Roland Penrose

Roland Penrose brought Surrealism to Britain, co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and was married to Lee Miller. He was born into a wealthy Quaker family, served in a Friends ambulance unit in the First World War, and went to Paris in the 1920s, where he knew Ernst, Man Ray, Miro and above all Picasso, whose friend he remained for forty years and whose standard English biography he wrote. He organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, which is the moment the movement arrived in Britain - Dali lectured in a diving suit and had to be rescued from it - and he bought and later gave away a large part of the Surrealist work now in British public collections. He founded the ICA in 1947 with Herbert Read as a place for work that the Royal Academy would not show, and he brought the 1960 Picasso retrospective to the Tate, which was seen by half a million people. During the war he taught camouflage to the Home Guard and wrote the manual. He met Miller in 1937 and they married in 1947; the marriage survived her drinking and his affairs and both of them were unfaithful by agreement more or less openly. Their house at Farley Farm in Sussex, full of Picassos and Ernsts, is a museum. He was knighted in 1966. He wrote the first English biography of Picasso in 1958 with the painter s cooperation. His collection was partly sold to pay tax after his death and partly given to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He and Miller had one son.

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