The Surrealists in Cornwall

During the summer of 1937 an group of Surrealist artists spent a month-long holiday in Cornwall, staying at Lambe Creek. Among them were some of the most original painters, sculptors, writers and photographers of the 20th century.  Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Aileen Agar and Joseph Bard, Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Henry Moore all made up what amounted to a Surrealist summer camp. While researching the biography of his mother Lee Miller, Antony Penrose discovered an album of photographs taken by Lee and Roland on that holiday to Cornwall. Over forty images by either Roland Penrose or Lee Miller, together with works by Henry Moore, Man Ray and Eileen Agar are now in the collection of Falmouth Art Gallery.  

With the help of some funding, the gallery was also able to commission a unique body of playful and witty work by two contemporary artists, Andrew Lanyon and Antony Penrose. The artists have a shared past.  Both are children of leading 20th century artists: Andrew is the son of Peter Lanyon, the St Ives Abstract Expressionist, and Antony is the son of the Surrealist painter Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller. As children they both met (and sometimes played games with) many of the leading artists of the period.

For this project the artists worked collaboratively through a playful exchange of Surrealist-inspired art and ideas from their respective studios in Cornwall and East Sussex to create their own Exquisite Corpse – a game invented by the Surrealists, a figurative visual form of the written game ‘Consequences’. The commission includes a series of letters, drawings, photographs, collages and small-scale sculptures, exchanged between the artists over a four month period in 2011.