drinking because he knew that his sexual activities distressed her and had, in part, made her turn to alcohol. In time, Roland became a more dutiful father to Tony. He enjoyed talking with his son, and certainly valued his companionship when Tony joined his parents on some of their trips. As he grew older, Tony became more alienated from and hostile towards Lee. He found it extremely difficult to understand how this woman could possibly be his mother. Rather than distancing herself from her son, Lee openly baited him. She often behaved as if they were siblings rather than mother and son. To a considerable extent, motherhood seems to have brought her into contact with the immature side of herself, that part that had been badly treated as a child. ‘We hated each other,’ Tony recalled, ‘and did it with such attention to the fine points that it became an art form. We constantly lurked in ambush and never missed a chance to assassinate each other’s emotions.’66 The precarious emotional strains were often fleeting. Many guests at Farley Farm were unaware of the tensions between husband and wife, or between mother and son. On 11 September 1961, the Penroses met the American-born McNultys at a dinner at the Prunier Restaurant in London, where James Beard, the celebrated writer on food, was also present. Lee, who was completing her cordon bleu training, was instantly taken with Henry McNulty, an expert on wines and spirits, and his wife Bettina, an editor at House and Garden. Bettina instantly understood that cooking for Lee was therapy, and also a way of getting back in touch with her creativity. Soon after that first meeting, on 17–19 November, the McNultys were guests at Farleys; they also spent Christmas there. Bettina, who became Lee’s closest friend, saw a great deal of Roland as well. She noticed that Roland and Lee shared the same bedroom and seemed to get along with each other, displaying the mixture of bickering and affection common in long-established marriages. Roland, Bettina observed, was not the kind of person who would ever tolerate being pushed around. Lee, she recalled, was a true original: ‘she didn’t say things the way other people did’. She also

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realised that ‘motherhood was not Lee’s role in life’. Bettina may have been Lee’s friend, but she and her husband were also attached to Roland. He once made a collage for Bettina as a birthday present, and he and Lee twice gave her and her husband paintings, one by Roland and one by Man Ray.67 Roz Jacobs, a fashion buyer for Macy’s, met Roland and Lee in Paris in 1955; the year before, Roz and her husband had become avid collectors of surrealist art, particularly the work of Man Ray. Roz quickly became a close friend of Lee’s, but was often in Roland’s company. For her, he ‘was a great charmer’. She never witnessed spats between Lee and Roland, but once when she arrived in London and had only Thursday night there, she, Lee and Roland taxied from Hornton Street to Victoria Station, where Roland took an evening train to Sussex as he did every Thursday. After Roland boarded, an angry Lee turned to Roz: ‘You’re here only one night. You’d think he could have stayed back!’68 Rosamond Bernier, who stayed with Lee and Roland for long stretches of time on Hornton Street and at Farleys between the time of her break-up with Georges Bernier and her marriage to the art journalist John Russell, often witnessed Roland in an irritated state when dealing with Lee’s drunken outbursts. When alone with Rosamond, each complained about the other. However, she observed that husband and wife got on amicably for long stretches of time.69 The request for Roland to broker a deal with Picasso to acquire The Three Dancers for the Tate had come through Sir Colin Anderson, the chairman of the trustees. They could only afford half The Three Dancers’ estimated value, and wanted a prix d’ami to be negotiated. After visiting Picasso in late September to open negotiations, Roland wrote him on 6 October: ‘. . . when you have had time to reflect about The Three Dancers of 1925 perhaps we shall be able to rejoice in the thought of having this picture in London as a permanent reminder of the exhibition and as a major representation of your work. I know your generosity would be much appreciated.’70 When Roland was awarded the CBE, he informed the painter that he was ‘proud to be the “Picasso man” ’. He added: ‘I do hope that your decision in favour of the Tate Gallery will be taken in this lovely January sunshine.’71

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Selling this major picture was a vexed issue for Picasso, and when he had trouble making such difficult decisions, he would simply put them on hold by not bothering to see the emissaries who were, in effect, pestering him. Well aware that Roland would not give up, he played ‘wait and see’. This immense canvas (215.3 cm × 142.2 cm) was for Picasso one of his greatest achievements. The canvas shows three dancers – the one on the right is barely visible. They are engaged in a macabre performance, the exact significance of which is difficult to decipher. For Picasso, the painting was likely his response to the death of his friend Ramon Pichot – the dancer on the right, who died while Three Dancers was being worked on. The person on the left is Pichot’s wife Germaine Gargallo, and the figure at the centre is Carlos Casagemas, Gargallo’s lover. Twenty-five years earlier in Barcelona, Casagemas had shot himself after failing to shoot Gargallo. As such, the picture shows someone who had died in Barcelona many years before, and another male friend recently deceased. At some level, the painting commemorates these two friends, but it can also be read as a commentary on the tragic outcomes of many love affairs. In response to such tragedies, the dancers can be seen as mounting an ecstatic, defiant response to mortal suffering. For Picasso, the personal associations the picture evoked made it one to which he was deeply attached. For Roland, the picture had special charms: it was painted when Picasso was most attached to surrealism, and had been reproduced in 1926 in Breton’s Le surréalisme et le peinture. The issue of whether or not to part with this important painting became even more complicated for Picasso because Roland, as mentioned above, was also beseeching him to allow him to mount an exhibition of his sculptures and, in addition, he had been enlisted by the architect William Hartmann to obtain a design from the artist for a monumental sculpture to stand in front of the New Civic Center building in Chicago. Picasso enjoyed having suitors at his beck and call – these persons reminded him of just how significant he was. On the other hand, receiving them ate up valuable time that could otherwise be spent working. Even matters of lesser importance caused him great annoyance. As he was finishing work on the 1964 Miró retrospective at the Tate, Roland felt that artist’s self-portrait in Picasso’s collection was

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essential to the show’s success. Picasso gave way in this matter, but he did so only after losing his temper. Things became even more complicated. During the time he was researching his biography of Picasso Roland had met the artist’s former companion, Françoise Gilot, who had been a visitor to Farley Farm a number of times. When she published her account of her life with Picasso in 1964, she revealed her former lover as a fragile, lonely and often destructive person. On this issue, Roland immediately took Picasso’s side, but he unwittingly placed himself in imminent danger of being banished by his sovereign. With considerable trepidation, he told Picasso: I had a phone call from a friend that greatly surprised me and left me wondering. She asked me if it was true that I had left the party at Maeght’s early in order to go and spend the evening with Françoise Gilot. Of course I replied with a categorical no, but I do wonder who could have been the perpetrator of so colossal a lie. Above all, I realized you might take it very badly at this particular time, because I recently learned something from my old editor in London, Victor Gollancz, what you must already know. He says that he was offered from America the manuscript of a book dictated by Françoise and written by a journalist called Carlton Lake. He added that he wouldn’t publish it for all the world. Françoise has seen fit to describe her life with you by inventing, from her supposedly total recall, long conversations with you and her version of events. Gollancz considers that the motives that presumably lie behind this book, along with all the unpardonable indiscretions, render it completely untouchable as far as he is concerned, but of course he can’t prevent others from publishing it. Fortunately, your Olympian habit of ignoring this sort of publicity, even when it comes from so poisoned a source, will enable you to surmount this attack, but I am terribly sorry that anyone should attempt to torment you in this way.72

The woman with whom Roland attended the party was his colleague, the arts administrator Joanna Drew; the source of the malevolent gossip was likely Douglas Cooper. Roland, who had invested so much of himself in idealising Picasso, found it difficult to accept Gilot’s version of him, even though he had himself been the victim of Picasso’s dark side on many occasions. Roland took down the paintings by Gilot that hung

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on his walls, and he had an angry confrontation with her on BBC Radio. Despite his own intimate knowledge of Picasso’s cruelty, he cut contact with her. While staying with Picasso on 28 November 1964, Roland confided to his diary just what a difficult position his relationship with Picasso placed him in: ‘The difference is that before I had no axe to grind and now I’ve got a hundredweight of axes and no idea how to grind them. The battle is so deeply psychological. The old devil cannot give in – he must torment both his friends and enemies – perhaps friends most.’ His language here is just as negative as anything penned by Gilot. At long last, Roland was finally facing up to the real Picasso. While he was researching and writing the biography, he had wanted to ignore Picasso’s many faults. He could no longer do this, but he refused to break ranks and show any sympathy for Gilot. The Three Dancers was finally sold to the Tate on 30 November 1964 for £80,000. It was the first painting Picasso had sold directly to a museum. The sculpture exhibition was another near-disaster. At the last minute, Picasso announced the show was off, but he was persuaded to change his mind. It opened on 9 June 1967. Having cancelled meeting after meeting, Picasso eventually came to terms with William Hartmann about the Chicago sculpture. In the midst of the protracted negotiations with Picasso, Roland curated the Ernst retrospective at the Tate in 1961 and the Miró in 1964. These were much milder affairs. Of the 205 works by Ernst, for example, 141 had previously been shown at MOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. Roland visited Ernst and Tanning, now living in Huismes, twenty-five miles southwest of Tours. With their help, he selected works from the American show. The balance of loans came from European collectors, who were mostly friends of Roland’s. In the House of Lords, Edith Summerskill objected strenuously to the waste of money expended on The Three Dancers when hospitals were in need of operating theatres. Subsequently, she and Roland debated this issue on television on the six o’clock news. The power of the painting to provoke ire deeply pleased Roland. He told Picasso: ‘Since then I’ve been inundated with letters that remind me of the good old days when retired colonels came to brandish their umbrellas and spit on modern art.’73 Roland’s dealings with Picasso were often anxiety-provoking and dispiriting, but there were also tender, reflective moments, such as

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the time he saw how elemental Picasso was as a person and as an artist: ‘I was surprised to see so clearly in his reaction how little he is conscious of the symbols, archetypes, that are so clearly present in his work. They arrive spontaneously; he is never consciously creating symbols. Free of this calculation, which debases the work of so many, he uses archetypes just as primitive people do – with unconscious conviction, and it is for this reason that they are so right and profound.’ Of course, Roland himself had always responded to art in a highly personal and deeply emotional way (Fig. 63).

Figure 63. Roland at his London flat, 1960. Above his head is Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1962). Among the other pictures are Miró’s Maternity (1924) on the left and De Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) on the right.

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Chapter Fifteen

The Uninvited Guest (1966–1984)

In 1953 Herbert Read had accepted a knighthood – much to the chagrin of his colleagues, who thought of him as an anarchist. Thirteen years later, in 1966, Roland faced severe criticism when he accepted the same honour. Many of his friends in the avant-garde felt that the acceptance of such a distinction meant he had allowed himself to become an establishment figure. At first, Lee gleefully and somewhat spitefully (and incorrectly) called herself ‘Lady Lee’, although she later referred to herself, correctly, as Lady Penrose. Roland’s friend Ninette Lyon asked him, ‘How can you call yourself a surrealist now you are Sir Penrose?’ ‘It’s all right,’ he replied, ‘I am now a Sir-Realist.’ Reyner Banham shouted at Roland: ‘What’s this knighthood about then?’ and Roland weakly retorted, ‘You wait. It’ll be your turn next.’1 Roland was publicly embarrassed when he was attacked at the ICA’s Apollinaire exhibition, where he was accused of abandoning his surrealist principles. Diane’s account of this matter should be treated cautiously: ‘One day, he became Sir Roland. He told me: “The Queen wants to make me a Sir. This annoys me a great deal.” He was dying to become one, but the surrealist artist he used to be was slightly embarrassed. He consulted with his friend Sir Herbert Read who told him that being ennobled would be immensely useful to the Institute of Contemporary Arts and for the help he gave to young artists. He accepted it. Since that time, he was called “Sir Roland”. To say the truth, he loved it.’2 Roland had never been a surrealist in politics – as were Breton and Éluard, in their avowal of different forms of communism. He felt that the bestowal of the title signified that the hard battle he had waged to make his fellow countrymen aware of modern art had been partially won. There was perhaps, he felt, no correct side to this argument.

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Diane was especially aware of Roland’s conflicted nature: ‘Surrealist, he never relinquished the habits of a great landowner he inherited from his family. Like his ancestors, he visited, every Monday, his lands, accompanied by his son and his farmer. He did it in a [Land Rover].’3 This split between establishment values and revolutionary ones was an inherent part of Roland’s character. He had purchased Farley Farm because he enjoyed and appreciated the English countryside and its many traditional values. He championed Picasso because he considered him to be the artist who had challenged and conquered all the previous rules of what twentieth-century art should be. But Picasso became a very wealthy man, and could be said to have become an establishment figure in his own right. Can one be a perfect English gentleman and still remain a genuine surrealist? Roland believed it was possible. Overall, he maintained, the best way to challenge the establishment was to become a part of it. Of course, as successful businessmen, the outsider Quakers had done exactly this. By the mid-1960s there were fewer visitors to Farley Farm, mainly because Roland used his Sussex home as a refuge from his lecture tours, meetings at the ICA and other London-based activities. As a result, he paid more attention to the garden and filled it with sculptures. F. E. McWilliams’ Kneeling Woman, which had once caused traffic jams, was placed in a bower of apples. Michael Werner’s huge Fallen Giant lay prone beside the beehives. Bill Turnbull’s War Goddess overlooked the pond on the kitchen side of the house. Having become interested in ley lines – the invisible channels of energy said to connect ancient sites – Roland was delighted to discover that he had placed Moore’s Mother and Child on a line that linked the Long Man to Chiddingly Church. Although he kept in touch with the ICA, Roland had lost touch with its day-to-day activities during his Picasso years. He had expected Herbert Read to carry on in his place, but when Read died in 1968 Roland felt duty-bound to rekindle his formerly close relationship with the Institute. Finding new quarters for the ICA – and raising funds to accomplish this – became Roland’s preoccupation. The lease on the old premises on Dover Street was up and the decision was made to move to a Nash mansion on Carlton House Terrace, on the Mall. Roland

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and many others felt that Dover Street had lost steam. Rather than being a place devoted to innovation, they argued, it had assumed the air of a cozy, genteel club. Lord Goodman, the chairman of the Arts Council, favoured the move, but £500,000 had to be raised to make it happen. Goodman made it clear that the Arts Council would not give a block grant unless contemporary artists supported this initiative. Sotheby’s waived its fees for fund-raising auctions held on 23 June 1966 and 12 December 1967. Lee gave Braque’s cubist La Mandore to the first auction to which, among others, Bacon, Hepworth, Man Ray, Miró, Nicholson and Picasso donated. Roland gave Picasso’s Le Crayon qui Parle and purchased Chadwick’s Dancers II. For the second auction, he intended to donate Femme nue couchée au soleil sur la plage, the first work he had acquired by Picasso. He asked Joanna Drew to collect the picture from the Hornton Street flat. She was just leaving when Lee arrived and asked Drew what she was up to. When told, she replied: ‘If that goes, I go!’ Wisely, Drew put down the canvas and fled.4 The two auctions raised about £115,000, which Roland topped up with a further £20,000. Tony Penrose was flabbergasted when he attended the opening party at the new ICA in April 1968 which featured Mark Boyle’s Sensual Laboratory and Ginger Johnson’s African Drummers: ‘If I had landed on another planet it would have been less of a jolt: the cavernous gallery was pulsing with the brain-pulping sound of an African rock band. The walls reflected ever-changing amorphous psychedelic colour patches from a series of ingenious lanterns. Various “happenings” were staged around the gallery, some erotic, others just bewildering. It was hot, dark and jammed tight with merrymakers in the trendiest of costumes who danced, drank and enjoyed the sight of each other as much as the “happenings”. Indeed it was a great event, but it was so un-Roland with its noise, garishness and raw licentiousness.’5 What soon became apparent to Roland was that the new ICA was not the ICA he had helped found. The Dover Street quarters may have been cramped, but they had been a place where artists could meet and actually talk about their work. The new place, with its large gallery, cinema and café, had cost so much that it brought in an entirely new segment of support – ‘closer’, as Roland observed, ‘to the strongholds of finance and industry in the city and therefore

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possibly further from the intellectual pioneers who had still understood the purpose of the ICA’.6 Desmond Morris, who had organised the highly successful show of Congo’s art in the spring of 1957 at the ICA, became its director in 1967. He resigned within a year, after his book The Naked Ape became an overnight success. Read told Roland: ‘It shows it pays to write on Apes rather than Art!’7 Roland strongly backed Morris as director because he felt that the younger man was a genuine ‘wild man’ who could transform the ICA in a new, meaningful way. In recalling his time as director, Morris recollected the only sharp words directed at him by Roland: ‘I remember going down the street in London with him once and mentioning a scandal in the news about someone’s sex life. He turned to me quite angrily and said: “What people do in the privacy of their own homes is their own business.” It was the only time he was ever sharp with me. I said he’d misunderstood me, and he said I had spoken as though I was being disparaging.’8 By 1968, the old ways of operating the ICA had completely disappeared. In the 1950s, Roland and Peter Watson had kept the ICA from going under by means of frequent infusions of cash. After 1964, when the Labour government came into power, the Arts Council was supportive. Essentially the ICA, in its first incarnation, had been run along the lines of a private gallery, but with public funding. That cozy situation changed with the move to the Mall: its scale of operation meant that it needed a great deal more money for basic operating expenses, and that increased funding became more open to scrutiny. It had also become incredibly easy, under the traditional ways in which business at the ICA had been conducted, to run up a deficit quickly. Some members of the Arts Council felt that issues which were international in scope should be under the control of the British Council. The Arts Council, which did not wish to relinquish control to the BC, became more stringent in its overseeing of ICA spending. The new director, Mike Kustow, came from the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he had established Theatreground, a mobile theatre unit. He was also a fervent CND supporter. His vision of the ICA was extremely idealistic: ‘It needed to become a workshop for the new, a centre for innovation, which, he felt, both individuals and society thirsted for; he wanted to make it a kind of alchemical alembic, in which the base matter of confusion and disintegrated experience was

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transmuted, healed, transformed into higher matter, in which problems became material for illumination and play.’ Yet, as he admitted, he never discovered the correct ‘strategy’ for such magic.9 Kustow found Roland a very amiable but divided person: in conversation he was ‘full of reminiscences of his youth in Paris with Picasso, his wild times with Éluard and the Surrealists, his flouting of moral and aesthetic conventions in pre-war Britain. The Chairman, now knighted for his services to art, told these tales of outrage and challenge, of ventures into the irrational and the unconscious, in an endearingly incongruous style, the style of “a very perfect gentleman”, externally a member of the Establishment, at home, despite his defiantly flamboyant ties, in the Athenaeum, yet internally still a renegade, a rebel.’10 Roland, however, did not know how revolutionary he wanted to be in running the ICA. In his foreword to the catalogue for the ‘Obsessive Image 1960–1968’ exhibition in April 1968, Roland claimed that the ICA was about to ‘extend its energies in new directions’.11 However, he was not really sure what those new initiatives were. Soon, moreover, he felt that Kustow’s ‘wild enthusiasm caused the hard earned funds to melt away like snow in June’.12 Kustow attempted to mount exhibitions that he considered edgy. Arnold Goodman, worried that the new ICA had run £40,000 over budget in its first six months and concerned that an American performance artist had frolicked in the nude to blaring music, called in Roland and Kustow to warn them about the necessity of not creating ‘embarrassments’. When Kustow was suspended in 1969, Roland, at Goodman’s suggestion, became president. ‘The immediate outcome’, Roland lamented, ‘was that a business man with wide and powerful interests was appointed as the new Chairman and I reluctantly accepted Herbert Read’s more peripheral post as President.’ The new chairman was Baron Kissim, whom Roland considered an ignoramus: ‘The paintings chosen to decorate both his office and his home showed no signs of interest in contemporary art.’13 In the good old days, Roland recalled, ‘everything for good or bad had been in the hands of a small group who kept a close watch on the programmes they planned. Although the activities were frequently unprecedented and occasionally scandalous by conventional standards, the Arts Council respected ideologically the independence

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of the ICA and at the same time became increasingly generous in its help. With larger, more prestigious and more expensive headquarters and a significantly larger staff, the ICA came under public scrutiny to an unparallelled extent.’14 Goldman appointed Kissim because he wanted spending to be curbed; as Roland was well aware, his own new post was largely ceremonial. Kissim claimed that he found it difficult to raise money among his business associates; the Arts Council poured in more money, but the quid pro quo was a closely maintained supervision of how money was being spent. Artists and intellectuals began to feel the ICA had lost in substance what it made up for in glitz. In 1970, a new chairman – Robert Loder – was appointed, and Ted Little replaced Kustow. Little had been responsible for the Birmingham Arts Lab, which staged an international performance festival that once took over Birmingham city centre in an anarchic celebration that proved popular with many residents. ‘Ted Little was brought in to make the ICA overall a humming place, to make it popular, a kind of Pompidou, with people queuing to get in.’ Roland did not see that mandate as a bad one, but he soon found himself at loggerheads with Little. As far as Roland was concerned, the new director ‘was thoroughly unsuited to the part.’ He brought with him some worthless friends who, under cover of setting up a press to print their vulgar posters, formed an unruly clique, a ‘mafia’, which began to defy and then openly to sabotage the instructions of the ICA Council. After many unheeded protests, I realized how far the ICA had drifted from the original conception of its founders, but I was trapped.15

He was ensnared because he was heavily involved with exhibitions devoted to two of his closest friends: first Man Ray (January–February 1975) and then Ernst (January–February 1976). He obviously did not wish to undermine those two events. From 1973 until 1976, Roland coped as best he could under the ICA’s new unsympathetic management. He organised the exhibition ‘Illusion in Nature and Art’ in 1973. In the preface, he wrote: ‘My praise of illusion is given not only because of its ability to create

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amusements, but also because it can sustain a power which is of inestimable value in our search for knowledge, our lasting enjoyment of life and our search for the fragile key to reality.’ Roland gave £5,000 so that the show could be mounted. ‘Unhappily,’ he reflected, this ‘apparent triumph for the ICA proved to be illusion. Beneath it a new crisis was brewing which arose originally from lack of funds, and although eventually we were saved by bankruptcy the way in which this happened brought with it a period of frustration, distortion of former aims and squabbling.’16 In 1974, Roland formed the Elephant Trust by contributing to it the money raised from selling Max Ernst’s monumental Célèbes. Apparently it had been Roland’s intention to give the painting to the ICA, but Julie Lawson persuaded him to vest it in a Trust instead. The original intention of the Elephant Trust was to fund exhibitions at the ICA. In 1975, there was yet another sticky issue. Two years earlier, Alistair McAlpine, a property developer and ICA council member, had loaned the ICA £15,000 and taken its Visitors’ Book, with its Picasso drawing, as surety. In 1975 McAlpine consigned the book anonymously to Sotheby’s. The wording of the entry in Sotheby’s catalogue gave the impression that the ICA was selling the book. Roland was aghast because his understanding had been that if McAlpine ever sold the book, it should go to the Tate. Through Roland’s efforts – and with his financial support – it was eventually presented to the British Museum.17 The glaring differences between Roland and Ted Little came to a head in 1976, when the director became firmly opposed to the Ernst show. On the night before the second opening, ‘secretly the “mafia” got to work . . . [and] daubed the whole of the entrance to the Gallery with hideous signs of their spiteful hatred [smearing the gallery walls with purple paint] and sullenly refused to clear them off’. The mess was cleaned, and the show opened without incident. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back occurred when Roland discovered that the same ‘mafia’ had been ‘joyously nailing on the walls an exhibition of all their miserable posters, printed surreptitiously on the premises after they had been forbidden by the [ICA] Council to do so. This made it clear that the Council could not and the Director dare not stem the tide of barbarism and I preferred to withdraw without further argument.’18

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The printers were three young men from Birmingham who had made successful, distinctive posters for touring theatre companies. The Arts Council engaged them to do posters for various ICA events. Ted Little had offered them an empty room in the basement. As Julie Lawson – who had been at the ICA since its inception – lamented: Roland ‘can get angry & outraged but cannot fight.’19 A part of Roland felt, perhaps correctly, that he could not have won this dispute. When Roland resigned in 1976 he wrote a statement that was not published, presumably because he did not want to damage the ICA’s reputation. It read in part: ‘I no longer recognise in the present situation the fundamental aspirations or the enthusiasm which have during the last thirty years caused me so willingly to give to the ICA all I could afford in time and money.’20 The press mistakenly associated his departure with the fuss over the Dadaist-influenced 1976 COUM Transmission Prostitution show at the ICA – which included pornographic images from magazines as well as erotic nude photographs. The show featured a stripper and transvestite guards. Prostitutes, punks and people in costumes were among those hired to mingle with the gallery audience. The show caused debate in Parliament about the public funding of such events, but it was not the cause of Roland’s resignation. Roland’s difficulties with the ICA in the seventies were similar to those he and Read had experienced earlier with the Independent Group. Bad manners aside, the ‘mafia’ felt that the older established moderns were old hat, and they considered Roland Penrose the elderly guardian angel of artists who had had their say. Modernism can be an extremely flexible term, and that is exactly what Roland discovered in 1976. His brand of modernism was no longer, in the opinion of many, fashionable. Earlier, Roland had been confronted with a much more dramatic calamity at Easter 1969 when Elsa Fletcher, who looked after the Hornton Street flat, telephoned Farley Farm to inform Roland and Lee that the flat had been broken into and works of art stolen. When Roland, Lee and Tony arrived in London a few hours later, broken glass was strewn about over the floors, accompanied by a pile of empty frames. Among the twenty-six paintings taken were Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Nature Morte au Bec de Gaz, Head of a Woman

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and Negro Dancer; De Chirico’s Uncertainty of the Past; Miró’s Tête de Paysan Catalan and various works by, among others, Ernst, Braque and Man Ray. The thieves had even taken a reproduction of Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin. The paintings were worth £300,000, but the insurance coverage was only against fire; Roland had thought no one would steal such well-known works of art, because he was certain no one would purchase them. The police acted quickly and efficiently. Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Lambert was put in charge. A few days later, an unidentified caller contacted Roland. When Roland appeared shortly thereafter on BBC television’s Panorama, the interviewer asked whether he would pay a ransom. Reacting as if he had been stung, Roland replied, ‘I will have no dealings whatever with these people!’ After the broadcast, a friend told a very upset Roland that he was certain his intransigence meant that the paintings would be destroyed. Lambert, however, reassured Roland: standing firm might actually assist in the capture of the thieves. Many messages of sympathy were received. Some crackpot theories were advanced – one speculated that the Kremlin had stolen the paintings. John Russell, the art journalist, unsympathetically told Roland that the paintings belonged to the world and that if he had not been so morally upright and Quakerish – and had paid the ransom – he would have quickly recovered his stolen goods. In the months that followed, Lambert established the identity of the thieves but not the whereabouts of the pictures. A sting to capture the gang was set up, but accurate intelligence was not immediately forthcoming. In fact, the police had trailed the gang to several spots in South London without success, including a disused shop in Ealing that was about to be torn down. Since the culprits were helpless to retrieve their loot because builders were working there, they took off from that spot without the police being wise to what they were doing. Two workmen, assigned to cleaning out the site, found the paintings, and were about to burn them when one of them took The Weeping Woman to a nearby art shop to see if it was ‘worth a bob’. The owner realised what he was looking at, and called the police. When he saw all his paintings at Chelsea Police Station, a very relieved Roland burst into tears. The canvases spent that night in a prison cell and were whisked off the next day to the Tate, where a restorer took them into his protective custody.21

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The most seriously damaged canvas was Picasso’s Negro Dancer, from which the thieves had cut away the signature with the intention of sending it to the owner. When Roland took the picture to Picasso to be resigned, the unsympathetic Master said that was unnecessary: ‘Every brush stroke is my signature. Why should I sign it again?’ Then he signed in India ink, knowing full well that it would not affix itself to oil, and said that the packaging would soil a signature written in oil. Roland finally won the battle when he pointed out that an opening had been left on the crate to allow the oil signature to dry. The ringleader of the gang evaded justice, although members of his band were jailed. Some paintings were sent to the Tate for safekeeping, but burglar alarms and security systems now became a necessary part of Roland’s existence. In 1973, the seemingly impossible happened: Picasso died on 8 April, in his ninety-first year. To Roland, it appeared as if it were ‘another of those diabolical jokes [Picasso] delighted in inflicting on his friends to test their perception of the uncertainty of the human condition. Slowly I realised that the only consolation that remained was the knowledge that beyond death, his work would live and his influence would endure.’22 In December 1974, Roland and Lee flew to New York for the opening of ‘Man Ray, Inventor, Painter, Poet’ at the Cultural Center’s retrospective. There, Lee would see some of her former companion’s iconic portraits of her. Ray was not in attendance. When the same exhibition opened at the ICA the following spring, the wheelchairbound Ray and his wife Juliet were there. Two years later, Roland confronted his mortality again when both Ernst and Man Ray died: Ernst on 1 April 1976, Ray on 18 November of the same year. In 1977, when he served on the committee selecting the Picasso works that would constitute the dation en paiement (death duties) payable to the French government, Roland felt he was burgling an old friend’s house. Roland and Lee continued to squabble. Rosamond Bernier once accompanied them to France to visit Château Le Pouy, where Roland and Valentine had once lived. The garden was completely overgrown, but Roland managed to find traces of the rose beds that he and his

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first wife had planted forty years earlier. Lee refused to get out of the car: she sat in the back reading cookery books. During the rest of the trip, she rarely bothered to look around local churches or other places of interest. Only in Roquefort, where the cheese is made, did she show any interest. Lee’s lack of interest in anything that gave Roland pleasure, Bernier felt, continually frustrated him.23 The couple’s relationship with their son had improved considerably – this gave them a great deal of relief from the deaths of close friends and their habitual squabbling. In 1970, when Tony graduated from the Royal Agricultural College, Roland was anxious to discuss his future with him. Roland suggested he travel before settling down at Burgh Hill, a nearby dairy farm Roland had bought in 1967. In 1971, Tony began what would become a three-year trek around the globe. Tony returned from his round-the-world trip accompanied by his wife, Suzanna Harbord, a ballet dancer he had married in New Zealand. Lee and Roland had immediately taken to Suzanna, a woman of incandescent beauty and charm, when they had earlier met her briefly in England, but Roland did not take the news of the wedding well. Lee had the opposite reaction: she wrote a warm letter of congratulations. In return, her daughter-in-law, upon settling with Tony at Burgh Hill, did everything she could to effect a reconciliation between mother and son. Tony discovered that he could finally come to terms with his mother. ‘It was not a mother– son relationship, but more like a grudging affection between two battle-scarred warriors who suddenly find that they would have been fighting on the same side if only they had known differently.’24 Roland began to see Lee in an altered way. All his life, Roland had preferred the company of women to that of men. There had been the long pursuit of Picasso – and the close friendship with Éluard – but his real quest was for the presence of women in his life, not only in the context of his erotic pursuits but also because of the enjoyment he received from being with women. At the age of seventy-seven, he had to confront his own mortality when both his wives became seriously ill. Despite all the difficulties they had experienced in their marriage, Roland cared deeply for Lee. When she became ill with pancreatic cancer, he looked after her until she died on 21 July 1977. There

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were many instances of quiet, tender displays of love. When out with a friend walking in a field, he came upon some wild orchids. He took some back for Lee.25 Roland bestowed the same care upon Valentine, the benign white witch of Farley Farm, when she died there just over a year later on 2 August 1978. Perhaps, at this time, he became aware that many of his finest paintings had been in response to his two wives. With Valentine as a model, he had depicted his estrangement from her. In order to understand what had gone wrong in their relationship, he had put his questions into his various renditions of her. At the beginning of his courtship of Lee, he had tried to show how she was a real woman as opposed to Valentine. Later, he revelled in Lee’s fecundity when she became pregnant; after that, he depicted his estrangement from her. Despite their many differences and disagreements, Roland maintained the integrity of his relationship with Lee. ‘Lee and I were never unfaithful to each other,’ he once told a startled Tony.26 What he meant was that his heart had remained true to Lee, even though he had slept with a number of other women during the course of their relationship. He rigorously maintained that love and sex were distinct, separate entities; in that respect, he felt that he and Lee had truly maintained an even keel. When Diane was not available – or chose to make herself unavailable – Roland saw a great deal of Daniella Kochavi, whom he met when she was editing a film about Picasso. He told this young woman that sex with Lee had ceased after Tony’s birth. Lee befriended Daniella, and treated her as a surrogate daughter. One evening when they were alone together, Lee asked Daniella what she saw in Roland. She was forthright in recalling her response: ‘I adored Roland. It was a Svengali-like relationship. He formed my taste, and Farley Farm showed me how to live.’27 In October 1975, Daniella tried to set down in a letter what their friendship meant to her: ‘Dearest Roland, I am going to take the occasion of your next birthday to write to you and try and tell you things that I never can get in edgeways verbally as you always interrupt me with the refrain, “I am just an old fool” or variation of the theme. I have never liked that refrain as it reminds me how it fooled me when I first knew you. I spent the first few months convinced that [this claim] must be true, as I assumed you of all people must know

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whom you were talking about. Little did I know then that you were throwing dust in my eyes – and with the ease of a pro (having been practising for a long while). You are not a fool, idiot or any other such thing – and if you are – it doesn’t make the slightest difference to any of the people who like to be in your company – including myself.’28 Daniella was informing her lover that she saw through his subterfuge of often resorting to self-deprecation. She was not questioning his sincerity, but she was telling him that he was in reality a good and generous person. Although Roland might have claimed to be ‘an old fool’, in reality he was a person who generously gave his best to others. At about the time Valentine died, he parted from Daniella; for the remaining years of his life, Diane was his sole female companion. Roland’s relationship with Diane remained an uneasy one. In 1974, Rosamond Bernier wrote to console him on his agonised response to one of Diane’s affairs. ‘D was tormented at the idea of hurting you . . . in the mysterious, uncontrollable way of these things, she has become imperiously attached to this new person. No doubt her agony about what to do brought on the migraines and troubles she had been having. What is marvellous is that this enchanting young person has the deepest of attachment to you, and for a long time, and still has, although its nature has changed.’29 The late seventies and early eighties were filled with many new challenges. Roland returned to the ICA as honorary president, a post bestowed upon him as a reparative gesture by the new director, Bill McAllister. In 1978, he was involved with the ‘Dada and Surrealism Reviewed’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Dawn Ades, who worked with him on the exhibition, was convinced he had begun to think surrealism as an active movement was over: ‘I think he felt that it was pointless keeping it going, especially after Breton had gone. Roland had moved on, aware that things had changed.’30 Tony asked him sardonically: ‘Where is your revolution now? All I see are things in glass cases belonging to the establishment. Where do I find the front line?’ His father replied: ‘There will always be a front line – and if you look, you will find it.’31 Two years later, in 1980, the Arts Council held a retrospective exhibition of Roland’s work, which opened at the Fermoy Gallery in King’s Lynn. Organised by Joanna Drew and Richard Francis, the

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exhibition had six stops. To Roland’s great delight the last was at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. There were seventy-four works in the exhibition – paintings, frottages and collages – but pride of place was given to the sculpture Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, first shown in 1936 at the International Surrealist Exhibition. Many other activities kept Roland busy. He attended meetings at the Quaker House in Lewes; he once offered to take Julian Fellowes along, although that never happened. In his final years, Roland became more deeply in touch with his Quaker roots. He resumed work as an artist with a series of new collages; he organised ‘Picasso’s Picassos’, a collection of works that would form the core of the Museé Picasso in Paris. Following the publication of his Picasso biography, he was involved in writing (sometimes in collaboration) other studies of Picasso. The writing of the Picasso biography obviously unleashed Roland’s considerable abilities as a writer. After Picasso’s death, many critics, including Douglas Cooper, fiercely attacked his late paintings: in Cooper’s opinion, these were ‘incoherent doodles done by a frenetic dotard in the anteroom of death’.32 Roland had no sympathy with such revisionist treatments of the great master. Moreover, in writing about his late friend, he insisted that in his work there was an unsettling division between good and evil. This is, of course, a surrealist defense of Picasso, and reflects the insight Roland had reached in the summer of 1933 about the basic disparity that exists between beauty and ugliness. In his essay ‘Beauty and the Monster’ from 1973, he observed, ‘We learn from Picasso that there is no beauty without ugliness, no evil without good.’33 Like him, Picasso had struggled with this incongruence. As late as 1980, therefore, Roland could maintain that Picasso was a ‘born Surrealist’ and ‘a Surrealist to the end’.34 In addition to writing about Picasso Roland had begun to publish critical work on other artists, including, in the early 1960s, books on the sculptors Kenneth Armitage and F. E. McWilliam. For Roland, McWilliam was ‘an inventor of styles . . . He has the capacity to relate our daily existence with the existence which is fundamental and timeless.’35 In 1965 Roland’s book on Man Ray – dedicated to Lee – was issued. In the most personal touch in the book, Roland paid tribute to Man Ray’s capacity for remaining in close contact

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with his friends: ‘He has watched them, talked with them endlessly, loved them and been loved by them.’36 Catalan artists fascinated Roland (as an adult, it should be remembered, Picasso considered himself such).37 In 1965 and 1970, his books on his friend Miró appeared; in 1978 his volume about Tàpies. Twenty-three years younger than Roland, this artist had begun his career as a surrealist; this fact appealed to him, as did Tàpies’s hatred of Franco’s regime. Roland’s openness to new ways of making art is revealed in his championing of an artist who took commonplace objects and made them speak a new language, a language which spoke in archetypal terms. ‘Darkness and light seemed often to struggle for supremacy . . . There was also an anthropomorphic presence which distinguished them from abstract painting and linked them more closely to surrealism.’38 Roland determined to write on Tàpies in order to stress ‘the significance of his new visual language in a format accessible to all students of the deeper meanings of art.’39 This project was of lasting sentimental value to Roland because it was his final collaboration with Lee: in 1973 she photographed the artist in his studio and at home in Barcelona. She died before the Tàpies book – dedicated to Valentine – was published in 1978. Roland’s studies of Man Ray, Miró and Tàpies were commissioned by Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series, a project that made available fully-illustrated, modestly sized volumes on a wide variety of artists. Introductory in nature, these volumes are intended for a wide audience.40 For Roland, writing them allowed him to continue his role as an advocate for surrealism’s contribution to modernism by emphasising that movement’s importance in the careers of those three artists. For example, in discussing Miró’s discovery of surrealism, he observes that his work turned to a ‘new source. It is by the eye of the imagination that he is guided, and it provides him with an inexhaustible abundance of images. His confidence in this new approach was strengthened by the surrealists’ belief that the visions of the imagination must be counted as part of reality.’41 Roland’s writings after the Picasso biography display his remarkable ability to look at a wide variety of modernisms while, at the same time, emphasising the kind of art to which he had dedicated his life. Once again, however, he allowed his role as a proselytiser to dominate his time. In 1981, his writing took an even more creative

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turn in a book that could be justifiably subtitled ‘The Memoirs of a Surrealist’. In his preface to Scrap Book, he asked, ‘Why a Scrap Book?’ Of course, this volume had to have a true surrealist edge to it. During the Second World War, ‘after some infantile attempts to enjoy myself on wet afternoons’, he had cut out and assembled some images in ‘provocative contrasts’: a photograph of a puritanical aunt placed next to one of a pin-up girl. Of course, The Road is Wider than Long from 1939 is meant to have the offhand look of a scrapbook. Having been asked to write a conventional autobiography, he knew that he would have to allow visual imagery to take precedence over written reflections. He put it this way: ‘It would in fact be a scrap book in which illustrations and texts were complementary.’ He compiled the book by assembling material in folders, by decades. Roland’s surrealist preoccupations were obviously drawn towards this unusual form as a suitable way in which to encapsulate his existence. This kaleidoscope version of a narrative stretched from childhood to the present time is a mixture of desire, achievement and frustration: inevitable compromises have taken the place of an unhesitating triumphal progress which can sometimes be the main theme of an autobiography. Those gratuitous elements, good luck and misfortune, are both present. In early days chance was surprisingly generous in mundane affairs, making for a life in which financial worries were minimal, and again fate has been unusually kind in providing me with friends of great value and introducing into my life women of character and unusual beauty whom I have loved.42

Roland portrayed his life as one blessed by fortune, although he had experienced the ‘calamities, wars, deaths, failures, miseries’ that blight most people’s lives. In addition, ‘accepting as an eternal condition the instability between good and evil’, his narrative became one of ‘opposing forces’.43 Scrap Book is a young man’s book, in that it embraces life wholeheartedly and fervently. The unfolding narrative does not express recrimination or regret. Moreover, it is robustly unapologetic. It is as if Roland proclaimed: ‘This is the life I led – for good and bad – and so be it.’

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There are deliberate obfuscations in chronology. For example, pages 204–5 are called ‘The Uninvited Guest’ and deal with the deaths of Lee and Valentine, whereas ‘The Flying Trapeze’ on pages 240–2 introduces Diane (to whom the book is dedicated) into the author’s life history. There are also significant omissions. The narrative does not reveal any of the complexities inherent in Roland’s romancing of Diane – or of Lee’s vociferous objections. Also absent is any mention of George Rylands. Central to the book are the reproductions of Roland’s works of art – and those of his contemporaries (for example, Picasso’s Weeping Woman occupies a full page in colour). Most of these paintings, sculptures and collages are inserted without comment. Roland was fully aware that much of the work of his contemporaries shown overpowered his own, but this was not his concern: he had lived a full life in the company of geniuses, and he was justifiably proud of this. Roland had always accepted his limitations as an artist, but taken as a whole, the book demonstrates just how varied his contributions to modernism were. Moreover, he recognised that his paintings, sculptures and collages were but a small part of his existence as compared to someone like Picasso, whose entire life had been centred on the making of images. In Sussex Roland had the comfort of being near his son and his daughter-in-law, both of whom made sure that there was a steady stream of visitors, places to go and exhibitions to attend. He took special pride in the births of his granddaughters, Ami Valentine in 1977 and Eliza Mary in 1979. Roland did not take to babies or toddlers but as soon as the two children started to make art, they were invited to his studio to make collages; he and the two girls called them ‘glueings’. The bond between father and son became of paramount importance to Roland. He could speak freely to Tony about professional and private matters. In a very real sense, Tony became his confidant, someone to whom he could talk about what he had attempted to do with his life. In the late seventies, Roland’s health began to decline. His eyesight became compromised and his short-term memory began to fail. Writing had always been a chore for him, but it remained a vital lifeline. These new disabilities made it difficult for him to accept invitations, or to contribute even short pieces on emerging artists he believed in. That made him depressed.

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But he was also resourceful. He found his way around some of the problems he confronted by composing Scrap Book in bits and pieces and rehearsing its various parts to Tony, Suzanna and Patsy. However, he was resistant, in general, to accepting assistance from others, and his helpers had to become cunning to assist him. For example, they did not wish him to drive, but they could not forbid him to do so. So, when Roland announced he was about to take his car out, one of them would announce that he or she had an errand to perform in town and would take him with them. Roland travelled a great deal with Diane: to Bomarzo in Italy, in 1979, to Montserrat and Barcelona in 1981, to Trouville in 1982, to Kenya in 1983 and to the Seychelles in January 1984. They were not the easiest of travelling companions. In general, Diane found that Roland was tyrannical and capable of great outbursts of jealous anger. According to her, he was a person who valued works of art over people. She felt he was capable of great rudeness to underlings, but there is no other evidence that he ever behaved in such a way; she also claimed to resent his heavy drinking and his obsessive need to work constantly. In her estimation, he was a person who did not enjoy his own company and so wanted to be surrounded by friends and acquaintances. She did not appreciate being referred to by Roland as his ‘frog’, as if she were some sort of pet.44 Diane made it quite clear to Roland that she valued her independence at all costs. She did not want to be owned by anyone, and she certainly considered marriage as a form of male tyranny. On this score, Roland refused to hear her. When he became seriously disabled in 1977, he had a hip replaced. Later, the pin that helped to hold the hip in place did not hold, and the operation had to be repeated twice. According to Diane, he pleaded with her during one of these crises to move their relationship onto a new footing and to stay with him in London: ‘Come and give it a go. Stay at least some time at my place.’ Diane stayed one night at Hornton Street. The next morning Roland got up, went out to buy The Times and, after Diane served him tea, hid behind his newspaper. She felt insulted. Nevertheless, Roland kept pestering Diane to marry him: ‘I want you to have everything that is mine.’ He could not understand, she remarked, ‘that a little French frog would turn down the offer of becoming a Lady. He introduced me as his wife and so considered me.’ On a lithograph, he inscribed this poem:

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For my Darling Songo My Diane, my wife The spring of all my light Your husband Roland Paris, the 28th of April 198345

Despite Roland’s protestations, she felt his behaviour often contradicted his supposed love. One day in Trouville when Diane had been away for the day, he phoned her: ‘I am reading Tàpies’ autobiography. Would you mind I don’t come to pick you up? Can you take a taxi home?’ Incredible Roland! When I would ask him how his childish whims were met, he would tell me: ‘When my nurse was not happy with me, she used to say: ‘Naughty boy, no jam for tea.’ Unbelievable Roland, who also used to say: ‘I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth.’ On another occasion, he left me alone, sick and without any money, in London, because he was leaving for Sussex but he wrote on the door: ‘Welcome home, my darling. I love you, I love you.’46

In passages such as these, Diane, as is her wont, keeps the focus on herself and her sense of being mistreated by Roland. She leaves a question unanswered: if she was a woman who valued independence above everything, why did she tolerate such behaviour? She claims never to have loved Roland, and could not therefore be seen to be the victim of a tyrannical lover. The answer might be that she did not know her own mind, and that she thus continually and constantly misinterpreted him. The likeness Diane sketches of Roland is unflattering and, in many instances, unbelievable. It must be assessed in context. In her autobiography Diane describes herself as someone who could not have been the easiest person to be with. At all costs, she was concerned with maintaining her beauty. She was also unashamedly self-centred. While detailing her own narcissism, Diane is at great pains in her autobiography to tell the reader what a difficult person Roland could be. There is little affection on her side, but she describes a great deal on his. She rejects his overtures and does not seem particularly distraught when she does so. On the other hand, she is anxious to cast herself in the role of Roland’s protector and muse (Fig. 64).

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Figure 64. Diane Deriaz with Roland.

Diane tried to have it both ways. She rejected the claims Roland made on her and portrayed him as both cranky and overly dependent, but, at the very same time, she proclaimed herself the light to which, like the moth, he was inexorably drawn. The portrait she renders of Roland’s vulnerable side as an older man is probably accurate, but she saw – and then castigated – only one side of him. Diane claimed, accurately, that she was the muse of Roland’s return to making works of art – specifically, collages. She became convinced that this activity would be rejuvenating, and so she facilitated it. I went to a bookshop in Trouville to buy cardboard and postcards. He had been a master of collage. He had to be again. When I brought him everything I bought, he said: ‘No.’ I insisted: ‘Try it out just to see.’ . . . The first attempts, amongst which some involved Flaubert’s head, were astonishing. We were up for one more round! It ultimately clicked. Roland went on until the end of his life. He also started to write poems. This is one of the things that I am the most proud of. 47

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Roland’s late collages – often done in response to the places to which he and Diane travelled – are even more lyrical and whimsical than the earlier ones. As he journeyed to these exotic locales, Roland captured their moods by manipulating the colours in the postcards so that a place’s essential emotional aura was rendered. Another crucial difference between the early and late collages is that the ones from 1982 and 1983 are much freer and more open in the use of space; as a result, the images are more forceful and imposing (Plate 23). Bad health further plagued Roland. After his visit to the Seychelles in January 1984 – a place he found too silent48 – he had a minor stroke. It was followed, less than a week later, by a major one. He could not speak properly, and his eyesight in one eye was badly damaged. Despite this setback, he worked on two exhibitions of new work at the Mayor Gallery and Galerie Henritee Gomis; Tony assisted his father. Roland’s health deteriorated rapidly after this point. He had agency nurses round the clock, and Tony, Suzanna or Patsy nearby to assist. His doctor, Hal Shaw, who over the years had become a family friend, visited him regularly, as did a number of specialists. Roland braced himself one day to ask Shaw, ‘Tell me frankly what my chances are.’ Shaw replied: ‘There will be no improvement in your condition.’ The patient then tried another tactic: ‘Is there anything I should avoid?’ The genial G.P. responded: ‘You can have anything you want.’ In the circumstances, that must have been a particularly distressing thing to hear. Soon afterwards, alone with Tony, Roland gave him some pieces of instruction: ‘Look after Patsy.’ ‘Look after Suzanna and your little girls.’ ‘You are honest. That’s good. Always be honest.’ After voicing these directives, he simply said: ‘And now I’m going to die.’ Tony assured his father that he, Suzanna and Patsy would always be there to look after him. Roland firmly replied: ‘I’m going to die now.’ Diane provides an alternative, extremely dramatic account of Roland’s final days. Diane’s narrative is as hyperbolic as it is selfserving. She leaves out of consideration the efforts of others – Tony, Suzanna and Patsy – to assist Roland when he was dying. Faced with her lover’s incapacity, she uncharacteristically transforms herself into

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an angel of mercy, an especially selfless one. Her account is dubious because, contrary to what she implies, she may not have been at Farley Farm when Roland passed away. In contrast, Tony’s account of his father’s death on 23 April 1984 is both restrained and moving. Pneumonia settled on him – the ‘old man’s friend’ I have heard it called for the release it brings. In the early hours of the morning his breathing slowed and all but stopped. I held his hand. The insistent beat of his pulse remorselessly held him against his will. The heart he strengthened six decades before by cross-country running and maintained by his long walks on the farm would not let him cross the last divide. The pulse flickered, steadied, beat arrhythmically, and then after one, lonely isolated beat like a full stop, was no more.49

Despite increasingly poor health in his final years, Roland maintained his strong commitment to advancing surrealism and a plurality of other modernisms. His resolute dedication buoyed him up, even as his health sharply declined. In the last years of his life, he continued to play his twin roles of artist and promoter of modernism. His strong convictions about the place of art in human life never wavered (Fig. 65). To the end, Roland retained the life lessons he had learned from his Quaker upbringing. His religion’s defiance of establishment values had allowed him to cultivate his own inner light, and, in the process, had given him the leeway to become a surrealist. In particular, Quakerism had permitted him to become his own man by allowing him to explore the unconventional in both his public and private lives. Despite this heritage, he was conflicted about cultivating his artistic inclinations and, at the same time, assuming a position of leadership within the art establishment. In the end, he chose the life of service. Some of his concluding remarks in his book on Miró could be applied to himself: ‘The reality of [his] painting exists in the dreams and desires of the imagination. His conception of reality is inseparable from his inner vision, nourished and made visible to us by his rare capacity to see clearly and to render faithfully that which he sees.’50

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Figure 65. Roland in his study at Farley Farm, 1983, photographed by Antony Penrose.

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Notes

Short Titles and Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes Burke

Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

FF

Farley Farm. The correspondence between RP and LM is housed at Farley Farm.

Friendly

Antony Penrose, Roland Penrose: The Friendly Surrealist (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2001).

Home

Antony Penrose, The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm (London: Frances Lincoln, 2001).

Indigo Days

Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days (Aldershot: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957).

Life

Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work (London: Gollancz, 1958).

Lives

Antony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).

LM

Lee Miller

Look

Eileen Agar, A Look at My Life (London: Methuen, 1988).

RP

Roland Penrose

RPA

Roland Penrose Archives, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

SB

Roland Penrose, Scrap Book, 1900–1981 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981).

Tate

ICA Archives, Tate Gallery (TGA A955)

Visiting

Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

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Chapter 1 1. SB, p. 16. 2. Yearly Meeting Epistle, 1740, quoted in Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism, p. 17. 3. Stramongate was a long-established Quaker school (founded in the seventeenth century). By the time James was there, the students were boys and girls, boarders and non-boarders. Part of the established curriculum was the ‘School Journey’, a long organised walk in the surrounding Lake District. 4. SB, p. 16. 5. SB, p. 18. 6. Westfield College was a small college situated in Kidderpore Avenue, Hampstead, London, and was a constituent college of the University of London from 1882 to 1989. The college originally admitted only women as students; it became coeducational in 1964. 7. Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah, Barclays: The Business of Banking, p. 23. 8. Ibid. p. 29. 9. See Priscilla Hannah Peckover to Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, 9 July 1907, MS: RPA. 10. As Marcia Pointon points out in ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650–1800’ (p. 418), George Fox had exhorted his followers to eschew possessions – ‘to “pluck down your Images, your Likeness[ed], your Pictures” ’, to remove them from houses, walls, signs or other places. Alexander’s behaviour is, of course, completely contrary to this exhortation. 11. SB, pp. 20–1. 12. Hannah Rumball in her MA dissertation ‘Unpicking the Quakers’ makes the crucial point that many Quaker women espoused frugality in dress in theory, but did not do so in practice. Although more observant than Alexander Peckover, RP’s aunts dressed fashionably. This was also true of Josephine Penrose, RP’s mother. 13. Documents in RPA. 14. Alexander Peckover to Elizabeth Josephine Penrose, 24 April 1893, RPA. 15. From 1889 to about 1891, James had lived at 6 Camden Road Studios; in 1893, 57 Aubert Park; 1894–7, 4 Primrose Hill Studios, Fitzroy Square. Josephine’s address at the time her marriage was announced was 7 Regents Park Villas, Oval Road. 16. The twentieth-century reformation of Quakerism into a socially-activated movement is described extremely well in Kennedy, British Quakerism. He says: ‘it did seem to me that the liberal agents of Quaker renewal were

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist fresh, vital and compassionate while their evangelical rivals appeared stodgy, desiccated and rigid. In any case, I decided that my focus would be the Quaker Renaissance’ (p. 5). I am grateful to Professor Kennedy for discussing his research with me. Like other members of her family, Josephine was an indefatigable defender of the Quaker principles of pacifism. James appeared before the tribunal to support his son’s stand against conscription. Both husband and wife allowed their home to be used for the training of ambulance workers. Josephine Penrose, Talks about Peace and War, pp. 9–10. Before she married, Elizabeth Josephine Penrose published Foreshadowings of Christianity (1888). In 1904, when Roland was four, Glimpses of Galilee appeared. Frances Partridge, who met Josephine on one occasion, described her as ‘an extremely formidable woman, and there was a tight family network embracing several long-lived great-aunts with names like Aunt Algerina and Aunt Hannah-Maria’ (Memories, p. 130). Alexander Peckover to James Doyle Penrose, 20 October 1900, MS: RPA. SB, p. 16. Ibid. Edith Ellis to Elizabeth Josephine Penrose, 20 September 1903, MS: RPA. Ibid. Ibid. SB, p. 16. This is likely a deleted passage from SB. MS: RPA. Ibid. p. 18. Ibid. SB, p. 21. Ibid. Antony Penrose, who is dyslexic, believes his father may have experienced the same condition. Friendly, p. 183.

Chapter 2 1. Previously known as High Grade School, Leighton Park; before that it had been called Grove House Friends’ Boarding School, and situated in Tottenham. 2. SB, p. 22.

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3. Martin Ceadel in Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945 observes: ‘Though limiting itself to campaigning against conscription, the N.C.F.’s basis was explicitly pacifist rather than merely voluntarist . . . In particular, it proved an efficient information and welfare service for all objectors; although its unresolved internal division over whether its function was to ensure respect for the pacifist conscience or to combat conscription by any means.’ 4. MS: Friends’ House Library. 5. This report is contained in the weekly periodical Friend, 18 August 1916. 6. Reports of the Joint War Committee. 7. Friendly, p. 16. 8. SB, p. 24.

Chapter 3 1. Frances Partridge knew Alec, Lionel and RP when they were undergraduates, and remembered Alec well: ‘I met their mother once, probably at a Cambridge function . . . Alec was a nervous man, easily agitated. He had been a bad soldier, and had nasty experiences in the First World War – he was unsuited to that. He always seemed to be seeking something . . . When he produced that play of Lytton’s he got so agitated and angry that he made himself rather unpopular. It was sad, because when he was in a good mood he was a very popular, delightful man – as were all the Penroses.’ Interview with Michael Sweeney, 10 March 1997. See also the description of the Penrose siblings in David Garnett, The Familiar Faces. 2. Bertha Wright, Bad Aunt Bertha, p. 50. 3. SB, p. 25. RP’s dismay was enhanced because he was missing ‘the visual stimulus of the Italian sun’. 4. Ibid. 5. Interview, Radio Three, 1980. Architecture had been set up in 1908 as a certificate, not degree, course. In 1919, ‘special exams’ in architecture were set up for an ordinary, not honours, degree. In the Easter term 1922, ‘Exams in Architectural Studies’ were introduced, but RP’s record card shows that he sat his exams under the old regulations. The exams RP took were in two parts: Part I was concerned with principles of construction, architectural drawing and applied mathematics; Part II was devoted to the history of art, with an emphasis on architecture. There was a small portion devoted to ‘modern schools of painting’.

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286 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist SB, p. 25. Ibid. Interview with Michael Sweeney, 22 January 1997. Dadie Rylands to RP, 4 April 1982, MS: RPA. Rylands’ pupils at Cambridge included Peter Hall, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn and Michael Redgrave. In 1944 he directed John Gielgud in Hamlet. Draft reply from RP to Dadie Rylands, MS: RPA. Terry O’Brien once asked RP if he had ever had a gay relationship. He replied: ‘That’s my business’ (Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997). SB, p. 26. Ibid. SB, p. 28. In a letter of 15 August 1920 to Keynes, Alec refers to this matter: ‘the important thing is for Bertha to get this baby out of her satisfactorily . . . Scanes wrote me an immensely long letter describing his motives. I’m not at all sure that his own self-bamboozlement doesn’t considerably exceed the deceptions.’ (Keynes Archive, King’s College, Cambridge). Robert Henry Scanes Spicer was an undergraduate at Kings from 1919–21, who took a first-class degree in classics. He married in 1923 and became a business economist and evidently an author of books on the motor industry. Newman, ‘The Peckovers of Wisbech’.

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

SB, p. 28. Ibid. Ibid. Indigo Days, p. 59. Ibid. SB, p. 26. In 1967 he was the subject of Uncle Yanko, a short documentary film by his niece, the filmmaker Agnès Varda. SB, p. 29. This information was provided by RP to his son, Antony. Friendly, p. 24. SB, p. 28. BBC radio interview, 14 October 1980. She visited the place for the first time in 1925.

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13. Virginia Woolf to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 6 May 1929, Letters, vol. 4, p. 65. 14. Duncan Grant to Vanessa Bell, 15 December 1930, as cited by Frances Spalding in Duncan Grant: A Biography, p. 198. 15. Ibid. p. 215. 16. Friendly, p. 27. 17. Indigo Days, p. 63. 18. SB, p. 31. 19. Ibid. 20. Bertha Wright, Bad Aunt Bertha, p. 90. 21. Ibid. 22. SB, p. 32. 23. Friendly, p. 29. 24. SB, pp. 32–3. 25. Friendly, p. 30. 26. 3 September 1927. 27. Friendly, p. 30. 28. Friendly, p. 29. 29. Manuscript dated 22 August 1978, possibly intended for inclusion in SB, MS: RPA. 30. Wright, p. 91. 31. Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters, p. 307. 32. As cited by Spalding in Duncan Grant, p. 211. 33. As cited in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 53. 34. Ibid. 35. Polizzotti, p. 104. 36. Ibid. 37. Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, p. 1. 38. Gerard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, p. 94. 39. Mary Ann Caws, Surrealist Painters and Poets, p. 138. 40. Ibid. p. 177. 41. SB, p. 160. 42. Valentine Penrose, Poems and Narrations, p. 11. 43. MS: FF. 44. Lytton Strachey to James Strachey, 1922. 45. SB, p. 34. 46. Typewritten notes on Galarza’s ‘The Three Principles’ by RP. MS: RPA. 47. SB, p. 36. 48. SB, p. 286. 49. This gallery is sometimes known as the Bonaparte. Van Leer, a former importer of cotton goods, had, in partnership with A. D. Mouradian, begun the gallery in 1925 to take advantage of the boom in interest of

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50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist the work of members of the School of Paris. He had evidently sold privately before opening the gallery at 41 rue de Seine in Montparnasse. He sold paintings by Utrillo, Modigliani, Derain and Vlaminck and had successful shows of Dufy and Pascin. In 1926 the gallery held the first major show in Paris of Ernst. Mouradian, who had been a pupil of Sickert, had a large private collection of Ernst. See A. Watt, ‘Art Dealers of Paris: 1’, Studio (May 1958). SB, p. 38. Ibid. Interview with Julian Jebb for BBC television, 11 October 1975. Friendly, p. 31. SB, p. 35. RP interview with Edward Lucie-Smith, 14 October 1980. Penrose, Poems and Narrations, p. 69. See Polizzotti, pp. 180–1. See Matthew Josephson, Life among the Surrealists. SB, p. 160. In Revolutionaries without Revolution (1975), André Thirion characterised him ‘as a man of few words but what he did say, he said well . . . his manner was distinguished & serious, and slightly condescending . . . A captive of women, a captive of love, a captive of his dazzling gifts, of the sympathy and respect he inspired in all others. He was drawn to libertinism, brothels, group sex, more as a spectator and dilettante than as an active participant. Like all the Surrealists he put elective love above everything, but any passion he felt for a woman never prevented his having flings on the side.’ Friendly, p. 59. SB, p. 42. After serving in World War I as a Major in the Royal Field Artillery (he was awarded the M.C.), he farmed in Berkshire from 1920–6. He then lived in various parts of France and Spain from 1926–53. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. MS: RPA.

Chapter 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

RP to Alec Penrose, 20 November 1932, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 19 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 28 November 1932, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 1 December 1932, MS: RPA. Ibid.

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Notes 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

289

RP to Alec Penrose, 13 December 1932, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 7 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 4 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 4 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 12 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 13 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 19 January 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 8 April 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 10 February 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 20 March 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 18 March 1933, MS: RPA. RP to Alec Penrose, 19 January 1933, MS: RPA. Ibid. MS: RPA. MS: RPA. MS: RPA. The film was never completed. ‘Even in its fragmented form, Afffaires publiques is instructive about Bresson’s sensibility, despite the usual disclaimer about its radical difference from the rest of his films. It is best described as an anarchic comedy about an inept chancellor of an imaginary country. Its aesthetic draws strongly on the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Mack Sennett – all adored by the Surrealists.’ Brian Price, Neither God Nor Master, p. 17. ARC was set up on 29 May 1934 as a limited company for the production, distribution and sale of films. The initial capital was 25,000 francs. Roland owned 20,000 shares and Bresson 5,000. Bresson was managing director. Between May 1934 and March 1935 Roland made ten interest-free loans to Bresson for a total of 230,500 francs. The total production cost was 353,514 francs. Roland also made two personal loans to Bresson in 1934. In a letter of 14 August 1998 to Michael Sweeney, Madame Bresson, writing on behalf of her husband, stated that Bresson was grateful to Roland for giving him the means to make the film. In a subsequent letter of 16 November 1998, Madame Bresson said her husband thought he was introduced to Roland through Ernst. MSS: RPA. SB, p. 49. 22 October 1934, MS: RPA. SB, p. 56. Ibid. Virginia Woolf to Dora Carrington, 2 March 1932, Letters, vol. 5, p. 29. RP to VP, 13 November 1935, MS: FF. 18 October 1934.

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290 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist 23 May 1935. RP to VP, 8 November 1934, MS: RPA. 16 November 1934, MS: FF. This letter is not dated. MS: FF. MS: RPA. 13 November 1935, MS: RPA. Ibid. MS: RPA. MS: RPA. MS: RPA. 1 February 1936, MS: RPA. Valentine’s sexuality is difficult to assess. There is no direct evidence that she had a sexual relationship with Alice Paalen. Georgiana Colville, in her chronology of Valentine’s life, states under 1936: ‘Valentine part vivre dans un Ashram en Inde, où Alice-Rahon-Paalen la rejoindra pendant quelques mois. Leurs poèmes respectifs de l’époque laissent entendre qu’elles y ont véce une liaison amoureuse.’ However, Colville also says: ‘Vers 1953: Valentine commence une liaison amoureuses de trois ans à Paris Hélène Azénor.’ Colville, Écrits d’une femme surréaliste, pp. 287–8. SB, p. 56. As cited in Friendly, p. 63. SB, p. 138. ‘Why I Am a Painter’, p. 32.

Chapter 6 1. RP interview with Edward Lucie-Smith for The Road is Wider than Long, BBC Radio Three, 14 October 1980. 2. Two other works, Man’s Life is This Meat (1936), which collected his early surrealist work and translations of French surrealists, and Hölderlin’s Madness (1938), further established his reputation. 3. Indigo Days, p. 171. 4. SB, p. 75. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Wolfgang Paalen to RP, 5 March 1935, MS: RPA. 8. SB, p. 78. 9. Look, p. 115. 10. Indigo Days, p. 66. There is a great deal of conflicting evidence about Roland and Read’s visit. According to A. F. B. Sinclair, Francis Bacon:

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Notes

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

291

His Life & Violent Times, Bacon recalled that the two visited his studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea and saw three or four canvases that they rejected as not being surrealist enough, although RP later said that Bacon had destroyed much from that time and had ‘become more Surreal in his late work’– a view which Bacon rejected. He recalled RP declaring: ‘Mr Bacon, don’t you realise a lot has happened in painting since the Impressionists?’ This seems a very uncharacteristic remark for RP to have made. Firstly, he generally avoided making such confrontational observations; secondly, Bacon was not painting in an Impressionist style at that time and had been in a show with some surrealist and Unit 1 artists at the Mayor Gallery. This anecdote, with Roland’s words, is repeated in M. Peppiatt’s book on Bacon published in 1996 (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma). Peppiatt sees the reason for their rejection of Bacon as being that the influence of Picasso on his work was more in evidence than the surrealism represented by RP himself. In this matter, Bacon’s recollection seems fanciful. ‘Art and Artists – The Mayor Gallery’, Observer, 23 April 1933. ‘Art’, New Statesman and Nation, 24 June 1933. RP met Sabartés, Picasso’s secretary-factotum, in May 1936. RP might have wanted to get something recent for the show, but all eleven entries came either from private collectors or dealers. SB, p. 70. In addition to the catalogued entries there were found objects and children’s drawings. Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England, p. 135. Look, p. 120. David Gascoyne, who ordered the white wedding dress from the theatrical designer Motley, discovered her. See Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts, p. 112. Look, p. 117. Ibid. pp. 68–9. Ray, The Surrealist Movement, p. 139. There are many conflicting accounts as to what actually happened. Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 432. 11 June 1936. Indigo Days, p. 69. Quoted by M. D. Z. [Morton Dauwen Zabel], Poetry XVIII, no. 6 (September 1936), p. 353. Look, p. 126. Friendly, p. 74.

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Chapter 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Elizabeth Cowling kindly provided me with this information. SB, p. 80. Life, pp. 261–2. Undated letter of mid-October 1936 to Picasso, MS: RPA. Life, p. 262. However, RP did tell Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard about the incident. See Look, p. 135. SB, p. 206. SB, p. 80. David Gascoyne, Collected Journals, p. 24. Ibid. p. 26. SB, p. 84. Ibid. Roland Penrose, ‘Art and the Present Crisis in Catalonia’, pp. 28–36. SB, p. 84. David Gascoyne performed this task. See Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts, pp. 125–6. SB, p. 68. Ibid. Letter dated 6 July 1936, RPA. Immediately after the exhibition, however, Breton did sell RP Poem-Object; RP also purchased, among other things, two paintings by De Chirico, a collage by Ernst and Eileen Agar’s Quadriga. René Gaffé to RP, 30 June 1937, MS: RPA. RP to LM, 3 November 1937, MS: Farley Farm. In 1931, Éluard had arranged to sell some of his and Breton’s African and Oceanic statuettes at the Salle Drouot; each man received nearly 150,000 francs. See Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, p. 362. John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, pp. 26–7. Marcia Pointon, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650–1800’. SB, p. 162. Ibid. p. 170 Home, p. 41. Ibid. p. 88. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. RP to Lee Miller, 25 or 26 October 1937, MS: FF.

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30. Roland Penrose, Wisbech Society Annual Review (1955), p. 9. 31. SB, p. 85.

Chapter 8 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

SB, p. 104. Lives, p. 20. RP to LM, 25 June 1937, MS: FF. When she saw Max Ernst’s work in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, Carrington was immediately attracted to him even before she met him. In 1937, Carrington met Ernst at a party held in London. The two fell in love and returned together to Paris, where Ernst promptly separated from Marie-Berthe. Look, p. 133. Ibid. Look, pp. 134–5. ‘Just as Éluard had made his wife, Nusch, available to Picasso, Penrose offered up . . . Lee Miller to the artist’ (John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), 25. This information about RP is almost certainly incorrect, since it does not accord with the character of RP. Look, p. 26. SB, p. 208. SB, p. 108. The present whereabouts of this canvas is not known, but it was photographed by David Douglas Duncan and is reproduced in his Picasso’s Picassos. SB, p. 108. Ibid. ‘Why I Am a Painter’, p. 32. Picasso painted portraits of all members of this gathering, and they may have all been versions of l’Arléslienne. The portrait of Éluard was certainly in this mode. Alphonse Daudet’s play (1872) is set in Provence. L’Arlésienne, which means ‘the girl from Arles’, is loved by a young peasant Fréderi. However, upon discovering her infidelity prior to their wedding date, Fréderi approaches madness. His family tries at great length to save him, but eventually Fréderi commits suicide by jumping off a balcony. SB, p. 109.

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Chapter 9 1. 5 April 1938. 2. Douglas Cooper, later to be a fierce opponent of Roland’s, became a partner in the Mayor Gallery in 1933. This collaboration ended quickly, with Cooper being paid out in works of art. 3. RP to LM, 6 October 1937, MS: FF. 4. RP to LM, 14 October 1937, MS: FF. 5. LM to RP, 22 October 1937, MS: RPA. 6. Anton Gill, Art Lover, pp. 204–5. 7. MS: FF. 8. Ibid. 9. In a series of paintings from 1937 to 1939, RP continued to investigate his conflicted inner world in surrealist fashion. Artifact (1937; Cassandra and Mark Seidenfeld) shows three arms growing out of a sinisterlooking head. The suggestion is that reason has lost its battle to assert itself. My Windows Look Sideways (1939; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), which applies a collage-like technique in an oil painting, contains Magritte-like inscriptions, whereas Portrait (1939; Tate Gallery) extends this technique so that the features of the portrait are contained almost entirely in the lettering. In the oil on canvas with collage Le Grand Jour (1938; Tate Gallery), RP expresses an exuberance sometimes absent in his work. 10. RP to LM, 5 December 1937, MS: FF. 11. RP to LM, 4 March, 1938, MS: FF. 12. 8 September 1938. 13. LM to RP, 18 October 1938, MS: FF. 14. Roland Penrose, The Road is Wider than Long, Getty facsimile edition, 2003. This reflection by RP was written in December 1979. The book is unpaginated. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. RP to LM, 27 October, 1937, MS: FF. 19. MS: RPA. On 3 May 1938, RP told LM that the architect Ernö Goldfinger was ‘pushing his idea of getting me to buy one of the houses he is building at the end of Downshire Hill. In many ways it’s very tempting – big windows, sun terraces and all very modern and smart – but I’m damned if I know if I want to fix myself even more firmly in London . . . in any case I shan’t decide yet.’ His main concern was ‘only the divorce, still an unknown quantity as regards date, to cause serious difficulties’.

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20. Juanita may have been the daughter of Darsie Japp and his Spanish wife. 21. RP to LM, 3 May 1938, MS: FF. 22. D. D. Egbert in Social Radicalism and the Arts in Western Europe writes: ‘Penrose had received the appeal for help in a letter from Prague sent to him by Josef Capek, artist brother of the late Czech writer Karel Capek. Penrose invited some artist friends who were his neighbours in Hampstead to lunch in order to discuss how help could best be given: an Artists’ Refugee Committee was decided upon . . . prominent in this during its early years were such neighbours of Penrose as Diana Uhlman and Stephen Bone, who served as secretary and whose father the veteran etcher Sir Muirhead Bone strongly supported (it) . . . Penrose represented the surrealists on the Committee, Richard Carline the London Group and Bone the New English Art Club.’ 23. There were many other efforts in England to assist Spain. The Artists’ International Association, a group working in co-operation with the international popular front against fascism, organised the exhibition ‘Artists Help Spain’ in December 1936 and a rally at the Albert Hall the following June. On 26 October 1942, RP applied for a Full Professional Membership in the AIA. Many members of the AIA were communists, and thus committed to social realism. However, in June 1942 the AIA introduced a policy of allowing artists submitting their work to submit a statement about their aims and, if they did so, to would be judged by a jury composed of members sympathetic to their style of art. 24. RP purchased two sets of these. 25. This is Françoise Gilot’s recollection in the French edition only of Life With Picasso. See T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth, p. 250. 26. Roland Penrose, Picasso (1971) but reference is to the 1981 edition, p. 306. 27. Visiting, p. 39. 28. SB, p. 87. 29. Roland Penrose, ‘Note on the Exhibition of Guernica.’ 30. This space was chosen through the efforts of local art students. James Beechey and Chris Stephens, Picasso & Modern British Art, p. 218. 31. Robert Radford, Art for a Purpose, p. 90. 32. Herbert Read, article in the London Bulletin 6 (October 1938), p. 6. 33. RP to LM, 12 January 1939, MS: FF. 34. SB, p. 118. 35. However, de Zoëte does not appear in any of the photographs taken by LM at Siwa. 36. See Friendly, p. 94. 37. Ibid.

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296 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist RP to LM, 19 March 1939, MS: FF. RP to LM, 27 March 1939, MS: FF. RP to LM, 29 March 1939, MS: FF. LM to RP, 3 March 1939, MS: FF. RP to LM, 19 March 1939, MS: FF. RP to LM, 1 May 1939, MS: FF. Quoted in Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, p. 193; I have not seen this letter. Artists of Today – Born 1900. Interview with Julian Jebb for BBC TV, filmed June 1975, broadcast 11 October 1975. RP to Lee Miller, 14 November 1937, MS: FF. Keith Hartley points out the significance of this letter in ‘Roland Penrose: Private Passions for the Public Good’, p. 19. Friendly, p. 95. Ibid.

Chapter 10 1. RP was actively involved in attempting to assist Ernst. On 27 September 1939, Leonora Carrington wrote to Ernö Goldfinger, c/o Roland Penrose, 21 Devonshire Hill (MS: RIBA): ‘Max is here in a concentration camp and things are not so cheerful as they might be – I see him twice a week for 10 minutes. What are you doing? . . . I would love to hear something from you. The £4 monthly that you send Max is confiscated so could you send it to me instead as I am of British nationality and nobody can touch it. Max asked me to do this today. I am very nervous and not too happy with all these miserable events – I suppose nobody is feeling too good . . . I have been trying with a sinister and deliberate determination to get Max out. I’ve written to all his influential friends to do as much as they can – and he’s in prison. Do you know anybody who could answer a guarantee for him . . . Max is very unhappy & can’t paint & has to cut brambles & cut wood & sleep on straw. This is awful. I’ve been here alone for 20 days.’ 2. SB, p. 124. 3. Indigo Days, p. 109. 4. SB, p. 127. 5. Ibid. 6. According to Michel Remy, the storage facility was ‘Van Oppen and Co. on the banks of the Thames’ (‘E.L.T. Mesens’s London Years, or, The Apache in the Valley’, p. 155.

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297

7. John and Cynthia Thompson interview with Michael Sweeney, Burnham Norton, Norfolk, 18 November 1997. John Thompson was a journalist for the Evening Standard and editor of the Sunday Telegraph. 8. Friendly, p. 100. 9. Ernö Goldfinger to RP, 11 April 1940, MS: RIBA Archives. 10. 6 May 1940, RIBA Archives. 11. Indigo Days. 12. 20 October 1950. 13. 23 June 1940. 14. 30 June 1940. 15. MS: RPA. 16. MS: RPA. 17. RP to Mesens, 22 August 1939, MS: RPA. 18. SB, p. 134. 19. LM’s work on Grim Glory may have inadvertently brought her to the attention of MI5 as a possible security risk. Special Branch reported in June 1941 that she and five women were visiting with Wilfred MacCartney – a convicted Soviet spy – in Budleigh Salterton, South Devon. An unnamed agent wrote: ‘I have been told by a friend on the staff of Vogue magazine that Lee Miller, who is a photographer for the magazine, is a very strong communist’ (Duncan Gardham, ‘MI5 investigated’). 20. SB, p. 128. 21. Information provided by Tony Penrose. 22. Friendly, p. 102. 23. SB, p. 131. 24. SB, p. 130. 25. SB, p. 131. 26. SB, p. 132. 27. SB, p. 24. 28. Friendly, p. 103. 29. Information provided by Tony Penrose. 30. Lives, p. 102. 31. Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, p. 9. 32. In an unpublished essay, ‘Hemline to Front Line: The Business of War Photography’, Antony Penrose has written: ‘Outwardly, given the pressing priorities of a country at war, it is surprising the government gave British Vogue any priority in the allocation of resources. Vogue gave the appearance of being a sophisticated women’s magazine struggling against shortages and bomb damage to produce top quality fashion and beauty tips. Withers was determined that Vogue should play

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a role in maintaining morale among women and the fashion industry, reminding her readers that glamour and fashion were still important in a manner that gave the appearance she had complete editorial freedom. The public were never aware of the incredible ingenuity Withers needed to keep the magazine functioning despite the rigorous ideological and practical control of British commercial publishing the government applied overtly and covertly.’ By adapting her magazine to practical realties, Withers obtained the paper necessary to keep her periodical running. 33. Penrose, Lee Miller’s War, p. 73. 34. ‘French Intellectuals and the Resistance’, text of a talk given on BBC Radio on 16 October 1944, MS: RPA.

Chapter 11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Audrey Withers interview with Carolyn Burke, 6 October 1997. As quoted in Friendly, p. 147. As quoted in Lives, pp. 147–8. MS: FF. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, p. 288. George Melly in Don’t Tell Sybil provides information – some incorrect – on Gigi Richter, who met RP when she was working at the London Gallery in Brook Street as a restorer when Melly joined the staff in 1947: ‘upstairs in a studio a beautiful German picture restorer dabbed away’. He names her and describes how she was forced to leave the Gallery by LM. ‘Our picture restorer left soon after I arrived . . . her picture restoration was the only profitable side of the gallery and might have kept us afloat . . . It was in fact Lee Miller . . . who sent her packing’ (p. 106). By the time of this incident, late 1947 or early 1948, LM had been back from Europe for over a year. Moreover, RP and Gigi’s affair had not ended when she returned. Further, a letter from Gigi Richter Crompton to Antony Penrose of 30 December 1997 (MS: RPA), prompted by her having read Melly’s book, states that it was not LM but Sybil Mesens who wanted her out of the London Gallery. As quoted in Lives, pp. 152–3. SB, p. 140. SB, p. 141. SB, p. 140. John Miller interview with Carolyn Burke. 29 May 1996.

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299

12. David Scherman to William Scherman, 27 July 1946, cited by Burke in Lee Miller, p. 399. 13. SB, p. 140. 14. Ibid. 15. SB, p. 141. 16. Ibid. 17. LM to RP, [January 1947], MS: FF. 18. LM to her parents, 2 May 1947, cited by Burke in Lee Miller, p. 399. 19. SB, p. 146. 20. LM to her mother, 8 September 1947, cited by Burke in Lee Miller, p. 399. 21. Notebook entry by LM, 9 September 1947, cited by Burke in Lee Miller, p. 399. 22. Appointment diary, 9 September 1947, MS: RPA. 23. Collection of A. and R. Penrose. 24. RP to the Millers, 11 September 1947, cited by Burke in Lee Miller, p. 399. 25. See Friendly, p. 138. 26. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. 27. John Golding interview with Michael Sweeney, 4 June 1997. 28. Michel Remy has written a particularly acute reading of this canvas: ‘the body, seen to be reclining on a couch of some kind, is dismembered before being re-membered by the viewer’s erotic desire, as though a magic life-giving ritual. The painting stages the awakening to a new life, a gradual coming into existence again – as in the fairy tale – under the many eyes of a totem-faced mountain ridge, that of Arizona . . . The deconstruction at work, i.e., the undecidable operation of destruction and construction experienced by those fragments, is brilliantly expressed in the title – indeed, between sleeping and awakening, there lies the beauty of insatiable desire and of the impending act of love, the prince’s kiss!’ (‘Irruptive, Disruptive, Unswerving Surrealism’, p. 33).

Chapter 12 1. Copy of letter in RPA. 2. RP served on a number of different committees at the ICA. Quite often, membership of these committees comprised the same core group, although the members of and the names of the committees changed. I have retained the designation of these groups as given on the various archival documents.

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3. Minutes of the Second Meeting of the ICA Organising Committee, MS: Tate. 4. Douglas Cooper to Herbert Read, October 1946, MS: ICA Archives, Tate. 5. Mesens to Hoellering, 5 April 1946, MS: ICA Archives, Tate. 6. As cited in ‘Contemporary Arts Museum: Statement of Policy’ (1946), p. 2, MS: Tate. 7. John and Cynthia Thompson interview with Michael Sweeney, Burnham Norton, Norfolk, 18 November 1997. 8. MS, Pennsylvania State University Library, Brunius Collection. 9. Email to Silvano Levy quoted in British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, p. 60. 10. ‘Correspondence’, Horizon 8, no. 48 (December 1943), pp. 433–4. 11. In an interview with Michael Sweeney on 11 August 1997, del Renzio explained that he joined the British Surrealist group in 1940. In 1942–3, believing that its leaders, E. L. T. Mesens and RP, were not doing anything to keep it going during the war, he instigated his own activities. This led to bitter exchanges with Mesens and Penrose that lasted until about 1947. He saw the dispute as partly personal but basically political in that del Renzio saw himself as following Breton’s Trotskyist line, while the other two, especially RP, he saw as supporters of Éluard, who was communist (Stalinist). 12. Alexandra Harris in Romantic Moderns provides an excellent account of this movement. 13. Desmond Morris interview with Michael Sweeney, 26 November 1997. 14. Indigo Days, p. 80. 15. As cited by D. Robbins in The Independent Group, p. 192. 16. Herbert Read to Douglas Cooper, 6 December 1947, MS: Getty. 17. MS: ICA. 18. 10 February 1948. 19. 19 February 1948. 20. Anne Massey, ICA, p. 17. 21. RP interview with Dorothy Morland, October 1976, MS: Tate. 22. SB, p. 143. 23. January 1949. 24. 2 January 1949. Despite this bad notice by Newton, RP was outraged when the critic was fired by the Times. (Newton wanted to concentrate on emerging artists and small exhibitions). RP wrote a letter to the newspaper stating that the dismissal was a scandal. Wyndham Lewis, whose 1949 retrospective at the Redfern was reviewed favourably by Newton, got in touch with RP, who recalled: ‘ I received an invitation to lunch with Wyndham Lewis in his favourite restaurant (Frascati)

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Notes

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

301

in Oxford Street where he had a special table half-surrounded by a screen, being very shy as well as ostentatious about appearing in public. I remember the enthusiasm he showed for my attitude and his suggestion that we should organise a march through Trafalgar Square in protest.’ RP to Jeffrey Meyers, 27 January 1979, MS: RPA. Eidos 1 (May–June 1950), p. 46. In an accomplished watercolour, King Harry Ferry (c. 1949; private collection), the prone body of a woman is transformed into a landscape. This kind of trope is, of course, a common one in nineteenthcentury painting. The oils Surrealist Composition (1950; Bolton Art Museum) and Breakfast (1949; A. & R. Penrose) are heavily indebted to Ernst, and are particularly strong in showing the artist’s sense of alienation. SB, p. 138. RP and LM were introduced to the Cuban painter when they visited New York after the war. George Melly, Don’t Tell Sybil, p. 113. MS: RPA. 4 April 1948. In her article, ‘The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group’, Anne Massey depicts the central role of Morland in the management of the ICA. Massey also demonstrates that women did a great deal of the work in such organisations but were not allowed to share fully in any resulting honours. Robbins, The Independent Group, p. 191. Dorothy Morland interview with Michael Sweeney, 5 February 1997. Robbins, The Independent Group, p. 21. Anne Massey points out that this exhibition legitimised the introduction of scientific exhibits as candidates for inclusion in ICA shows. Massey, ICA, p. 58. Becky E. Conekin, The Autobiography of a Nation. Freda Paolozzi, as cited by Massey in ‘The Mother of Pop’. Dorothy Morland interview with Anne Massey, 29 June 1956. Cited in Massey, ‘The Mother of Pop’, p. 273. As cited by Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Towards a Redefinition, p. 246. As cited in The Studio, February 1950, p. 62. Yorkshire Evening Post, 28 February 1953, as cited by Massey, ICA, p. 83. Architectural Review (May 1953), p. 339, as cited by Massey, ICA, p. 83. Ibid.

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

RP interview with Dorothy Morland, October 1976. Glasgow Herald, 12 April 1951. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Herbert Read to Philip James, 21 January 1951, MS: Arts Council. Visiting, p. 95, p. 358. In 1943, Barr was dismissed as director of MOMA but was allowed to remain on as an advisory director; later, he became Director of Collections. 50. Only in 1963 did the dreaded Pop Art make its way into England at the ICA’s 1963 The Popular Image USA. Intimations of British Pop Art and genuine American Pop Art are vastly different phenomena: ‘While the erstwhile Independent Group had been keen to establish their credentials as “the Fathers of Pop” during the early 1960s, there can be no doubt that American Pop Art was distinctly different to anything produced in England’ (Massey, ICA, p. 136).

Chapter 13 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

SB, p. 180. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. Ibid. Ibid. In 1966, RP purchased Burgh Hill Farm, adjoining Farley Farm; to pay for it, he sold Picasso’s cubist Portrait of William Udhe. RP told Picasso: ‘The farm as a whole is now big enough that you would need a day to walk round the outside of it.’ Picasso asked if he had taken the walk. ‘No,’ said RP. ‘Well, you had better be sure of some fine weather,’ rejoined Picasso. RP was relieved Picasso was not angry. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, p. 309. Friendly, p. 142. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. Friendly, p. 143. Burke, Lee Miller, p. 316. Home, p. 77. Friendly, p. 143. Ibid. Ibid. Rosamond Bernier heard other gossip about other activities at Farley Farm: ‘I think I was seen as some sort of innocent angel as I was never asked to be involved! Someone told me that Timmie and Terry O’Brien had swapped with Roland Penrose and Lee, and there were other such swap-arounds’ (interview with Michael Sweeney, 2 September 1998).

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Notes 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

303

SB, p. 193. PLW, p. 47. Visiting, p. 65. Home, p. 77. See Home, p. 79. Vogue, July 1953. Lives, p. 313. Burke, Lee Miller, p. 313. Friendly, p. 146. Visiting, p. 71. SB, pp. 160–1. SB, p. 241. David Gascoyne interview with Michael Sweeney, 28 August 1996.

Chapter 14 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Visiting, p. 211. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, p. 164. Ibid. p. 86. 21 April 1954, MS: MOMA archives. Ibid. Rosamond Bernier interview with Michael Sweeney, 2 September 1998. Burke, Lee Miller, p. 331. Visiting, p. 94. Visiting, p. 146. SB, p. 218. Visiting, p. 149. Visiting, p. 151. Ibid. Visiting, p. 160. Visiting, p. 172. Visiting, p. 153. Visiting, p. 154. RP’s sexuality is extremely difficult to situate because the evidence is sparse. It appears to be heteronormative, but this is not completely so. For example, there is the issue of his homosexual relationship with George Rylands and RP’s subsequent attitude towards homosexuality. Rylands’ name does not occur in the enormous list of the names of friends arranged alphabetically in the fly-leaf papers decorating Scrap Book. ‘Watson’ – referring to Peter Watson – does. Although RP would have been fully aware that Watson, who died in 1956, was homosexual,

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist he did nothing to distance himself from him. RP did, however, separate himself from Rylands, with whom he maintained a cordial but very distant acquaintanceship. RP refused to answer in later life when someone asked him if he had ever had a gay experience. That was his business, he said. After Cambridge, Roland does not seem to have had a very active sex drive; his first wife, Valentine, was never interested in pursuing sexual intimacy. After his separation from her, RP actively pursued a number of women and was known as a ‘ladies’ man’. During his courtship of and marriage to Lee Miller, he had a number of affairs with women and this practice continued after Miller’s death. However, it is clear RP was sexually attracted to Picasso. It is difficult to theorise a situation in which there are relatively few facts. My suspicion is that RP’s sexuality was a divided one but that he maintained the stance of heteronormativity. Perhaps he had to convince himself over and over again of his heterosexuality? I would further add that RP had no interest in the sexual lives of his male friends, and that he was never homophobic. Anthony Hill interview with Michael Sweeney, 12 November 1998. Visiting, p. 205. SB, p. 230. Ibid. At Roland’s first meeting as a member of the British Council’s Fine Arts Committee (FAC) on 8 December 1953, the Drogheda Report on the Council’s work was discussed. The report was favourable, but recommended cutting staff in Europe to concentrate more on the developing world. The post of Fine Arts Officer in Paris (held by Frank McEwen) was one of the posts most under peril. This threat formed a major topic at the FAC meetings for the next few years, with the FAC arguing strongly for the retention of the Paris post in the face of opposition from the BC’s Executive Committee. Members pointed out the success of the Fine Arts Officer’s work (in Paris). British art was now sought after all over the world, and this outstanding achievement on the part of the BC would not have been possible if the ground had not first been prepared in Paris. For example, following the success of his exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Henry Moore’s international reputation had been firmly established. SB, p. 230. Ibid. SB, p. 24. SB, p. 232. Ibid.

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Notes

305

28. Lynn Chadwick interview with Michael Sweeney, 24 April 1998. RP was a member of the Fine Arts Committee of the British Council that was severely criticised for recommending Chadwick for the award. This was discussed at a meeting on 31 January 1956. The Director General of the Council was upset that the Council was seen as ‘cranky. He did not think that the Council ought to go too far ahead of opinion in showing art that was avant-garde . . . in his opinion Lynn Chadwick was a case where the Council went too far. He had to remember, as a background to the question, the fact that the Council was not yet a permanently established institution and the future of its staff was uncertain . . . This, together with the claims of other activities, was the cause of his opposition to filling the Paris post . . . ‘Clive Bell said that he was not himself in sympathy with Lynn Chadwick but unless the FAC had the last word in all aesthetic decisions, it had better resign. Sir Herbert Read asked what the expression “reasonably well-informed public opinion” meant, to which the Chair replied that if this Committee were not “reasonably well-informed” he did not know who was. They were a group of museum directors, professors of art history and elderly art critics, and he was surprised and pleased to hear that they were thought avant-garde. In reply to a question from Mr Penrose the D-G said that he found that ambassadors and Council representatives abroad did not think that this kind of exhibition did much good. The Council might encounter damaging criticism over the very large area devoted to Chadwick. The Chairman said that he thought Chadwick was rather less avant-garde than Calder, who got the sculpture prize at Venice last year . . . Mr James said that in his view ambassadors were more out of touch than anybody. Interest in British art was growing abroad . . . dealers in Paris were beginning to stock the work of British artists.’ RP then observed that in his travels in America and Europe, no whisper that the work of this Committee was ‘cranky’ had come to his ears. 29. Visiting, p. 181. 30. Terry O’Brien interview with Michael Sweeney, 21 May 1997. 31. Visiting, p. 198. 32. Visiting, pp. 198–9. 33. Friendly, p. 205. 34. John Thompson interview with Michael Sweeney, 18 November 1997. 35. Kenneth Armitage interview with Michael Sweeney, 10 March 1998. 36. Alastair Lawson interview with Michael Sweeney, 4 April 1997. 37. Visiting, p. 206. 38. SB, p. 223. 39. Life, p. 154.

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306 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist Life, pp. 156–7. Visiting, p. 208. Visiting, p. 206. Visiting, p. 210. MS: RPA. Visiting, p. 213. Ibid. Visiting, p. 230. Visiting, p. 228. D. Robbins, The Independent Group, p. 191. See Visiting, p. 375, n. 113. Daily Mail, 1 July 1960. RP to Picasso, 8 July 1960, MS: Musée Picasso, Paris. ‘Originally, around 150,000 visitors had been anticipated during the 77-day run, but by the time of the opening this had been revised to a quarter of a million and the opening hours extended with this in mind. In the end, the show attracted over 460,000 visitors and sometimes the galleries were so filled they had to be closed.’ (Visiting, pp. 233–4). Ibid. The Observer, 10 July 1960. New Statesman, 16 July 1960. The Listener, 14 July 1960. 23 June 1960, MS: RPA. 27 July 1960, MS: RPA. Desmond Morris interview with Michael Sweeney, 26 November 1997. The Times, 29 September 1960. Tony Penrose in conversation with James King, December 2014. The ‘Affair of the Poisons’ (L’affaire des poisons) was a major murder scandal in France in 1677–82 during the reign of King Louis XIV: a number of prominent members of the aristocracy were implicated and sentenced on charges of poisoning and witchcraft. The scandal reached into the inner circle of the king and led to the execution of thirty-six people. Anthony Hill interview with Michael Sweeney, 12 November 1988. Dorothy Morland interview with Michael Sweeney, 5 February 1997. Ibid. Burke, Lee Miller, pp. 343–4. Information provided by Bettina McNulty, December 2014. Information provided by Roz Jacobs, January 2015. Interview with Rosamond Bernier, January 2015. She sometimes assisted RP with the sale of items from his collection. Roland sold Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin (1910) to Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1956. From the 1960s onward, he sold items from his

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Notes

70. 71. 72. 73.

307

collection through Eugene Thaw, the New York dealer. Rosamond Bernier was sometimes involved in these transactions. When Michael Sweeney asked her about the Rockefeller sale and other items leaving the collection, she observed that Roland ‘was rather Quakerish about it. I recall when he sold (not through Thaw) that marvellous Picasso, Jeune Fille à la Mandoline, to Nelson Rockefeller, the price seemed enormous at the time – $100,000. Roland said to me, “Darling, it was just too valuable a painting for me to have.” He loved his paintings but he took selling some fairly calmly . . . I didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t the best deal for Roland. And I’m sure that Roland would never have done as well with anyone other than Gene. The arrangement was that if one of Roland’s paintings sold for more than the expected sum, the extra sum would be returned to Roland . . . Roland had me sell his Cubist 1910 Picasso Portrait of Wilhelm (Uhde) to the American collector Joseph Pulitzer Jr because a piece of land adjoining his farm [Burgh Hill] had come up for sale. This was a direct sale, not via Thaw’ (interview with Michael Sweeney, 9 February 1998). Visiting, p. 242. Ibid. p. 240. Ibid. p. 268. Ibid. p. 281.

Chapter 15 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Anthony Hill interview with Michael Sweeney, 12 November 1998. Diane Deriaz, La Tête à l’Envers, p. 241. Ibid. Joanna Drew interview with Michael Sweeney, 8 October 1997. Friendly, p. 158. Ernst died on 1 April 1976, Ray on 18 November 1976. SB, p. 263. James King, The Last Modern, p. 310. Desmond Morris interview with Michael Sweeney, 26 November 1997. Michael Kustow, Tank, p. 30. Ibid. p. 36. Foreword to ‘Obsessive Image’ exhibition. SB, p. 262. SB, p. 263. SB, p. 262. SB, p. 263. SB, pp. 262–3. Friendly, p. 164.

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308 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist SB, p. 264. Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, p. 404. 1 November 1976, MS: RPA. Friendly, p. 160. SB, p. 255. Rosamond Bernier interview with Michael Sweeney, 2 September 1998. Friendly, p. 164. John Golding interview with Michael Sweeney, 4 June 1997. Information provided by Tony Penrose. Burke, Lee Miller, p. 354. October 1975. Rosamond Bernier to RP, 14 August 1974, MS: RPA. Dawn Ades interview with Michael Sweeney, 2 June 1998. Information provided by Tony Penrose. Quoted in John Richardson, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, p. 300. Roland Penrose and John Golding (eds), Picasso in Retrospect, p. 124. RP’s essay first appeared in 1970. Excerpt from a conversation between RP and Dominique Bozo in Artforum, September 1980, p. 30. Roland Penrose, McWilliam, p. 9. Roland Penrose, Man Ray, p. 99. See John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, p. 13. SB, p. 278. Ibid. p. 279. RP’s first book on Mirò is entitled Miró: The Masters, No. 19 and was published as a large folio paperback by Knowledge Publications (Purnell & Sons) of Taunton. There are eight pages of text, and full descriptions of the sixteen colour plates. Roland Penrose, Mirò, p. 34. SB, pp. 8–9. RP may have been inspired in part by Man Ray. In describing the American artist’s autobiography, Self Portrait (1963), RP remarks: ‘He describes it [his memoir] modestly as captions or subtitles to the continuous flow of images of which life is composed’ (Man Ray, p. 10). Ibid. The section on Roland in her autobiography is titled ‘La grenouille de Roland Penrose’. Deriaz, La Tête à L’Envers, p. 255. Ibid. p. 257. Ibid. p. 253. John Golding interview with Michael Sweeney, 4 June 1997. Friendly, p. 170. Penrose, Miró, p. 201.

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Bibliography

Manuscript Sources Until 1994, Roland Penrose’s archive (RPA) was stored at his home, Farley Farm, in Sussex; in that year, ten years after his death, it was sold to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGM) in Edinburgh. The letters of Roland Penrose to Lee Miller, his second wife, are still at Farley Farm, where they are part of the Lee Miller Archive. (Also still at Farley Farm are a large number of works of art by Penrose.)

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art The Roland Penrose Archive (RPA) contains virtually all the known correspondence of Penrose, as well as his diaries and day-books. As a general rule, Penrose did not keep copies of outgoing correspondence until the last twenty years of his life – with the important exception of his letters from India to his brother Alec. Like many archival collections, the RPA has a large amount of passive correspondence (letters to Penrose). Among the latter are Valentine Penrose’s letters to her husband, and Galarza’s letters to Penrose. Michael Sweeney was charged with the task of arranging and classifying the enormous number of documents Penrose had kept throughout his life. In addition, in 1997 and 1998 he interviewed as many as possible of Penrose’s friends and acquaintances still alive. The transcriptions of these interviews, stored at SNGM, are an invaluable source of information for the biographer. In 1995 the SNGM purchased twenty-five works from the Penrose Collection, and shortly afterwards Gabrielle Keiller donated her extensive collection of surrealist works of art, manuscripts and

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books to SNGM. The Penrose and Keiller holdings make SNGM a major research centre for the study of surrealism in general, and especially surrealism in the United Kingdom.

Farley Farm, Chiddingly, Sussex The extant correspondence of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller is now in the Lee Miller Archive.

The Institute of Contemporary Arts Archive, Tate Archives, London This archival holding contains copies of letters to and from Penrose (most of the originals are at SNGM). In addition, this archive holds a complete set of minutes of various ICA meetings.

Writings of Roland Penrose, Arranged Chronologically ‘Notes on the Ratton Exhibition of North Western American Art’, Axis 4 (November 1935), pp. 18–19. With Christian Zervos: ‘Art and the Present Crisis in Catalonia’, Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries (London and Toronto: William Heinemann, 1936). ‘Why I Am a Painter’, text of a speech given c. 1938–9, in Roland Penrose/ Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2001). ‘The Transparent Mirror’, London Bulletin 2 (May 1938), p. 24. ‘The Battle of Gloucester’, London Bulletin 4–5 (July 1938), p. 40. ‘Note on the Exhibition of Guernica’, London Bulletin 8–9 (January– February 1939), p. 59. The Road is Wider than Long: An Image Diary from the Balkans, July– September 1938 (London: Gallery Editions, 1939. Reprinted 1980). Home Guard Manual of Camouflage (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1941). ‘Correspondence’, Horizon 8: 46 (October 1943), p. 289. ‘French Intellectuals and the Resistance’, text of a talk given on BBC Radio on 16 October 1944. ‘Bulldoze Your Dead’, Message from Nowhere (November 1944), pp. 12–13. In the Service of the People (London: William Heinemann, 1945).

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Bibliography

311

Homage to Picasso on his 70th Birthday: Drawings and Watercolours since 1893 (London: Lund, Humphries, 1951). As editor: Wonder and Horror of the Human Head: An Anthology (London: Lund, Humphries, 1953). Article in the Wisbech Society Annual Review (1955). Portrait of Picasso (London: Lund, Humphries, 1956). Picasso: His Life and Work (London: Gollancz, 1958. Revised 1971 and 1981). Kenneth Armitage (Amriswil: Bodensee Verlag, 1960). Pablo Picasso: Four Seasons (London, 1961). With Roy Wilenski: Picasso: Early Years (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). McWilliam (London: Tiranti, 1964). With Edward Quinn: Picasso at Work (London: W. H. Allen, 1965). Picasso Sculptures (London: Tudor Publishing, 1965). Miró: The Masters, No. 19 (London: Purnell & Sons, 1965). Pablo Picasso: The Masters, No. 50 (London: Purnell & Sons, 1966). The Eye of Picasso (London: Fontana, 1967). The Sculptures of Picasso (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968). Miró (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970). Picasso (London: Phaidon, 1971). As editor, with John Golding: Picasso 1881–1972 (London: Portland House, 1973). Man Ray (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975). Tàpies (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978). As editor, with John Golding: Picasso in Retrospect (New York: Granada, 1980). Scrap Book, 1900–1981 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981).

Secondary Sources Ackrill, Margaret, and Leslie Hannah, Barclays: The Business of Banking, 1690–1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Addison, Paul, Now the War Is Over: A Social History of Britain, 1945–51 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). Ades, Dawn (ed.), Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978). Agar, Eileen, A Look at My Life (London: Methuen, 1988). Arnold, Dana, and David Peters Corbett, A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley, 2013). Beechey, James, and Chris Stephens, Picasso & Modern British Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2012).

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Bell, Clive, Old Friends: Personal Recollections (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956). Bell, Vanessa, Selected Letters, ed. Regina Marler (New York: Bloomsbury, 1993). Blunt, Anthony, Picasso’s Guernica (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). Brandon, Ruth, Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917–1945 (New York: Grove Press, 1999). Brown, E. J., The First Five: The Story of a School (The Downs: E. J. Brown, 1987). Burke, Carolyn, Lee Miller: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Caws, Mary Ann, Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Ceadel, Martin, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Clark, Adrian, and Jeremy Dronfield, Queer Saint: The Cultured Life of Peter Watson (London: John Blake Publishing Ltd., 2015). Clark, T. J., Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Colville, Georgiana, Écrits d’une femme surréaliste (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Conekin, Becky E., The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Conekin, Becky E., Lee Miller in Fashion (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013). Cowling, Elizabeth, Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). [Includes a bibliography of all Penrose’s writings on Picasso on pp. 399–400.] Deriaz, Diane, La Tête à l’Envers: Souvenirs d’une trapéziste chez les poètes (Paris: A. Michel, 1988). Duncan, David Douglas, Picasso’s Picassos (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Durozoi, Gérard, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Egbert, D. D., Social Radicalism and the Arts in Western Europe (London: Duckworths, 1970). Elliott, Patrick, Another World: Dalí, Miró and the Surrealists (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2010). Ernst, Jimmy, A Not-So-Still Life (New York: St Martin’s, 1984). Fraser, Robert, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Gale, Patrick, Notes from an Exhibition (London: Fourth Estate, 2008).

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Gardham, Duncan, ‘MI5 investigated Vogue photographer Lee Miller on suspicion of spying for Russians, files show’, Daily Telegraph, 3 March 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/4927532/MI5investigated-Vogue-photographer-Lee-Miller-on-suspicion-of-spyingfor-Russians-files-show.html (last accessed 16 December 2015). Garnett, David, The Familiar Faces (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). Gascoyne, David, Journal 1937–1939 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1978). Gascoyne, David, Collected Journals 1936–42 (London: Skoob Seriph, 1991). Gill, Anton, Art Lover: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003). Gilot, Françoise, Life with Picasso (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1964). Guggenheim, Peggy, Out of this Century (New York: Dial Press, 1946). Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Harris, Alexandra, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010). Harrison, Martin, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties (London: Merrell, 2002). Hartley, Keith, ‘Roland Penrose: Private Passions for the Public Good,’ in Roland Penrose/Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2001), pp. 13–29. Haworth-Booth, Mark, The Art of Lee Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Holroyd, Michael, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1967–8). Hubert, Renée Riese, ‘Gender, Genre and Partnership: A Study of Valentine Penrose’, in Juliet Flower MacCannell (ed.), The Other Perspective in Gender and Culture: Rewriting Women and the Symbolic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 118–42. Hubert, Renée Riese, Magnifying Mirrors (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Josephson, Matthew, Life among the Surrealists: A Memoir (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). Kantor, Sybil Gordon, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Kennedy, Thomas C., British Quakerism 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). King, James, Interior Landscapes: A Life of Paul Nash (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).

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King, James, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990). Kustow, Michael, Tank: An Autobiographical Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975). Levy, Silvano, Tanja Pirsig-Marshall, et al. (eds), British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye (Leeds: Leeds Museums and Galleries, 2009). McNab, Robert, Ghost Ships: A Surrealist Love Triangle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Magritte, René, and Paul Nougé, ‘Colour-colours’, in Roland Penrose/Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2001), pp. 65–6. Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Towards a Redefinition, PhD dissertation (Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic, 1984). Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). Massey, Anne, ICA: 1946–68 (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2014). Massey, Anne, ‘The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group’, journal of visual culture 12: 2, pp. 262–78. Medley, Robert, Drawn from the Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1983). Melly, George, Paris and the Surrealists (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991). Melly, George, Don’t Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E. L. T. Mesens (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1997). Morris, Desmond, Animal Days (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979). Newman, Margaret (formerly Mrs Margaret Penrose), ‘The Peckovers of Wisbech: Mrs Newman’s address at the opening of the Peckover Exhibition on 14th July 1980’, Wisbech Society Review (1981), p. 10. Partridge, Frances, Memories (London: Gollancz, 1981). Penrose, Antony, The Lives of Lee Miller (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985). Penrose, Antony, The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm (London: Frances Lincoln, 2001). Penrose, Antony, Roland Penrose: The Friendly Surrealist (Munich, London and New York: Prestel, 2001). Penrose, Antony (ed.), Lee Miller’s War (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). Penrose, Josephine, Foreshadowings of Christianity (London, 1888). Penrose, Josephine, Talks about Peace and War. For the Young (London: Friends’ Tract Association, 1902).

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Penrose, Josephine, Glimpses of Galilee (London, 1904). Penrose, Valentine, Poems and Narrations, trans. Roy Edwards (Manchester: Carcanet Press and Elephant Trust, 1977). Peppiatt, M., Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Constable & Robinson, 1996). Pointon, Marcia, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650–1800’, Art History, 20: 3 (September 1997), pp. 397–431. Polizzotti, Mark, Revolution of the Mind: the Life of André Breton (Boston: Commonwealth Books, 2009). Price, Brian, Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Prodger, Philip, Man Ray/Lee Miller. Partners in Surrealism (Salem, London and New York: Merrell, 2011). Radford, Robert, Art for a Purpose: The Artists’ International Association, 1933–1953 (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987). Ramkalawon, Jennifer, ‘Roland Penrose and the ICA Visitors’ Book,’ in Roland Penrose/Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2001), pp. 67–8. Ray, Paul C., The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971). Remy, Michel, Towards a Dictionary of Surrealism in England, together with Towards a Chronology of Surrealism in England (Nancy: GroupeÉdition Marges, 1978). Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Remy, Michel, ‘Irruptive, Disruptive, Unswerving Surrealism: A Contribution to the Reassessment of Surrealism in Britain,’ in Levy et al. (eds), British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye (Leeds: Leeds Museums and Galleries, 2009). Remy, Michel, ‘E. L. T. Mesens’s London Years, or, The Apache in the Valley’ in Van den Bossche et al., The Star Alphabet by E. L. T Mesens: Dada and Surrealism (Aan Zee: MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2013), pp. 147–61. Renzio, Toni del (ed.), Surrealism in England: 1936 and After (Canterbury: Atlantic Books, 1986). Reports of the Joint War Committee . . . of the British Red Cross Society . . . on Voluntary Aid (London: HMSO, 1930). Richardson, John, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper (New York: Knopf, 1999). Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy 1881–1906 (New York: Knopf, 2007). Robbins, D. (ed.), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (London: MIT Press, 1990).

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Robertson, Alexander, et al., Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties: Angels of Anarchy and Machines for Making Clouds (Leeds: Leeds City Art Galleries, 1986). Roy, Dilip Kumar, Yogi Sri Krishnaprem (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1968). Rumball, Hannah, Unpicking the Quakers: Prescription and Practice in 19th Century British Quaker Dress, MA thesis (Kingston, 2011). Sinclair, A. F. B., Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times (London: Crown, 1993). Skidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1893–1920 (London: Papermac, 1983). Slusher, Katherine, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose: The Green Memories of Desire (Munich, Berlin, London and New York: Prestel, 2007). Slusher, Katherine, Mirar de reojo: Roland Penrose y el Surrealismo [Looking Sideways: Roland Penrose and Surrealism] (Málaga: Fundacion Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 2008). Smith, Michael, Lionel Sharples Penrose: A Biography (Lavenham: Lavenham Press, 1999). Spalding, Frances, Duncan Grant: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1998). Stroman, Elizabeth Leavy, The Art and Life of Jean Varda (Sausalito, CA: Purple Cottage Press, 2015). Thirion, André, Revolutionaries without Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1975). Tickner, Lisa, and David Peters Corbett (eds), British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939–1969 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Trevelyan, Julian, Indigo Days (Aldershot: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957). Van den Bossche, Phillip, Christiane Geurts-Krauss, and Virginie Devillez, The Star Alphabet by E. L. T Mesens: Dada and Surrealism (Aan Zee: MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2013). Van Hensbergen, Gijs, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). Watt, A., ‘Art Dealers of Paris: 1’, Studio (May 1958). Withers, Audrey, LifeSpan. An Autobiography (London: Peter Owen, 1994). Woolf, Virginia, Letters, vol. 4, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1978). Woolf, Virginia, Letters, vol. 5, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1979). Wright, Bertha, Bad Aunt Bertha: The Memoirs of Bertha Wright (Cambridge: Biograph, 2010).

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Index

RP = Roland Penrose Titles of works of art by RP reproduced in colour are printed in bold.

Abstract-Creation group, 86 Abstract Expressionism’, 204–5 Academy Cinema, 184–5, 194 Ades, Dawn, 271 Aeschylus, The Oresteia, 29 Agar, Eileen, 98, 101, 105, 107, 122–3, 124, 157 Air Raid Protection Corps, 155 Allen, Clifford, 21 Alloway, Lawrence, 200, 201 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 3, 8 ‘American Symbolic Realism’ (ICA exhibition), 204 Anderson, Sir Colin, 254 Anghilanti, Elise, 44 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 52, 259 Parade, 52 The Teats of Tiresias, 52 Apostles (Cambridge Conversazione Society), 32–3 Arden of Feversham, 31 Arensberg, Walter, 178 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, 10 Armitage, Kenneth, 235, 236 Armstrong, John, 99 Arson, 189 Artists’ Refugee Committee, 142 Arts Council, 185, 196, 205, 242–4, 261 Ashmolean, 194 Atelier, 17, 94 Atlee, Clement, 145 Ayer, Freddie, 217

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Bacon, Francis, 99, 233, 290–1n Balkans, 136–9 Ballard, Jean, Les Cahiers du Sud, 57 Balthus, 233 Banham, Rayner, 200, 202, 259 Bank House (Peckover House), Wisbech, 6–7, 15–17, 119 Banting, John, 157 Barcelona, 111–12, 228 Barclays, 6 Bard, Joseph, 101, 122, 124 Barr, Jr., Alfred H., 175–6, 194, 205–6, 218, 225–6, 230, 235 Baudelaire, Charles, 45 Baudouin, Pierre, 228 BBC, 185 Beddington, Jack, 198 Beechcroft, Hermonsceux, 17–18, 22, 27, 207 Bell, Clive, 32, 48, 228 Bell, Vanessa, 32, 43, 44, 49–50 Benares (Varanasi), 79 Bernier, George, 181–2 Bernier, Rosamond, 181–2, 254, 268–9 Betjeman, John, 107 Billancourt Studios, 70 Blake, Peter, 236 Blake, William, 16, 98 Bloomsbury Group, 32, 49 Blunt, Anthony, 145, 246 Boisgeloup, 113 Bombay (Mumbai), 74–5 Bonnat, Léon, 37 Bosch, Hieronymous, 94

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Boué, Colonel, Valentine Penrose’s father, 46–8 Boué, Suzanne, Valentine Penrose’s mother, 47 Bourke-White, Margaret, 166, 167 Boyle, Mark, Sensual Laboratory, 261 Braden, Peter, 212–13 Bradenham Hall, Norfolk, 83–4, 154, 155 Braque, Georges, 32, 38, 41–2, 185, 228 Brauner, Hari, 136–7 Brauner, Victor, 136, 146 Bresson, Robert, Affaires Publiques, 81, 289 nn Breton, André as primary theorist of surrealism, 53–6 opens International Surrealist Exhibition, 101 sells portion of his collection to RP, 114 dispute with Éluard, 138 The Magnetic Fields, 53 The Surrealist Manifesto, 55 ‘Vigilance’, 55–6 Le surréalisme et le peinture, 255 see also 45, 50–1, 59, 65, 98, 99, 100, 106, 109, 148, 177, 188–9, 190, 191 British Arts Centre (proposed), 158–60, 184 British Council, 185, 232, 246 Brockway, Fenner, 21, 110, 144 Brogue (English Vogue), 160–1, 166–7, 178 Brunius, Jacques, 187, 188, 190 Bucharest, 136–7 Buckland Wright, John, 155–6 Buñuel, Luis, L’Age d’Or, 70–1, 233 Burra, Edward, 99 Butler, Reg, 206 Byculla Club, 74 Café de la Place Blanche, 94 Cairo, 146 Calcutta, 76–7 La Californie, 228 Cambridge, 27–36, 40 Campbell, Jean, 45

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Campbell, Roy, 208 Capa, Robert, 166 Carrington, Dora, 60, 83–4 Carrington, Leonora, 122, 130, 153 Carroll, Lewis, 98 Cartier, Jacques, 57 Casagemas, Carlos, 255 Cassis, 42–5, 56, 66–7 Centre Georges Pompidou, 264 Cézanne, Paul, 31, 32, 35 Chadwick, Lynn, 234–5, 305n Dancers II, 261 Chakravarti, Gyanendra Nath, 78 Chakravarti, Monika (later Yashoda Ma), 78, 80 Chamberlain, Neville, 137, 141, 144 Char, René, 108 Charleston, 211 Chiddingly Post Office Stores, 218 Churchill, Winston, 157 Clark, Kenneth, 99 Clark-Hall, Denis, 156 Cocteau, Jean, 219, 233 The Blood of a Poet, 120, 233 Coldstream, William, 243 Collins, Cecil, 99, 105 Colquhoun, Ithell, 149, 150 Condom-sur-Baïse, 48 Congo, the chimpanzee, 237 Connolly, Cyril, 107 Conran, Terence, 204 Constable, John, 95 Cook, James, 107 Cooper, Douglas accuses RP of having a ‘ready-made’ collection, 116 objects to how ICA is being set up, 184–7, 191–2, 196, 197–8, 199 reviews RP’s biography of Picasso, 240–1 furious about Tate Gallery Picasso retrospective, 242–4, 245, 247, 248 tries to make further problems for RP with Picasso, 256 makes negative remarks about dead Picasso, 272 see also 229, 250 Copley, Bill, 234 Cornwall, 122–3

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Index COUM Transmission Prostitution at ICA, 266 Cubism, 115, 224, 228 Dada, 52, 61–2, 91 ‘Dada and Surrealism Reviewed’ (Hayward Gallery exhibition), 271 Dalí, Gala, 68–9 Dalí, Salvador, 69, 94, 105–6 David, Elizabeth, 220 Davies, Hugh Sykes, 106 De Brunhoff, Michel, 228 De Chirico, Giorgio, 106, 114–15, 119 de Galaup, Jean-François, 57–8 de Kerversian, Juanita, 141 de Zoëte, Beryl, 146–7 Decour, Jacques, 169 Degenerate art exhibition, 141 Del Renzio, Tony, 189–90, 200, 300 Delvaux, Paul, 131 Derain, André, 57 Deriaz, Diane, 221–3, 230, 233, 253, 259–60, 270–1, 275, 276–80 Desnos, Robert, 169 Diaghilev, Ballets Russes, 31, 228 Dobrée, Bonamy, 31, 59–60, 145 Dobrée, Valentine, née Gladys BrookePechell, 59–60 Your Cuckoo Sings by Kind, 59–60 Dolan, Pat, 205 Domínguez, Óscar, 234 Downs School, 18 Downshire Hill, No. 21, 95–6, 178 Downshire Hill, No. 36, 178, 210 Drew, Jane, 199, 204 Drew, Joanna, 244, 261, 271 Driberg, Tom, 149 Durruti, Buenaventura, 111 Eastern Command Camouflage School, Norwich, 162, 164 Edgerton, William le B., 76 Egypt, 59–61, 67, 146–8 Eisenstadt, Alfred, 166 Elephant Trust, 265 Eliot, T. S., 98, 101, 204 Elizabeth II, HM, the Queen, 205, 246, 259 Elizabeth, HM, the Queen Mother, 246 Ellis, Edith, 11–12

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319

Ellis, Havelock, 12 Eloui Bey, Aziz, 60, 121, 146–7, 148–9, 179 Eloui Bey, Nimet, 60, 146 Éluard, Dominique, née Laure, 219, 222 Éluard, Maria (Nusch), née Benz, 69, 108, 113, 115, 122–3, 124, 148, 176 Éluard, Paul early life, 55–6, 68–70 assists with International Surrealist Exhibition, 98 introduces RP to Picasso, 108 sells part of his collection to RP, 115 dispute with Breton, 138 death, 219–20 ‘The Earth is Blue Like an Orange’, 56 Mourir de ne pas Mourir (Dying of Not Dying), 69 Une Semaine de bonté. . ., 81 ‘Liberté’, 169 ‘La beauté de Lee. . .’, 180 ‘À toute Epreuve’, 234 see also 45, 50–1, 54, 59, 65, 91–2, 94, 105, 110, 113, 122, 124, 174, 176, 180, 189, 221, 222, 226, 288n Épinal, 57; see also xiv, 45, 50–1, 54 Ernst, Marie-Berthe, 64–5, 70 Ernst, Max early career, 61–3 teaches RP how to paint surrealistically, 64–6 expresses negative thoughts about RP as an artist, 91–2 incarcerated, 153, 296n moves to Arizona with Dorothea Tanning, 177 his retrospective at the Tate, 257 death, 268; see also xiv, 68–70, 72, 94, 99, 104, 120, 122, 130, 180, 190, 218, 222, 233 L’Eléphant Célèbes, 52–3, 101, 115, 265 Histoire Naturelle, 65 La joie de vivre, 113 ICA retrospective, 264 Erskine, Georgina, née Murray, 216–17 Evans, Mervyn, 99

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Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, 116, 128 Farley Farm (Farleys), 208–23, 260 Fauves, 37–8 Fellowes, Julian, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, 250–2, 272 Poison Presented, 251–2 Fenton, Sybil (later Mesens), 130, 154, 156, 197, 219 Fermoy Gallery, 271 Fidelin, Ady, 122, 124 Fini, Leonor, Worship Exhibitionism, 100 First Red Cross Italian Ambulance Unit, 23–4 Fletcher, Elsa, 266 Forbes, Mansfield (Manny), 31 Forster, E. M., 144 ‘40 Years of Modern Art. . .’, 192–4, 199 ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art’, 194–6, 203 Fox, George, 2–3, 116 Francis, Richard, 271 Frank, Jean-Michel, 233 Freddie, Wilhelm, The Fallen in the World War, 100 Freud, Lucien, 117 Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), 22–3 Friends Meeting House, Wisbech, 7 Friesz, Othon, 38–9, 57 Fry, Maxwell, 199 Fry, Roger his career as a paradigm of RP’s, 33–5, 36 ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, 33, 100 the ‘Second Post-Impressionist exhibition’, 33, 100 see also 32, 176 Fundació Joan Miró, 272 Gabo, Naum, 129 Gaffé, René, 114–16, 129 Galanis, Demetrios, 41 Galarza, Vicomte de Santa Clara, 60–1, 67, 73, 77, 79–80, 88 Gargallo, Germaine, 255

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Gascoyne, David, 94–5, 98, 106, 110–11, 222 Short Survey of Surrealism, 94 Roman Balcony and Other Poems, 94 Opening Day, 94 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 31 Gauguin, Paul, 35, 38, 61 Gellhorn, Margaret, 167, 174 Giacometti, Alberto, 235 Gilot, Françoise, 228, 256–7 Goa, 74–5 Goldfinger, Ernö, 155–6, 294n Golding, John, 247–8 Goldman, Emma, 111 Gollancz, Victor, 224–5, 227, 234–5, 244, 256 Goodman, Arnold, Lord, 261, 263–4 Gowing, Lawrence, 247 Goya, Francisco, Third of May 1806, 143 Grand Canyon, 178 Grant, Duncan, 32, 43, 44, 50 Greece, 136 Gregory, E. C. (Peter), 184, 199, 219 Grigson, Geoffrey, 187, 198, 199 Gris, Juan, 38, 185 ‘Growth and Form’ (ICA exhibition), 200–1 Guernica, 117, 142 Guggenheim, Peggy, 130, 133–5, 153, 187–8 Out of This Century, 134, 176–7 Guggenheim Jeune, 130, 159 the Gurneys, Quaker banking family, 5 Hamilton, Richard, 200–1, 203 Hamilton, Terry, 203 Hampstead, 95–6 Harecroft House, Wisbech, 7 Hartmann, William, 255, 257 Hayter, S. E. (Bill), 94, 99, 155 Hayward, John, 213–14 Hélion, Jean, 86, 94 Hemingway, Ernest, 174 Henderson, Nigel, 200 Hendy, Philip, 232 Hepworth, Barbara, 99 Heretics Society, Cambridge, 33 Herkomer, Sir Hubert, 3 Hermitage, 244

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Index Hill, Anthony, 231, 252 Hillier, Tristan, 99 Hitler, 137, 142, 144, 153, 189 Hockney, David, 236 Hoellering, George, 184–5, 186 Home Guard, 157, 162 Horizon, 189 Hornton Street, 210, 236, 266–7, 276 Howard, Charles, 99 Huelin y Ruiz Blasco, Ricardo, 228 Hugnet, Georges, 100 Huston, John, 213 ICA Visitors’ Book, 215, 219, 265 ‘Illusion in Nature and Art’ (ICA exhibition), 264–5 Imperial Tobacco, 156–7 Inagerie d’Épinal, 57 Independent Group, 199–202, 246, 266 Independent Labour Party, 110–11 India, 73–9 Industrial Camouflage Unit, 155–7 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), 184–206, 246, 250, 260–6, 271 International Surrealist Exhibition, 100–7, 114 Isle of Wight, 16–17 Italy, 125, 164–5 Jacob, Max, 169 Jacobs, Roz, 254 Jai Sing’s Observatory, 76 James, Edward, 106 Japp, Darsie, 72, 288n Jarry, Alfred, 65 Ubu, 45 Jennings, Humphrey, 98, 99 John, Augustus, 107 Johnson, Ginger, African Drummers, 261 Johnson, Philip, 205 Jolas, Eugène, transition, 99 Jordan’s Meeting House, Chalfont St. Giles, 13–14, 22 Joyce, James, 204 Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, 124 Jung, Carl, 82–3 Mr Jupp, Chiddingly, 213

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321

Kahlo, Frida, 148 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 228 Keynes, Lydia, née Lopokova, 36, 228 Keynes, Maynard, 31–2, 36 Khokhlova, Olga, 228 King’s College, Cambridge, 27, 28 Kirstein, Lincoln, 204 Kisling, Moîse, 40–1 Kissim, Baron, 263 Klee, Paul, 104 Kloman, Anthony, 205 Kochavi, Daniella, 270–1 Konody, P. G., 99 Kustow, Mike, 262–3 Lake, Carlton, 256 Lake, John, 164, 179 Lamba, Jacqueline, 101, 177 Lambe Creek, 122–4, 141 Lambert, Frederick, 267 Landseer, Edwin, 8 Larrau, 59 Larrea, Juan, 144 Lawson, Alistair, 237 Lawson, Julie (Tommy), 198–9, 265, 266 Le Pouy, chateau, 71–2, 268 LeCorbusier, 201 Lee, Rupert, 105 Leeds City Art Gallery, 145 Léger, Fernand, 185 Legge, Sheila, 101, 130 Leighton Park School, 20–1 Levy, Bert, 157 Levy, Julian, 122, 175 Lhote, André, 38–9, 57 Life, 165 Lindsay, Vera, 218 Little, Ted, 264–6 Local Defence Volunteers, 157 Loder, Robert, 264 London Bulletin, 132, 145, 161, 189 London Gallery, 129–32, 136, 154, 196–7 London Group, 57 Long Man (Wilmington Giant), 208 Lund Humphries, 219 Lutyens, Edwin, 149 Lyon, Ninette, 234, 259 Lyon, Peter, 234

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Maar, Dora, 108, 113, 116, 124, 127, 148, 228 McAlpine, Alistair, 265 McColgan, Kathleen, 154 McEwen, Frank, 232–3 McNulty, Bettina, 253–4 McNulty, Henry, 253 McWilliams, F. E., Kneeling Woman, 193, 260 Maddox, Conroy, 157, 189 Madrid, 228 Magritte, René, 100, 104, 126, 131, 136 Representation, 136 Maharaja of Indore, 76 Maharaja of Udaipur, 76 Malaga, 228 Man Ray, Juliet, 178, 268 Margaret, Princess, HRH, 246, 248 Marlowe Society, Cambridge, 28–9, 36 Maskelyn, Jasper, 164 Masson, André, 101 Matisse, Henri, 32, 113, 228, 230 Mayor, Freddy, 130, 154, 192 Mayor, Pam, 154 Mayor Gallery, 99, 130, 149 Melly, George, 197–8, 248 Melville, Robert, 194–5 Mesens, E. L. T. re-hangs International Surrealist Exhibition, 105 helps RP acquire the Gaffé collection, 114–15 becomes manager of the London Gallery, 129–32 fierce opponent of Éluard, 138 furious with Herbert Read and Peggy Guggenheim about proposed British Art Centre, 158–60 often intransigent about plans for the ICA, 186–90, 196, 198 A Little Backbone, Please, 159 Idolatry and Confusion, 190 see also 100, 119, 122, 154, 196, 199, 248 Messel, Oliver, 164 Miller, Erik, 121, 178 Miller, John, 121, 176 Miller, Lee early career, 120–2 meets and falls in love with RP, 122–8

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travels to the Balkans with RP, 136–41 she and RP in Egypt, 146–8 decides to leave Egypt and settle in England, 148–50 meets Valentine, 160 wartime work for Brogue, 161–2, 168 becomes lover of David Scherman, 165–6 post-war work, 171–2, 178 jealous of Gigi Richter, 172–4, 176, 179 suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and loses interest in taking photos, 174–5 decides to return to Roland, 175 becomes pregnant, 178 gives birth to Antony, 180 she and RP purchase Farleys although she does not like living in the country, 208–12 she and RP quarrel, and she begins to drink heavily, 216, 268–9 becomes interested in cooking, 220 violently jealous of Diane Deriaz, 222–3 assist RP in his work on Picasso, 226 death, 269–70 Grim Glory. . ., 161 see also 120–269 passim Miller, Mafy, 147, 148, 178 Miller, Theodore, 121, 175, 176 ‘Million Penny Fund’, 145 Miró, Juan, 62–3, 99, 114, 115, 119, 234, 255–6 Tate retrospective, 257 Carnival of the Harlequins, 101 Object 228, 104 Catalan Landscape, 114 Mirtola, 77 Monselice, Italy, 25 Monte Cassino, 164 Montgomery, Field Marshall Bernard Law, 162 Moore, Henry, 95, 98, 99, 122, 144 Mother and Child, 115, 148, 260 Moore, Irina, 122 Morland, Dorothy, 199–201, 246, 246, 252

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Index Morris, Desmond, 190, 237, 248, 262 The Naked Ape, 262 Morrow, Edward R., 161 Mougins, 108–10, 124–7, 228 Murray, Patsy, 216–17 Murray, Paula, 216, 222, 279 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 175–6, 185, 186, 194 Mysore, 75 Naples, 164 Nash, Paul, 95, 98, 99, 105 Nast, Condé, 121 National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, 144 Neo-Romantics, 190 ‘The New American Painting’ (Tate exhibition), 202 New Burlington Gardens, 101, 142, 144–5 New Road 143, 189 New York City, 175 Newton, Eric, 158, 196, 239, 300n Nicholson, Ben, 99, 233 ‘1950, Aspects of British Art’ (ICA exhibition), 204 Nixon, Ronald (later known as Krishna Prem), 31, 80 de Noailles, Vicomte, Charles, 70, 233 de Noailles, Vicomtesse, Marie-Laure, 70, 233 La Noblesse, 64–5 Non-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), 21–2 North Brink, Wisbech, 7 Norton, Lady, (Peter), née Noel Evelyn Hughes, 129 Nougé, Paul, 126 Nunn & Co., Ford dealership, Manchester, 145 Oak Creek Canyon, Sedona, Arizona, 177 O’Brien, Terry, 179, 181, 207–8, 213, 235 O’Brien, Timmie, 179, 207, 213, 218 ‘Obsessive Image’ (ICA exhibition), 263 Ogden, Charles Kay, 33 Oldfield, Josiah, 216 Olivier, Fernande, 228

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323

Oppenheim, Meret, Fur Covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon, 101 ‘Opposing Forces’ (ICA exhibition), 205 Oriel College, Oxford, 145 Orwell Lodge, St. John’s Wood, London, 8, 207 Orwell, Sonia, 213 Osterley Park, 157, 162 Oxhey Grange, Hertfordshire, 12–13, 22, 27, 35–6, 48, 59, 207 Paalen, Alice, née Rahon, 88 Paalen, Wolfgang, 86, 98 Painted Desert, 178 Panorama, 267 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 190–1, 200 Paris, 36, 169, 232–5 Parmelin, Hélène, 231–2 Partridge, Ralph, 60 Peck, Gregory, 178 Peckover, Alexander, 1st and last Baron Peckover, RP’s grandfather, 2, 4, 5–7, 10, 17, 20, 35, 77, 116 Peckover, Alexandrina, RP’s aunt, 4, 7 Peckover, Algerina, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4, 7 Peckover, Algernon, RP’s great grandfather, 4, 5, 6, 7, 20 Peckover, Anna Jane, RP’s aunt, 4, 7 Peckover, Elizabeth, née Sharples, RP’s grandmother, 4 Peckover, Jane, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4 Peckover, Jonathan, founder of the Peckover banking dynasty, 4–5, 6 Peckover, Jonathan, RP’s great uncle, 5, 7 Peckover, Katherine Elizabeth, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4 Peckover, Priscilla, née Alexander, RP’s great grandmother, 4 Peckover, Priscilla Hannah, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4, 7, 215 Peckover, Susanna, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4 Peckover, Wilhelmina, Josephine Penrose’s aunt, 4, 7 Peckover, William, RP’s great uncle, 5, 6, 7

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Penrose, Alexander (Alec), RP’s brother, 10, 21, 22–3, 27, 28, 29, 35, 37, 73, 79, 83–4, 116, 155, 219–20 Penrose, Ami Valentine, RP’s granddaughter, 275 Penrose, Annie, Harry’s wife and RP’s aunt, 18, 27 Penrose, Antony, RP’s son, xv, 150, 180, 215, 216–17, 250, 253, 260, 266, 269, 275, 279–80 Penrose, Arthur, RP’s uncle, 17, 22–3 Penrose, Bernard (Beacus), RP’s brother, 10, 12, 37, 83–4, 141, 155 Penrose, Bertha, née Baker, RP’s sisterin-law, 27–8, 35, 48, 49 Penrose, Eliza Mary, RP’s granddaughter, 275 Penrose, Frances, RP’s sister-in-law, 83 Penrose, Henry (Harry), RP’s uncle, 17, 27 Penrose, James Doyle, senior, RP’s grandfather, 2 Penrose, James Doyle, RP’s father, xiv, 2–4, 7, 14, 21, 22, 35, 39, 42, 44, 70, 219 Queen Phillipa Interceding for the Burgers at Calais, 3 Penrose, Josephine, née Peckover, RP’s mother, xiv, 2, 4, 7, 9–10, 11, 14, 22, 35, 44, 70 Talks about Peace and War. . ., 9–10 Penrose, Joy, née Newton, RP’s sister-inlaw, 83, 141 Penrose, Lionel, RP’s brother, 10, 20, 22, 27, 28, 35, 37, 83, 155 Penrose, Roland early childhood, 11–12 move to Oxhey Grange, 12–13 early interest in the visual arts, 14–17 centrality of Quakerism’s ‘inner light’ in his life, 18 attends The Downs, 18 at Leighton Park School, 20–1 serves in Red Cross Ambulance Unit in World War I, 23–5 enrolls at Queen’s College, Cambridge, 27 acts and designs for the Marlowe Society, 28–30 affair with George ‘Dadie’ Rylands, 29–30

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becomes a member of the Heretics Society, 33 profound influence of Roger Fry on him, 33–5 studies in Paris, 37–40 experiences a sense of liberation in France, 40–2 settles at Cassis, 42–5 meets and falls in love with Valentine Boué, 45–8 marries Valentine, 48 becomes intrigued with surrealism, 50–2 early paintings, 56–7 he and Valentine share common goals, 58 he and Valentine travel to Egypt where they meet Galarza, 59–61 encounters Ernst, 62–3 purchases flat in Paris, 63–4 rents La Noblesse where he studies with Ernst, 64–5 is an extra in L’Age D’Or, 70 his mother dies, 70 he and Valentine move to Château Le Pouy, 72 death of his father, 73 early cracks in his marriage to Valentine, 70–2 he and Valentine travel to India, 73–9 meetings with Galarza seem to clear up marital problems, 79–80 has epiphanic moment about the place of good and evil in human life, 82 further marital problems, 82–8, 91 realizes his limitations as an artist, 92 plans and participates in International Surrealist Exhibition, 94–5, 98–107 moves to Downshire Hill, 95–6 meets Picasso, 108 spends part of the summer at Mougins with Valentine, 108–10 travels to Spain, 110–12 purchases his first major canvas by Picasso, 112–14 becomes a serious collector, 114–19 he and Valentine separate, 119 meets and falls in love with Lee Miller, 120–3 at Lambe Creek with Lee, 124–6

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Index at Mougins with Lee, 124–7 begins to make collages, 124–6 buys London Gallery, 129–32 travels to Balkans with Lee, 136–8 makes The Road is Wider than Long, 138–9 divorces Valentine, 141 active in countering fascism, 141–2 arranges for Guernica to be shown in England, 142–6 visits Lee in Egypt, 146–8 he and Lee travel to France just before World War II begins, 153–4 war time activities as camouflage expert, 155–7, 162–5 plans British Art Centre, 158–60 Valentine lives with him and Lee, 160 involved in a ménage à trois with Lee and David Scherman, 165–6 returns to Paris, 168–70 affair with Gigi Richter, 172–3, 176, 179 visits the United States with Lee, 175–8 marries Lee Miller, 179 begins to have second thoughts about his relationship with Lee, 182–3 actively involved in plans for the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 184–8, 191–6 referees quarrels among the English surrealists, 188–91 closes London Gallery, 196–8 further involvement with ICA, 198–206 buys Farley Farm, 208–11 problems running Farleys, 212–13 meets and begins affair with Diane Deriaz, 221–3 accepts invitation to write biography of Picasso, 224–6 works on Picasso biography, 227–32, 235–6, 237–9 becomes British Council representative in Paris, 232–5 champions artists of various stripes, 236–7 becomes Trustee of the Tate Gallery, 241

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325

organises the Arts Council exhibition of Picasso at the Tate Gallery, 242–8 begins negotiations with Picasso for the Tate to acquire The Three Dancers, 248–50, 254–7 accepts knighthood, 259–60 further involvement with ICA and disillusionment with it, 260–6 distraught when paintings from his collection stolen, 266–8 cares for Lee and Valentine when they are dying, 269–70 affairs with Daniella Kochavi and Diane Deriaz, 270–1 writes about Picasso and other artists, 272–4 writes Scrap Book, 274–5 health declines, 275–6 on-again, off-again relationship with Diane Deriaz, 276–8 makes final collages, 278–9 dies, 279–80 Works of Art Abstract Composition (Portrait of Lee Miller), 182 Atterissage, 57, 67 Beacus Penrose at the Wheel, 150 Black Music, 162 Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 107, 149, 272 Conquest of the Air, 128, 149 Conversation between Rock and Flower, 66 The Dew Machine, 135 Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads?, 196, 197 Eclipse of the Pyramid, 67 Egyptian Pyramid, 67 Faites vos Jeux, 197 Fireplace at Farley Farm, 211 First View, 182, 197 Fontcreuse, 57 From the Housetops, 149 Good Shooting, 149 La Méditerrané-Étude artistique, 126 Monsters, 57, 86 Night and Day, 149–50, 182 Oasis, 86 Octavia, 149–51 Pequod, 57

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Penrose, Roland (Cont.) Real Woman, 136 The Sailor’s Return, 57 Seeing is Believing, 135–6 Self Portrait, 183 The Third Eye, also known as The Eye of the Storm (Portrait of Lee Miller), 182–3 Unsleeping Beauty, 182–3 Valentine with Cat, 88 Winged Domino, 88, 151 Writings ‘Beauty and the Monster’, 272 Catalan Art from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries, 111 Desire Caught by the Tail (translator), 197 Home Guard Manual of Camouflage, 163 In the Service of the People. . ., 169, 188 Kenneth Armitage, 272 McWilliam, 272 Man Ray, 272–3 Miró, 273 Picasso: His Life and Work, 238–41 Portrait of Picasso, 231 The Road is Wider than Long, 138–9, 146 Scrap Book, 274–6 Tàpies, 273 Penrose, Suzanna, née Harbord, RP’s daughter-in-law, 269, 275, 279 Penrose, Valentine, née Boué, RP’s first wife meets RP, 45 courtship of her and RP, 46–7 marries RP, 48 volatile temper, 48–50 intrigued by Galarza, 60 discord between her and RP, 66–7, 79, 81, 82, 84–91 visits Mougins with RP, 108–9 travels to Spain with RP, 110–11 decides to separate from RP, 119 is divorced from RP, 141 meets Lee Miller and moves into Downshire Hill, 160 attends marriage of RP and Lee Miller, 179 lives at Farleys, 220

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death, 270 Imagerie d’Épinal, 57–8 Dons des féminines, 68 The Bloody Countess, 220 see also 45–270 passim Perpignan, 224–5 Philip, HRH Prince, Duke of Edinburgh, 246 Phillips, Ewan, 198–9 Piave, 23–4 Picabia, Francis, 99 Picasso, Pablo meets RP, 108 at Mougins is injured in car driven by RP, 109 sells Femme nue. . . to RP, 112–13 sells Weeping Woman to RP, 116–17 is delighted RP is going to write his biography, 225 expresses disdain for surrealism, 227 pits RP and Douglas Cooper against each other, 229 is delighted with RP’s biography, 238 is elated by success of Tate retrospective, 246–7 is reluctant to part with The Three Dancers, 254–7 death, 268 Science and Charity, 111 Femme nue. . ., 112–13, 114, 261 Minotauromachy, 113 papier colté, 114 Girl with a Mandolin, 115, 239 Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, 115, 203, 238, 246 Weeping Woman, xv, 116–17, 266, 275 Guernica, xv, 117, 137–8, 142–5, 155 Dream and Lie of Franco, 142 ‘L’Arléslienne’ portraits of Lee Miller, 126–7, 251, 293nn Night Fishing at Antibes, 153, 168 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 194, 248 Le Désir attrapé par la queue, 197 Las Meninas, 244 The Three Dancers, 248–9, 254–5, 257 Le Crayon qui Parle, 261 Negro Dancer, 267, 268 see also 30, 38, 61, 100, 104, 111–12, 113, 114, 119, 143,

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Index 124–8, 148, 168, 174, 214–15, 218, 219, 224–32, 238–41, 243–58, 237, 260, 268 Picasso Exhibition, Tate, 1960, 241–8, 249, 306n ‘Picasso: Drawings and Watercolours. . .’ (ICA exhibition), 219 ‘Picasso Himself’ (ICA exhibition and then MOMA), 231 Picasso y López, Maria, 111–12 Pichot, Ramon, 255 Piper, John, 131, 190 Pollitt, Harry, 138 Pollock, Jackson, 205 Poole, George, 77–8 Port Said, 73 Poushana Butler, 79 Pushkin Museum, 244 Quaker House, Lewes, 272 Quaker Meeting House, Watford, 13 Quakers (Society of Friends) centrality in RP’s life, 2–3, 70, 82, 162 RP’s family as part of a new kind of Quakerism in early part of twentieth century, 8–10 and pacifism, 21, 155 prohibition against collecting in Quaker doctrine, 283n see also 5–6, 138, 217, 219, 267, 272 Queen’s College, Cambridge, 27 Ratton Gallery, 108 Ray, Man, 100, 104, 108, 120, 121–2, 124, 148, 152, 178, 217, 228, 233 Eyes and Hands, 148, 228, 268 L’Heure de l’Observatoire, 120 ICA exhibition, 264 Read, Herbert, 95–8, 99, 104–5, 130, 135, 145, 158–60, 165, 184–7, 191, 192, 193, 199–202, 204–5, 237, 246, 259, 259, 260, 262 Read, Lady, née Margaret Ludwig, 96 Reber, G. F., 116 Redding, Sylvia, 179 Reeves, Joyce, 236, 244 Renoir, Jean, 108 Richards, James, 213–14 Richardson, John, 116 Richter, Gigi, 172, 174, 176, 179–80, 181, 298n

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Riley, Bridget, 236 Rimbaud, Arthur, 45, 110 Rivera, Diego, 138 Robinson family, Chiddingly, 213 Rochas, Hélène, 120 Rockefeller, John D., 199 Roma, 139 Romania, 136–7 Roque, Jacqueline, 228, 229 Rosenberg, Léonce, 38 Rosenberg, Paul, 113 Rothenstein, John, 242 Rowntree, John William, 8–9 Royal Academy, 149 Royal Watercolour Society Galleries, 57 Rubenstein, Helena, 158 Russell, John, 267 Rylands, George (Dadie), 29–30, 32, 41, 49, 181, 275 Sabartés, Jaime, 228 St Francis Xavier, 74–5 St John’s Wood Clique, 4 St Paul’s, Calcutta, 73 Salles, Georges, 228 Scherman, Bill, 176 Scherman, David E., 165–7, 171–2, 174, 176 Segoznac, de, André Dunoyer, 57 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 29 Shaw, George Bernard, 187 Shaw, Hal, 279 Sheffield Peace Conference, 214 Sheppard, John Tressider, 28 Sibald’s Holme, 7 Siebe & Gorman, 106 Siwa, 147 Slinger, Penny, 236 Snowdon, Lord, Antony ArmstrongJones, 246 Solomon Guggenheim Museum of NonObjective Painting (Guggenheim Museum), 135 Sotheby’s, 261, 265 Spain, 110–13 Spicer, Henry Scanes, 35 Sprott, Sebastian, 33 Stalin, Joseph, 138, 189 Steichen, Edward, 121 Steinberg, Saul, 218 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 234

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Steven, John, 130 Strachey, James, 83 Strachey, Julia, 84 Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, 84 Strachey, Lytton, 60, 83–4 Stramongate, 3, 283n Strauss-Ernst, Lou, 169 Stravinsky, Igor, 178 Strettel, Marguerite, 129 Struve, Thea, 133 Summerskill, Edith, 257 Surrealism surrealism as define by Breton, 50–6 RP decides to become a surrealist artist, 61–2 RP learns to paint in a surrealist way, 65–6, 91–2 RP intuits that this movement incorporates the good and the bad, 82 Valentine becomes hostile to the movement, 8 RP collects major example of this art form, 115 disagreements among the English members of this movement, 138, 188–91 see also 224, 228 ‘Surrealism Today’ exhibition, 157–8 Sutherland, Graham, 99, 233 Swan, John Macallan, 3–4 Sylvester, David, 53, 195–6, 247 Taj Mahal, 77 Tanning, Dorothea, 177, 218, 222, 257 Tàpies, 277 Tate Gallery, 185, 254 Taylor’s Depository, 154 Teed, Peter, 45 ‘Ten Decades. . .’ (ICA exhibition), 202 Thomas, Dylan, 101, 130, 208 Thompson, Cynthia, 188 Thompson, Darcy Wentworth, Growth and Form, 200–1 Thompson, John, 188, 236 Three Horseshoes, 160 Tissot, J. J., 8 Todd, Ruthven, 106 Toklas, Alice B., 228 Tomlin, Stephen, 84 Towers of Silence, 74

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Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 24 Trevelyan, Julian, 94, 99, 104, 130, 153, 155–6 Trotsky, Leon, 138, 189 Turnbull, William, 200 War Goddess, 260 Unit One, 99 United Front, Cataluña, 111 ‘Unknown Political Prisoner’ competition at ICA, 206 Vaché, Jacques, 54 Vallauris, 228 Van Gogh, Vincent, 61 Van Leer, gallery, 64, 287–8 n Varda, Jean (Yanko), 39–41, 45, 59, 60, 181 Vauvenargues Castle, 228 Vernon, Wilfred, 157 Villa les Mimosas, Cassis, 43–4, 49, 71 Vogue, 121, 218 Wadsworth, Edward, 99 Walton, William, 104 War Office, 157 Watson, Peter, 185, 196, 262 Webster, John, The White Devil, 28 Werner, Fallen Giant, 260 Westfield College, 4, 283n White, Sam, 245 Whitechapel Gallery, 145 Whitney, Jock, 206 Wintringham, Tom, 157 Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, 4–7, 119 Wisteria House, Wisbech, 7 Withers, Audrey, 161, 167, 171–2, 178, 218 ‘The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head’ (ICA exhibition), 203 Woolf, Virginia, 32, 33, 43, 49, 144 Ylla, 148 Yoxall, Harry, 161, 208 Zam Zam, 165 Zervos, Christian, 108, 110–11, 168 Zervos, Yvonne, 108, 111, 168 Zuloaga, Ignacio, 145 Zwemmer, Anton, 129 Zwemmer’s Bookshop and Gallery, 99, 113, 114, 129, 157, 190

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Plate 1. Roland Penrose, Monsters, 1925. Oil.

Plate 2. Roland Penrose, Atterissage, 1926. Oil.

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Plate 3. Roland Penrose, Conversation between Rock and Flower, 1928. Oil.

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Plate 4. Roland Penrose, Eclipse of the Pyramid, 1929. Frottage drawing.

Plate 5. Roland Penrose, Oasis, 1936. Oil.

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Plate 6. Roland Penrose, Valentine with Cat, 1932. Oil.

Plate 7. Roland Penrose, Winged Domino, 1938. Oil.

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Plate 8. Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 1936–7. Mixed media object.

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Plate 9. Roland Penrose, La Méditerrané-Etude artistique, 1937. Collage.

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Plate 10. Roland Penrose, The Conquest of the Air, 1939. Oil.

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Plate 11. Roland Penrose, Seeing is Believing, c. 1937. Oil.

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Plate 12. Roland Penrose, Night and Day, 1937. Oil.

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Plate 13. Roland Penrose, Beacus Penrose at the Wheel, c. 1937. Oil.

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Plate 14. Roland Penrose, Octavia, 1939. Oil.

Plate 15. Roland Penrose, Black Music, 1940. Oil.

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Plate 16. Roland Penrose, First View, 1947. Oil.

Plate 17. Roland Penrose, Unsleeping Beauty, 1940. Oil.

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Plate 18. Roland Penrose, Abstract Composition (Portrait of Lee Miller), c. 1950. Oil.

Plate 19. Roland Penrose, The Third Eye, 1950. Oil.

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Plate 20. Roland Penrose, Self-Portrait, c. 1948. Oil.

Plate 21. Roland Penrose, Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads?, 1947. Oil.

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Plate 22. Farley Farm.

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Plate 23. Roland Penrose, East-West, 1983. Collage.

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