Roland Penrose & Lee Miller: The Surrealist and the Photographer

The Englishman Roland Penrose (1900-1984) met the American Lee Miller (1907-1977) in Paris in 1937. Already a surrealist artist of considerable talent, Penrose became a committed and tireless champion of modern art through his activities as a collector, gallery owner, writer and exhibition organiser. His outstanding art collection, formed mainly in the 1930s, included masterpieces by Picasso, de Chirico, Max Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and many others. After World War Two, Penrose was instrumental in founding the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and in 1960 organised the first Picasso retrospective in Britain. A former Vogue model photographed by Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene and others, Lee Miller studied photography under Man Ray in Paris in the early 1930s. She soon became known in her own right as a witty portraitist and fashion photographer in the surrealist mould. But it was as a photojournalist that she left an indelible mark, covering the Blitz, the siege of St Malo and the liberation