Sir Roland Penrose

Sir Roland Penrose (born October 14, 1900, London, England—died April 23, 1984, Farley Farm House, near Chiddingly, East Sussex) was a British artist, collector, and writer known best for his curatorial work and promotion of modern and contemporary artists.

Penrose attended Queens’ College, Cambridge, and earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1922. He left for Paris that year and studied painting in the studio of artist André Lhote. In 1923 he moved to a studio in Cassis sur Mer, and the following year he met and married poet Valentine Boué. The two became part of the Surrealist circle. Penrose was captivated by the philosophy and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement and began creating collages and took up the technique of frottage, which he had learned from Max Ernst. In the 1930s he also began what would be a long career of promoting contemporary artists and financed Surrealist projects by Ernst as well as the film Public Affairs (1934) by French director Robert Bresson.

Penrose separated from his wife in 1934 and went back to England in 1935. He and his friend poet David Gascoyne took Surrealism with them from Paris. He established the British Surrealist group in 1936 along with Gascoyne, artist Paul Nash, and poet and critic Herbert Read. Penrose was also instrumental in organizing the first International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London in the summer of 1936. It was at about that time that Penrose began collecting art, starting with the purchase of a work by Pablo Picasso (whom he had met through French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard). While visiting Paris in 1937, Penrose met model and photographer Lee Miller, and, though Miller was married at the time and Penrose’s career in London was taking off, the two began a romantic relationship. In 1938, with Belgian artist E.L.T. Mesens, he launched the London Gallery with an exhibition of works by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte and worked on behalf of Picasso to exhibit and tour the artist’s monumental painting Guernica (1937). Penrose also purchased Éluard’s large and impressive collection of art in 1938. Miller finally joined Penrose in London in 1939. The two collaborated that year on his poem “The Road Is Wider than Long,” which recounted their travels in 1938 through Romania and Greece and for which she contributed photographs.

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During World War II, Penrose remained in England, where he was active at the Eastern Command Camouflage School in Norwich, where he lectured on the art of camouflage. Penrose was also involved with the Artists’ Refugee Committee, which found artists safe passage to England from Nazi-occupied countries. Following the war Penrose reopened the London Gallery (which had closed in 1939) and then, with Read, Mesens, and others, established the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1946. He and Miller married in 1947 and in 1949 bought Farley Farm House, which became their primary residence. The couple hosted their artist friends on a regular basis in their home, which they decorated lavishly with their own art and with their art collection.

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, Penrose dedicated most of his time to curatorial work for the ICA. In 1948 he and Read cocurated the first two exhibitions: “40 Years of Modern Art” and “40,000 Years of Modern Art,” which introduced Modernist works of art to the broader public in London. During the 1960s Penrose served as a trustee and curator at the Tate Gallery and organized exhibitions on Picasso (1960)—for which he was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire)—Ernst (1961), Miró (1964), and others. He also wrote books on his friends Picasso (1958), Miró (1970), Man Ray (1975), and Antoni Tàpies (1977), and he penned an autobiography, Scrap Book, 1900–1981, in 1981. For his work in the field of contemporary art, he was recognized with a knighthood in 1966. He returned to making collages in the last years of his life and exhibited his work a number of times from 1980 until the year of his death.