Born at the very start of the 20th century, Roland Penrose lived a long, busy, productive and useful life in the arts, and has a fair claim to be considered a minor but valuable national treasure – one who slowly helped his contemporaries see the point of Picasso, Surrealism and all the other wild things of modern art that once made retired colonels splutter with outrage. But he has also suffered from the injustice traditionally reserved for the spouses of Great Men: his reputation has been all but entirely eclipsed by that of his (second) wife, Lee Miller. Thanks to a recent slew of books, exhibitions and the like, Miller has become one of the most famous photographers of her day, and justly so. She brought to her work not just a laser-sharp eye but also physical courage, stoicism, ingenuity and wit. It doesn’t hurt that in her youth she also possessed the kind of uncanny beauty that made jaws drop.

Penrose was also a strikingly good-looking chap and a sharp dresser, but his accomplishments, though many and substantial, were much less spectacular. He took a first in architecture at Cambridge, but almost immediately upon graduation applied himself to painting, at which – as he came to recognise – he was never much more than a solid 2:1. His real flair was in identifying, championing and collecting the work of talents greater than his own.

He was the main organiser of the famous 1936 Surrealist Exhibition in London; he co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts; he amassed one of the finest private collections of modern paintings and sculpture; he wrote a very good biography of Picasso, still worth reading; and he curated the improbably successful 1960 Picasso show at the Tate Gallery, described by one reviewer as almost certainly ‘the exhibition of the century’. Even the royal family seemed to enjoy their visit. It was all but inevitable that he should be knighted, and equally inevitable that his old colleagues in Surrealism should be outraged by his capitulation to Her Majesty. ‘It’s all right,’ he told one of them, ‘I’m now a Sir-Realist.’ Many of his friends and collaborators were or later became famous, so that he has often been an interesting supporting character in other biographies. James King’s Roland Penrose: The Life of a Surrealist is the first full-length biography of the man. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but the first ninety-odd pages, which bring Penrose to the age of thirty-five, are full of fresh and instructive matter and a couple of psychological interpretations that seem both sensible and persuasive. One is that a major clue to his psychological complexity can be found in his Quaker upbringing, which was chilly and constrained, but which also gave him a handful of strengths and virtues: a desire to do public service, albeit not of a kind that his parents could ever have understood, let alone approved; an intellectual intransigence, fostered by the Quaker reliance on the ‘inner light’; and an ability to thrive in the public sphere while never compromising his basic principles. The anarchist and rebel who happily accepted a knighthood was the true heir of the Christian idealists who did very nicely, thank you, in banking.

As is proper for a biography of a Surrealist, there is quite a lot here about sex. King has established that, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Penrose had an intense year-long affair with George ‘Dadie’ Rylands – a revelation that will surprise precisely no one who has read about Cambridge in the 1920s. King suggests that Penrose’s gay side surfaced again decades later in his all but idolatrous obsession with Picasso, and this suggestion also seems plausible. Penrose first enjoyed straight sex in the arms of an amiable Parisian prostitute, who was startled when her client burst into peals of laughter.

For the next few decades, his tastes were robustly heterosexual, or, as King puts it in his endnotes, ‘heteronormative’. (Apart from its ugliness, isn’t that a pejorative term? As in: ‘I hated the Charlie Brown & Snoopy movie, it was so heteronormative’ – genuine overheard complaint.) He married his first wife, the poet Valentine Boué, in 1925, but found that her vagina was too small to permit conventional conjugal embraces. The marriage lasted, with some gaps, until 1936, but neither Roland nor Valentine gathered much comfort from it. Roland took to womanising, was good at it, and kept it up even after he met Miller in 1937 and married her in 1947.

His keenness for sex was no doubt typical of those who had spent their early lives in grim, all-male schools and colleges, and it was rendered all the more intense by his discovery that there were some brilliant young men in France, les surréalistes, who were writing tirelessly and excitedly about every mode of erotic experience; one of those young men, Paul Eluard, became a close and loyal friend. The young Englishman abroad was intrigued, attracted and – after seeing some canvases by Max Ernst – converted. Penrose never abandoned the Surrealist cause and he became the movement’s most influential promoter in the United Kingdom.

The most vivid and readable passages of King’s biography cover Penrose’s travels, in the early 1930s, through India. He was angered and at times disgusted by what the British had done in India, and refused to keep up the recommended callous treatment of his assigned servants. He returned to Paris and then to England, and at the age of thirty-five, nel mezzo del cammin, he began to be the Penrose familiar from all those other biographies. He suffered inner woes, but on the face of it the rest of his life was a splendid success story, with many lasting triumphs and few major defeats. He died in 1984 at the farm that he had turned into a work of art in its own right, watched over by the son Miller had given him.

For the most part, King tells this story in a straightforward and fairly lucid manner. Fastidious readers will not greatly care for his pop-psych vocabulary (‘conflicted’, ‘internalised’), his occasional redundancies (‘he had the patrician manner and speaking voice of members of his class’) or his Mills & Boonisms (‘he was certainly not prepared to encounter a goddess who would sweep him off his feet’). King’s summaries of intellectual movements tend to be perfunctory and bland: his account of Dada as a ‘negative reaction to the horrors of World War I’ might earn an A in GCSE art but won’t much impress any of the thousands who have read Greil Marcus’s brilliant re-evaluation of Dada in his bestseller Lipstick Traces.

The oddest lapse in the whole book comes when King describes Penrose’s meeting with the film-maker Humphrey Jennings, who was ‘carrying a beaten-up suitcase. When asked what was inside it, he had a ready-made answer: “Pandemonium”.’ Well, no. What Jennings actually said was ‘Pandaemonium’ – that is, the drafts for his epic history of the Industrial Revolution, eventually published posthumously in 1985 and the main inspiration for the ‘Pandaemonium’ section at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London, watched by billions around the world. It is scarcely credible that King does not know this; is he having a laugh? If so, we are not amused.