Cathy's Art Diary

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...

Interesting talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at two aspects of art in the early 20th century. Sue Roe talked about her book “In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910” looking at how and why this area of Paris became the birthplace of Modernism in art. She spoke about how Picasso went there and found a new way of working. Esther Freud then talked about her new novel “Mr Mac and me” which is a novel about Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s time in on the Suffolk coast. She’d written it after moving to the area and researching the house she bought which had been an inn. Her main character, a young boy, is imagined as the son of the family who owned the inn. There was an interesting discussion between the writers chaired by Olivia Laing and some good questions from the audience.