.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Hair had been an important theme for Roland Penrose before he met Lee Miller when he created a Surrealist object titled The Dew Machine (destroyed in the war) made from the head he sawed off a mannequin (see fig. 1). He had a wig made of long blonde straight hair, added false eyelashes, and completed her transformation to life by painting the eyes, lips and flesh tones. The head, elegant but banal, hovers upside down above a baseboard and the kind of funnels used by chemists are inserted into the neck, filled with coloured beads. Thin strings connect the funnels to a stick that passes through the hair that caresses the baseboard. A further wine glass shaped apparatus completes the object, and strengthens the conjunction between the forces of arcane magic and the magic of science. It is easy to imagine the object scaled to a gigantic size, the funnels loaded with mysterious substances feeding the hair that softly trails across the countryside wherever dew is needed (fig. 2).
A reprise of The Dew Machine greets us from within his painting Seeing Is Believing also titled L'Ile Invisible. Here the head reaches down from the sky where day and night are simultaneous, and the tresses caress a small island densely covered by houses and a small port with the masts of sailing boats. A strand of hair tumbles from a street like surf. Perhaps the town refers to Cassis, and if this is so it is also interesting to note the head in the preparatory drawing has a resemblance to Valentine (the first wife of Roland Penrose), but the painting is more a copy of the mannequins head. On the back of the drawing Roland began another study. The profile of a mans face, strong and suggestive of a Greek warrior, has text written over it;
MIND
150000000 FOR GUNS
0 FOR LOVE
MINED
MIND!
The events of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism were never very far from his mind.
A reprise of The Dew Machine greets us from within his painting Seeing Is Believing also titled L'Ile Invisible. Here the head reaches down from the sky where day and night are simultaneous, and the tresses caress a small island densely covered by houses and a small port with the masts of sailing boats. A strand of hair tumbles from a street like surf. Perhaps the town refers to Cassis, and if this is so it is also interesting to note the head in the preparatory drawing has a resemblance to Valentine (the first wife of Roland Penrose), but the painting is more a copy of the mannequins head. On the back of the drawing Roland began another study. The profile of a mans face, strong and suggestive of a Greek warrior, has text written over it;
MIND
150000000 FOR GUNS
0 FOR LOVE
MINED
MIND!
The events of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism were never very far from his mind.