Roland Penrose

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE (born October 14, 1900 in St. John's Wood , London , † April 23, 1984 Farley Farm House, Chiddingly , East Sussex ) was an English artist , art historian and author . He was also a renowned gallery owner , art collector and curator, as well as a co-founder of the surrealist movement in Great Britain and a founding member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

Life

Roland Penrose grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford . His father, James Doyle Penrose, was a successful portrait painter ; his mother, Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, was the daughter of Lord Peckover of Wisbech , a wealthy banker. The family had four sons. Roland's older brother, Lionel Penrose , became a noted psychiatrist, geneticist, and mathematician.

The young Roland attended Leighton Park School in Reading , Berkshire . After studying architecture at Cambridge University , Penrose decided to become a painter. In 1922 he moved to France to join the local art scene. He first attended the art schools of Othon Friesz and André Lhote , where he first saw the cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque . Around 1924 he bought the Villa Les Mimosas in Cassis in the south of France , where he met his first wife, the poet Valentine Boué ; the two married a year later. In Cassis he also met Jean Varda , Georges Braque and Wolfgang Paalen . Boué also introduced him to André Breton and Paul Éluard , who in turn introduced him to Max Ernst , Joan Miró and other artists from the surrealist movement. Ultimately, Max Ernst was to have the greatest influence on the work of Roland Penrose: Penrose took over the collage and frottage techniques that characterize his later work from him . In 1928 Roland and Valentine rented an apartment in Paris; later they moved into the Chateau Le Pouy near Valentine's home, Lower Normandy . In 1932 the couple went on a trip to India.

Penrose returned to London in 1936 and was with David Gascoyne and Herbert Read one of the organizers of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries from June 11 to July 4, 1936 in London . Through his commitment, Penrose promoted the English surrealist movement. In the same year a lasting friendship developed with Pablo Picasso, whom Penrose had met through Paul Éluard. In 1938, Penrose was to make Picasso's monumental work Guernica known through an exhibition tour in England. Penrose's intense engagement with Surrealist ideas, painting, and the philosophy of the Surrealists ultimately led to a heated controversy with Valentine, who was pursuing her own artistic goals. Eventually it broke up and the two separated in 1936. Valentine traveled to India with Alice Rahon , Wolfgang Paalen's wife, and Penrose returned to London the following year. There he settled in the district of Hampstead , where the center of the British avant-garde art scene had settled. In 1938 he opened the London Gallery in Cork Street, where he presented works by the surrealists and works by artist friends such as Naum Gabo , Barbara Hepworth , Wolfgang Paalen , Piet Mondrian , Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson . Penrose came into contact with Henry Moore through the mediation of Wolfgang Paalen. In 1938 Moore's sculpture Mother and Child , which Penrose had on commission in front of his Hampsteader house, evoked a tangible press scandal and Penrose, who had already drawn attention to himself through his commitment to Picasso's Guernica , became the focus of a campaign against abstract art .

Lee Miller and the war

In June 1937, Penrose met the young American photographer Lee Miller at a Surrealist party in Paris . The two fell in love. Miller, who had previously assisted the surrealist photo artist Man Ray for a number of years , was married to the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and lived in Cairo. Together with her, Penrose toured half of Europe in the following years. In 1939 Miller finally separated from Aziz Eloui Bey and moved with Penrose to London under the auspices of the Second World War .

With the outbreak of war, the pacifist Penrose volunteered as an air raid helper and taught camouflage painting to camouflage military equipment with the British Home Guard (LVD) on a training ground in Osterley Park . During that time he wrote the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage and took on various teaching positions that soon earned him the rank of captain at the Eastern Command Camouflage School in Norwich . Roland and Lee's house on Downshire Hill soon became a popular meeting place for numerous intellectuals, journalists, painters and writers during the war years. Max Ernst, Paul and Nusch Éluard , Dalí , Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters as well as Stanley William Hayter and ELT Mesens belonged to the closer circle of acquaintances at this time . In addition, the American Time - Life photographer David E. Scherman and the journalist Kathleen McColgan, both friends of Lee, found accommodation in the Miller-Penrose house.

The ICA

Penrose, who himself had only had two large solo exhibitions in his own rooms - in 1939 and later, in 1947, in the London Gallery , which had reopened a year earlier - at times gave up painting entirely and concentrated increasingly on promoting contemporary artists . With the aim of providing a space for experimental art of all kinds, Roland Penrose, ELT Mesens, the publisher Geoffry Grigson and the art critic Herbert Read joined forces in 1947 to found the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In 1948 the ICA began with the first exhibition under the title 40 Years of Modern Art , a comprehensive retrospective of Cubism , followed by 40,000 Years of Modern Art , a show that mainly showed African art . But interest in modern art was initially extremely low in post-war London: in the absence of customers, Penrose even had to close his London Gallery again in 1951. Nonetheless, for years he vigorously pursued the goal of bringing modernity to Great Britain - Penrose was to remain the driving force of the ICA for over 30 years.

Farley Farm and later years

Farley Farm House in 2011

Lee Miller and Roland Penrose married in 1947, and their son Antony was born in the same year . In 1949 the family bought Farley Farm House , a small dairy farm in East Sussex . The artist meetings quickly moved there, including Valentine, Penrose's first wife, was one of the frequent guests. Lee Miller pictured many of these meetings in the 1950s before giving up photography. Penrose redesigned the area around the farm into a sculpture garden and displayed his extensive collection of modern art in the rooms of the farm, preferably paintings by Picasso and the Surrealists, as well as numerous sculptures and African sculptures. In the following years until the late 1970s, Penrose, in his activities as curator of the ICA and the Tate Gallery , published catalogs and monographs accompanying the exhibitions on Picasso, Picasso his life and work (1958), Miró (1970), Man Ray (1975 ) and Antoni Tàpies (1978). In 1975 the couple founded the “Elephant Trust” - a society for the promotion of art in Great Britain.

Lee Miller died of cancer at Farley Farm House in 1977, followed shortly after by Valentine in 1978. Both deaths caused Penrose to become deeply depressed and suffered a stroke that made it almost impossible for him to write. At the beginning of the 1980s, Penrose began again to work as an artist: he made collages with postcards from all the places he had traveled in his life. In 1981 he published his own biography under the title Scrap Book, 1900–1981 . Sir Roland Penrose died on Lee Miller's birthday, April 23, 1984 at Farley Farm.

The estate of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller is administered by their son, Antony Penrose. It is in the Farley Farm House.

Honors

Roland Penrose was promoted to Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1960 after the successful Picasso exhibition at Tate in 1958 . In 1966 he was knighted with the Knight Bachelor for his services to the promotion of contemporary art . On his 80th birthday, the University of Sussex honored him with an honorary doctorate in literature in 1980 .

Works (selection)

  • The Last One - Collage, (1984), The Roland Penrose Estate
  • House the Light-house - Gouache , collage (1983), Tate Collection, London
  • The Last Voyage of Captain Cook - sculpture (1936–67), Tate Collection, London
  • Portrait - oil on canvas (1939), Tate Collection, London
  • Magnetic Moths - Mixed Media (1938), Tate Collection, London
  • Le Grand Jour - oil on canvas (1938), Tate Collection, London

bibliography

Writings by Roland Penrose

literature

  • Elizabeth Cowling, Lee Miller (photographs): Visiting Picasso. The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose. Thames & Hudson, London 2006, ISBN 978-0-500-51293-7
  • Antony Penrose, Alen Macweeney (photographs): The house of the surrealists. The circle of friends around Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. Nicolai'Sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-87584-164-6
  • Antony Penrose: Roland Penrose, The Friendly Surrealist. Prestel, 2001, ISBN 3-7913-2492-6
  • Katherine Slusher: Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. The Green Memories of Desire. Prestel, 2007, ISBN 978-3-7913-3762-3

Audio

  • Surrealism Reviewed. Interview with Roland Penrose and Lee Miller 1946, LTM Records, CD 2343, Norfolk 2003, ISBN 0-9540549-5-4

Web links

Individual references and sources

  1. ^ The London Gallery closed in 1940 with the outbreak of the Second World War
  2. ^ The Scotsman: Surrealist who tried to paint a whole nation green. URL: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=40952006 (March 4, 2007)
  3. ^ Elephant Trust , elephanttrust.org.uk, accessed April 25, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Penrose, Roland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Penrose, Sir Roland Algernon (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English artist, author and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 14, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH St. John's Wood (London)
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1984
Place of death Chiddingly , Farley Farm House, East Sussex