Surrealist Weekends: Farleys in the Fifties
Antony Penrose (Lee Miller Archives, £12.50)
IF you could have been a guest at any country-house party in history, where and when would it be? I would choose Farley Farm in East Sussex in the 1950s. Oh, to have joined the artists Lee Miller and Roland Penrose as they transformed a chilly farmhouse near Chiddingly into a Surrealist hothouse for creative friends, from Picasso and Man Ray to young British painters, sculptors and designers. Or, rather, as they assembled weekend gangs of gifted friends to provide much of the labour for free.
In a Vogue feature entitled ‘Working Guests’, Miller described in comically devious detail how, as she pretended to be tied to the kitchen and then dozed on a sofa, visitors were enlisted into keeping house and farm in order: artist Dorothea Tanning turning electrician,
New York’s Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr feeding pigs. ‘It doesn’t take much plotting to lead someone up a garden path, especially a literal one,’ Miller added, proving the point with pictures of Max Ernst planting borders, Henry Moore moving his sculpture and painter John Craxton up a ladder pruning a tree.
Many visitors also made art and gave it to their hosts. This remains part of the wonderful
Farleys House and Gallery museum where an exhibition based on this book opens next week (April 3–July 10, www. farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk). Conversation and conviviality flowed around Miller’s surreal meals—produced via 1,000 cookery books and with choice avant-garde artworks in mind. A delicious blue fish was served in honour of Miró; a startling mayonnaise replaced olive oil with red carrageen algae.
Beset by post-traumatic shock due to wartime horrors, plus postnatal depression, Miller remained a heroic hedonist, hosting party after party as she tried and failed to drown her private sorrows in drink. Boxes in the attic, discovered by her son Antony Penrose after her death, revealed Miller as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. He wrote a beautiful biography of his tormented parent, to which this book is a brilliant little coda. Those who want to re-create an artful Farley Farm menu can consult a new edition of Ami Bouhassane’s Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends and Recipes (Lee Miller Archives, £30).
Ian Collins