Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist

by James King

EUP, £30

Review by Brian Morton

Farley Farm is the only place I visit in dreams that looks exactly as it did in real life. That is because the place itself is a dream. Roland Penrose’s home at Muddles Green, Chiddingly, opposite the distant but still haunting chalk figure of the Long Man of Wilmington, isn’t just the house and garden of an artist and collector. It is itself a work of art. I knew that Picasso, his friend and the subject of a pioneering study, had been among the first visitors in 1949, but I hadn’t expected to see Picassos on narrow domestic walls, to be viewed with an intimacy that would have set off alarms in a public gallery. There was – is – a fish-shaped pond, Shona sculpture on a roof, and little vitrines of fetish objects as absorbing as any of the formal art. On my first visit I sat at lunch beside a husky Frenchwoman, Roland’s last girlfriend, who told me she was a trapeze artist and that my quadriceps were strong. The food was made, astonishingly good, by a small Quaker woman who relied on guesswork, never having tasted meat.

James King’s biography is welcome not least in rescuing Roland Penrose from behind the large and often troublous shadow of his second wife, photographer Lee Miller: a rare but unique example of the wife taking the critical foreground. The reversing of genders is, inevitably, part of a story that involves much blurring and swapping of roles. Penrose embraced heterosexuality after a diffident start. His first troubled marriage, to the Gascon poet Valentine Boue, was “white”; Valentine suffered from vaginismus. Thereafter, he seems to have tasted wide and deep.

This, as King brilliantly shows in his introduction and opening chapters, was a reflection of Penrose’s own Quaker origins and a commitment to the “inner light”. In his own artistic career – and it is arguable that just as the house is a work, so was the life as a whole and not just the paintings, assemblages and collage – Penrose sought to distance himself from the academic and institutional aspects of art and to create, as he put it in another pioneering study, of Man Ray, “an attitude towards the arts based on the reality of human desire”.

In essence, that is what he pursued to the end. Unlike most of his friends and contemporaries, Penrose never made a living from art. His freedom was secured by family banking money and by the mind-set of a strict but also aesthetic Wisbech upbringing. His father was a mid-range portrait-painter, Dublin-born. A cynic might think that Roland was simply a rich boy who could guarantee an entrée into the circles of high Modernism because he had the money, but he also had talent and one of the marks of his work, evident in the colour plates King includes and throughout the Penrose Archive, which is held in Edinburgh, is the profound attention he gave to each work, the rigour with which he explored each dream.

Balancing the “inner light” in Quakerism is an injunction to help others as much as possible, and King shows Penrose to be balanced or sometimes conflicted between his own desires as an artist and a deep instinct to become an enabler and administrator. He was influenced in his own work by Max Ernst and Paul Eluard rather than by Surrealism’s “pope” Andre Breton, and that bias tells. He helped mount the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936, which brought Dali to London, and helped Surrealism leap from foreign strangeness to part of the national unconscious in just a few weeks. The painter Cecil Collins thought the show wasn’t the dawn of something new but the sunset of an old world that was about to be plunged into war again. Lee Miller documented the worst horrors of that conflict, but Roland had already intuited some of its manglings. His lesser works, while still influenced by Max Ernst, have something of the quality of 1970s cover art for prog-rock albums, but there is always a dark, thoughtful energy and a brooding awareness of looming disaster.

The same instinct towards group activity and proselytism led him to a founding role in London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, still a model for balancing new-wave exploration with institutional security. And yet, again inevitably, the ICA story will take second place for most readers to some of the spicier anecdotes in King’s study. King tells how Penrose used to wince when Picasso demanded to be taken for a “walk”, which was a euphemism, the great man groaning in the back of Roland’s car as he watched girls in the street.

King’s is a model study of a deceptively elusive figure. It balances admiration with honesty, foreground with the wider Surrealist moment, practicality with aesthetics. It stands alongside Roland’s most distinctive creation. You can pay to visit Farley Farm now, but I never do. The dreams, and now the text, are enough.