Thames & Hudson £25 pp408
Anyone who falls under the spell of a great artist deserves our sympathy. Take Picasso. He threw tantrums like a spoilt three-year-old. He was a hypochondriac, constantly exaggerating minor ailments. And he knew precisely how to hurt friends and other members of his entourage. He never apologised.
One of his victims was the Englishman Roland Penrose, a friend for 40 years. Picasso knew that Penrose’s archenemy and great rival as a collector was the Australian Douglas Cooper. So Picasso brought the two together without notice as often as he could and watched the sparks fly.
Cooper makes several appearances in Visiting Picasso, which is a compilation of Penrose’s letters to Picasso, together with extracts from notebooks compiled in preparation for his excellent biography of Picasso first published in 1958 and expanded in 1971. All this material is elegantly edited by Elizabeth Cowling, who also provides structure in the form of an intermittent, highly readable narrative. The book is fascinating and occasionally riveting. This is due less, though, to the picture of Picasso that emerges, by turns seductive and repellent, than to what Penrose reveals about the well-groomed and impeccably behaved gentleman who fawned for Britain at the Court of Don Pablo — in other words, himself.
Penrose was able to cultivate his hero at such length because he never seriously had to work for a living. Born into a Victorian Quaker family with enormous wealth from banking, he devoted his energies to painting (not very well), collecting (brilliantly), owning a London art gallery (half-heartedly), organising exhibitions (expertly), founding and funding the Institute of Contemporary Arts (determinedly) and farming in deepest Sussex (enthusiastically).
Penrose was an idealist, for whom modern art, in particular surrealism, was a social and cultural crusade. He was one of the organisers of the first London surrealist exhibition in 1936 (at the opening of which Salvador Dali almost died, asphyxiated by the helmet of the diving suit he was wearing). Having met Picasso in the same year, Penrose was responsible for the first showing in Britain of both Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Most of Penrose’s friends were surrealists: Paul Eluard, whose entire art collection he bought, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, once the lover of Lee Miller, Penrose’s second wife. The American Miller wasn’t just a famous blonde stunner but also a star photojournalist (many of her excellent pictures illustrate this book). She also loved sex, as did Penrose. He had a string of girlfriends on the go, one of whom he kept in a tiny London flat that she incongruously shared with Picasso’s Weeping Woman, one of the stars of Penrose’s collection, acquired from the artist for a knock-down £284 in 1937. (It’s now in Tate Modern.)
Inevitably, for this is England, the surrealist libertine eventually joined the establishment. He became first a CBE and then a knight (“a Sir-realist”, as he embarrassingly put it), the honours being conferred in recognition of his support for worthy causes such as the ICA, and his organisation of a Picasso exhibition at the Tate in 1960. This, apart from the biography, was the most spectacular fruit of Penrose’s friendship with the artist, and it involved giving members of the royal family a guided tour of the show at the gala opening. Afterwards, Penrose sent a breathlessly excited letter to Picasso (who once owned up to having erotic dreams about the Queen and her sister), reporting that Princess Margaret had said: “What fun it must be to make a collage!” Meanwhile, the Duke of Edinburgh kept telling the Queen to get a move on.
Royalty wasn’t alone in persuading Penrose to bend the knee. Picasso did, too, and more than a few of the gushingly adoring letters that Penrose sent him are cringe- making. (After the liberation of France, Penrose wrote: “London has been in a state of total sterility since losing contact with Paris.”) As Cowling points out, he was clearly a masochist, who relished the cruelty and humiliation regularly meted out by his idol. He was also partial to a bit of bondage in bed, and had Cartier make him a pair of solid gold handcuffs as a gift for Lee.
The friendship with Picasso was mostly one-sided. Fourteen years passed before Picasso allowed Penrose to use the informal tu. Far from enjoying the master’s undivided attention, Penrose usually found himself among a gaggle of hangers-on struggling for his attention. Picasso answered not one of Penrose’s letters, and frequently pretended to be out when Penrose rang his door bell. Penrose was rarely invited to stay the night. And he took no pleasure in being hurt by his rival for Picasso’s affections, the unspeakable Douglas Cooper.
Picasso, tired of Cooper’s hissy fits, eventually expelled him from his presence, after which relations with Penrose grew easier. Certainly Picasso could be extraordinarily generous, not only to Penrose personally but also to the causes he espoused. He usually gave a drawing to the annual Christmas auction at the ICA (which he called the “Institut de Singes”), gifts of enormous value. Persuaded by Penrose, he also sold The Three Dancers, one of his most important paintings, at a bargain price to the Tate. It was the first time he had dealt directly with a museum.
So Penrose, who repeatedly sold parts of his collection to aid this or that charity, was mostly a good thing, who deserves posthumous gratitude. How many millionaire art collectors are true idealists as he was? How many of them engage in artistic matters with such missionary zeal? There weren’t many of them then, and there surely aren’t any of them now.
Clowning around
Picasso could be harsh, but he could also be extremely playful, Penrose noted: “He has a new disguise which consist[s] of a bald pate with black side hair and the twisted syphilitic nose of an Italian grocer; completed by a bowler hat, he walks round making noises and nudging people in the inane fashion of [a] small self-confident Neapolitan tout.”
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