Farleys House near Chiddingly, East Sussex, has been converted into a museum and archive featuring the lives and work of its former residents, the photographer Lee Miller and the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose. It also houses a collection of contemporary art by their friends Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Joan Miró.
Lee Miller and Roland Penrose came to live at Farley Farm in 1949 and, in the thirty five years they lived there, built up a collection of contemporary art. Many of these were made by their friends and visitors, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Joan Miró. [1] These artworks were assembled by Miller and Penrose, along with other works from all over the world by their son Antony Penrose, who has transformed the barn into an art gallery for upcoming and local artists to show their work. The house is surrounded by a sculpture garden and Lee Miller's vegetable patches. [2]
Picasso visited Miller and Penrose at Farley Farm on 11 and 15 November 1950. On his second visit he created a drawing in Indian ink on two pages of the ICA visitors book (now in the British Museum), of bulls with grasshopper's wings perched on twigs; he had seen William, an Ayrshire bull, that day in the farm's dairy. It is one of only two works Picasso created in England, the other being a mural in John Desmond Bernal's flat in London.[ citation needed ]
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose, was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she was a war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. It is located in Madrid, near the Atocha train and metro stations, at the southern end of the so-called Golden Triangle of Art.
Events from the year 1937 in art.
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Minotaure was a Surrealist-oriented magazine founded by Albert Skira and E. Tériade in Paris and published between 1933 and 1939. Minotaure published on the plastic arts, poetry, and literature, avant garde, as well as articles on esoteric and unusual aspects of literary and art history. Also included were psychoanalytical studies and artistic aspects of anthropology and ethnography. It was a lavish and extravagant magazine by the standards of the 1930s, profusely illustrated with high quality reproductions of art, often in color.
Julian Otto Trevelyan was an English artist and poet.
The Weeping Woman is a series of oil on canvas paintings by Pablo Picasso, the last of which was created in late 1937. The paintings depict Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress and muse. The Weeping Woman paintings were produced by Picasso in response to the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and are closely associated with the iconography in his painting Guernica. Picasso was intrigued with the subject of the weeping woman, and revisited the theme numerous times that year. The last version, created on 26 October 1937, was the most elaborate of the series, and has been housed in the collection of the Tate Modern in London since 1987. Another Weeping Woman painting created on 18 October 1937 is housed at the National Gallery of Victoria and was involved in a high-profile political art theft.
West Dean College of Arts and Conservation is situated in the 6,350-acre (25.7 km2) West Dean Estate, of West Dean near Chichester. The Estate was formerly the home of the poet and patron of the arts Edward James. He was an avid admirer of the Surrealist movement, and formed one of the largest collections of their works during his lifetime. He inherited West Dean House and the estate after the death of his father, William Dodge James.
The Centre Pompidou-Metz is a museum of modern and contemporary art located in Metz, capital of Lorraine, France. It is a branch of Pompidou arts centre of Paris, and features semi-permanent and temporary exhibitions from the large collection of the French National Museum of Modern Art, the largest European collection of 20th and 21st century arts. The museum is the largest temporary exhibition space outside Paris in France with 5,000 m2 (54,000 sq ft) divided between 3 galleries, a theatre, and an auditorium.
Women Surrealists are women artists, photographers, filmmakers and authors connected with the surrealist movement, which began in the early 1920s.
Jesus Fuertes was a Cubist painter, who was initiated into the world of art by Salvador Dalí, and was described as a "true genius" by Pablo Picasso. Fuertes often chose women and cats as his subject matter. Several of his well-known works involve the use of shades of blue, which earned him the nickname "Painter of Blue".
The Farm is an oil painting made by Joan Miró between the summer of 1921 in Mont-roig del Camp and winter 1922 in Paris. It is a kind of inventory of the masia owned by his family since 1911 in the town of Mont-roig del Camp. Miró himself regarded this work as a key in his career, describing it as "a summary of my entire life in the countryside" and "the summary of one period of my work, but also the point of departure for what was to follow." It is preserved in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, where it was given in 1987 by Mary Hemingway, coming from the private collection of American writer Ernest Hemingway, who had described it by saying, “It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.”
The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme was an exhibition by surrealist artists that took place from January 17 to February 24, 1938, in the generously equipped Galérie Beaux-Arts, run by Georges Wildenstein, at 140, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. It was organised by the French writer André Breton, the surrealists' brain and theorist, and Paul Éluard, the best known poet of the movement. The catalogue listed, along with the above, Marcel Duchamp as generator and arbitrator, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst as technical advisers, Man Ray as head lighting technician and Wolfgang Paalen as responsible for the design of the entrance and main hall with "water and foliage". The exhibition was staged in three sections, showing paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms and mannequins which had been redesigned in various ways. With this holistic presentation of surrealist art work the movement wrote exhibition history.
Antony William Roland Penrose is a British photographer. The son of Sir Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, Penrose is director of the Lee Miller Archive and Penrose Collection at his parents' former home, Farley Farm House.
Bull's Head is a found object artwork by Pablo Picasso, created in 1942 from the seat and handlebars of a bicycle. It is described by Roland Penrose as Picasso's most famous discovery, a simple yet "astonishingly complete" metamorphosis.
In 1935, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 53, temporarily ceased painting, drawing, and sculpting in order to commit himself to writing poetry, having already been immersed in the literary sphere for years. Although he soon resumed work in his previous fields, Picasso continued in his literary endeavours and wrote hundreds of poems, concluding The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1959.
Valentine Penrose, was a French surrealist poet, author, and collagist.
Rosalind Gersten Jacobs was an American fashion buyer, retail executive, merchandise and marketing consultant, art collector, and patron of the arts. Along with her husband Melvin Jacobs, she built relationships with key artists from the Dada and Surrealist movements during the 1950s and 1960s and assembled a rare and notable collection of their works.