How important are looks in our everyday lives? Can the colours of our walls liberate us? Does the careful arrangement of shells on a windowsill make us happier — better, even? The Cult of Beauty at the V&A reminds us of the aesthetic movement’s imperative: to place beauty at the core of everything. That exhibition coincides with the reopening of the home of two artists who lived and breathed that aesthetic motto.
Roland Penrose and Lee Miller were the ultimate power-art couple of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. He was the clever British surrealist painter, pal of Picasso, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art, she was the brilliant photographer, acclaimed Vogue war correspondent and former model and muse of Man Ray.
Between April and October each year, Farley House Farm in East Sussex, their old home, opens for tours, guided by close members of the family. It’s a case of peering through the keyhole into the most fascinating art clique of the 20th century.
The couple moved to the pretty dairy farm in Chiddingly, near Lewes, after the war, in 1949, so as to be near their artist friends over the Channel. Picasso, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, would all come and stay, paint or sculpt and leave their works to the house. It was a safe haven. Miller was mentally bashed up after photographing the horrors of the Holocaust. She threw herself into the place and focused on her vegetable garden to indulge her other great passion, cooking. Food was a surrealist sport to her — Miller was a sort of Heston Blumenthal before her time and had more than 2,000 cookbooks.
The house and its contents are extraordinary. The walls, painted deep blues and pinks and yellows, show up sketches by Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover, installations by Man Ray, Penrose’s little-seen early works. A gravy jug made and painted by Pablo himself sits on a dresser alongside kitsch nudes and mugs by local artists. A stick found in the wood is given as much space and import as a surrealist classic. Found object or expertly painted canvas, as long as you’re beautiful, you get in.
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Ami Bouhassane, Penrose and Miller’s granddaughter — and my tour guide today — explains the consequences of living this way. “When we were children my sister and I used to come back from our friend’s houses saying, ‘Guess what? Rose only had two pictures on the walls in her house. Weird!’. We couldn’t believe that other people lived without this amount of art,” Bouhassane says.
The house is a cabinet of curiosities on a grand scale. In the old kitchen, where in her childhood meat would be hung from the ceiling to dry, I am introduced to a tall, wooden lady, painted by Penrose, and loved by Picasso, who used to be the figurehead of a ship and was found in a Cornish shipyard.
Picasso lurks around every corner. In the working kitchen, above the Aga, there is one of his tiles grouted into the wall, a glazed, colourful face, still flecked with what looks like pasta sauce, and a drawing on the wall above the kitchen table, Grasshopper Bulls, which he drew into Penrose’s ICA handbook: “He did it to get out of chopping the vegetables”, Bouhassane remarks.
Tucked in the pantry are Miller’s weird and wonderful cooking utensils, ancient jelly moulds and bottles of exotic liquor. Inside the cupboards — her crab apple jelly from 1976 and other conserves dating back to the 1960s.
In the dining room the centrepiece is an amazing inglenook hearth — adorned by Penrose, who painted the South Downs above it and a sun-like face who has become the guardian of the family. It’s hippyish, before hippies existed, and influenced by Penrose’s first wife, Valentine, a French poet who ran away to India, influenced by Eastern philosophy. This gang were free spirits and she ended her life living in a cottage next to the house having become friends with Miller (who also shared Penrose with a mistress for much of their marriage). The children called her “the white witch”.
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When the couple lived here there were works by all their friends on the walls, positioned to put you off your surrealist dinner: Francis Bacon’s bloody head, Joan Miró’s head of a Catalan peasant. Nowadays there’s Penrose’s very formal first painting, West Country Farmhouse, done when he was 20 and before he had discovered France and Surrealism. Throughout are his paintings of Miller. They had a loving but difficult relationship — she was mentally scarred and he often pictures her in a state of disarray. Penrose’s first portrait of his wife, Night and Day (1937) sits on an easel in the dining room. It was painted soon after they met at a fancy dress party. In the painting her costume is made of clouds and bricks and includes two pyramids, which may be an allusion to the fact that she was married to an Egyptian at the time. There is a sadness there too — funnels, I am told, represent her inability to emote, which Bouhassane in part blames on the fact that her grandmother was raped, aged 7, by a family friend and developed gonorrhoea. This was pre-penicillin, and her early years were defined by the appalling pain involved in its treatment.
In the hall there is another portrait of Miller, dated 1946. By now she had had post-traumatic stress disorder, after her wartime experiences reporting from the death camps. Her body is shown in pieces. Bouhassane tells how Miller returned late to England, because she stopped off in Romania to look up some gypsies that she had photographed before the war. She found that most had been killed and the rest were dying. The experience was tattooed on her and it took Penrose, who had remained in England where he had been an air warden, three months to nurse her back to basic health. “She had let herself go, she was a wreck,” her granddaughter says. In Penrose’s 1949 work Flight of Time we see the full extent of her damage. “She can keep only the upper part of herself together, she is almost totally fragmented.”
Elsewhere there is evidence of an art collecting couple with a ferocious sense of humour. In the hall there is a Man Ray from 1935 called L’Age de Colle. Man Ray’s cleaning lady rearranged his desk and he liked it so much he sprayed glue over the objects and put them in a glass box. Many institutions have tried to borrow it, but restoration experts say that it cannot be moved because it is so fragile and precious. In another cabinet there is a mummified rat that Penrose found on a hot-water pipe, a Picasso tile of a man fondling the left breast of a fulsome lady (“a Catholic schoolteacher asked us to put a bikini over it on one tour”, Bouhassane says). And a wooden, painted, Mrs Noah — a present from Picasso’s son Claude to Anthony, Bouhassane’s father, for his ark.
Upstairs Lee’s working life (which her son knew nothing about as a child) is documented. Walls of photographs by her and of her friends. And, of course, that famous picture of Miller lying in Hitler’s bath, taken hours after the liberation of Dachau. “People object to it, but she hadn’t washed for three weeks and her dirty boots on the rug are a symbol of her total disrespect for him,” Bouhassane says. To me, it’s a wonderful, liberating image. Also on display is Hitler’s drinks tray, which Miller looted from his apartment and the tools of her trade — her Rolliflex camera, an enormous flashgun and a typewriter. To come back to such beauty after what she’d seen must have been as much of a hell as a heaven.
www.farleyfarmhouse.co.uk