ROLAND PENROSE

English Surrealist painter, photographer, poet, biographer, and major promoter and collector of modern art

Born: 14 October 1900, St Johns Wood, London, England.

Died: 23 April 1984, Farleys House, Muddles Green, Chiddingly, East Sussex, England.

Roland is best known as a Surrealist artist and for his biography of his friend Picasso, ‘Picasso – his life and work’ (1958), followed by books on Joan Miró (1970), Man Ray (1975),  Antoni Tàpies (1978), and his autobiography ‘Scrap Book, 1900 – 1981’(1981). He organised the highly acclaimed Picasso retrospective for the Tate Gallery in 1960, followed by other key exhibitions at the Tate and major galleries. He co-founded the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in 1947 but returned to painting in the last decade of his life, with exhibitions of his collages in London, Paris and Brighton.

Roland’s early painting was much influenced by Max Ernst, from whom he learned the techniques of collage and frottage, but it was the Cubism of Braque and Picasso that gave him the key to his distinctive postcard collages.

The son of a Victorian portrait painter, Roland was educated at Cambridge before moving to France, where he lived from 1922 to 1936. Through his first wife, the surrealist poet Valentine Boué, Roland met the poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, who introduced him to the painters Max Ernst and Joan Miró. He joined the Surrealist movement in Paris, and on his return to London in 1936 organised the International Surrealist Exhibition with the poet David Gascoigne and the artist and writer E.L.T Mesens. This led to the formation of an English Surrealist movement in which Roland became a leading artist.

1936 also saw Roland establish at permanent base at 21 Downshire Hill in Hampstead, London, alongside his artist friends Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Paul Nash, to name but a few. In 1937, during a stay in Paris, Roland met the photographer Lee Miller. The pair fell in love and began a long-distance love affair, which culminated in Lee moving to London in 1939 to be with Roland. They married after the war, and had their only child – a son named Antony, in 1947.

In 1938, Roland continued his role as a disruptor in the British art scene by taking over, with E.L.T Mesens, The London Gallery in Cork Street, where the pair showcased Surrealism and modern art. Famously, the gallery organized the 1938 British tour of Picasso’s Guernica and its associated works. A year later, the gallery published Roland’s surrealist image diary The Road is Wider than Long, which recorded a journey through Greece and Romania he had taken with Lee a year earlier.

Roland retained his Quaker pacifist beliefs during the Second World War, working as an ARP Warden and going on to design and lecture on camouflage for the Home Guard and Armed Forces.

Throughout his life, Roland was a dedicated and enthusiastic champion of new artists. Determined to bring international modernism to London, Roland, Mesens and Herbert Read founded the ICA in 1947 as a space for new and experimental art. Roland remained a guiding force at the ICA for thirty years.

In 1949, Roland purchased Farley Farm as a countryside retreat for his family. With Lee, Roland filled the farmhouse’s brightly painted walls with artworks, adding his own contribution in the form of a mural in the dining room inglenook fireplace. The house became a key meeting place for artists, with their friends visiting in droves. Picasso, Henry Moore, Leonora Carrington, Miró, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning are among the creatives who signed their names into the Farleys visitor book.

Roland was awarded a CBE in 1960 following the Picasso exhibition at the Tate. He was knighted in 1966 for his Services to Contemporary Art. In 1980 the University of Sussex honoured him with an Honorary Doctorate of Literature.

Roland died at Farleys on 23rd April 1984. Today, many of the rooms at Farleys have been restored, and the house, galleries and garden are open for tours between April and October.