In Montparnasse and Sussex
Fascinating talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival bringing together Sue Roe with her book on the surrealists in Montparnasse and Anthony Penrose, the son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, surrealists who lived in Sussex. I have to admit to a bias here as I know Sue Roe well and love the way she writes group biographies filling in lots of detail about what the world around her subjects and what was happening in Paris that they may have been influenced by. She started the event with a talk on the birth of surrealism and why it evolved in Paris after the First World War. She brought to life an array of characters. Penrose then talked his parent’s early lives and about his childhood in Sussex where many of the people Sue had talked about came to stay. He talked about Manray as an inventor of a fly trap, Paul Elliard smuggling poems out of France in the War which Penrose had translated and published and Picasso coming to stay when the press hounde...