William Packer
Star-Struck
Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose
By Elizabeth Cowling
Thames & Hudson 408pp £25
This intriguing book is ostensibly an account of the long personal friendship between Roland Penrose and Pablo Picasso. It is indeed full of fresh, useful and often entertaining material that Elizabeth Cowling has drawn from the vast personal archive of papers, letters and notebooks that Penrose left to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh on his death in 1984. But if it confirms and even adds to our incidental understanding of Picasso, in his temper as an artist and a man, its essential subject is Penrose himself.
Sir Roland Penrose was one of the great panjandrums of the mid-twentieth-century British art world, and as typical of the species as could be, his career following that not uncommon trajectory from youthful bohemian avant-gardista to establishment grandee. Born in 1900, he read architecture at Cambridge but then turned to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk