May 15, 2010
When Picasso came round to play
To the young boy, he was just a friend of his artist father. Finding out that Picasso was a towering figure came later
Antony Penrose

Pablo Picasso’s work still finds unexpected ways of astounding us even if only for the boggling $106.5 million recently realised at auction by his 1932 painting of his mistress Marie Thérèse Walter titled Nude, Green Leaves and Bust. Now Picasso: Peace and Freedom at Tate Liverpool promises a new look at the political dimension ever present in his life but intimately known only to a few. The Picasso I knew did not wear his politics as an emblem. He came to my home, Farley Farm in Chiddingly, Sussex, in November 1950. My earliest memories are of a person of great warmth. He was generous with hugs, cuddles and games on the floor, and he smelt distinctively of cologne and soap. We liked the same things. My teddy, the pets, Gypsy the old draft horse and our handsome Ayrshire bull, named William, with his retinue of cows.

These events return to me as snatches of conversations, hazy images, smells and emotional traces from memories long ago. I was well into my teenage years before I realised that other people saw Picasso, Paul Éluard, Joan Mirò, Max Ernst, Man Ray and others as the leading artists of the 20th century. For me they were habitué friends of my family. They were warm, funny, hugely talented and sometimes flawed people who were bonded by their love of art and their desire to use it as an agency for bringing change to the world. I urge those who jump to the conclusion that Surrealism was a naive and self-indulgent movement to look at the risks run and the ultimate price paid by the Surrealists who proved their principle against the Nazis. Many of them died as a result.

It was discovering the work of my mother, Lee Miller, hidden in the attic of Farley Farm House that prompted me to research her life and that of my father. Neither of them had ever spoken much of the Second World War, of politics and the principles that guided their lives but gradually these things emerged and meshed with my memories of them as parents. In their external lives, they stopped being my parents and became “Penrose” and “Miller”. They still remain as my mother and father in my internal life.

Picasso had met my father, the painter Roland Penrose, in Mougins in 1936, thanks to the poet Éluard who had invited him there for a beach holiday on the Côte d’Azur. Éluard, a close friend of Picasso, had helped Penrose to gather the loans for his First International Surrealist Exhibition in London held in June of that year. Its success established Penrose as the ambassador of Surrealism in Britain, a nation still struggling to come to terms with Post-Impressionism. ...

...Becoming super-rich was important to him only because it allowed him to be private and to quietly help the people and the causes he admired. Naturally his wealth made it impossible for him to enjoy the simple pleasures of the beach he loved or the townspeople around him, but he found secret ways through trusted friends of supporting what mattered to him, and that allowed him to carry on simply being Picasso. ...