Eileen Agar<\/a>. This was the gang who in July 1937 took over the superbly named H\u00f4tel-Restaurant Vaste Horizon, perched on an olive-and-oleander-covered hillside above Cannes. The summer they spent there, plus the war years that followed, is the subject of Anna Thomasson\u2019s \u201ccollage\u201d cum group biography A Vast Horizon.<\/p>\nThe book begins with a single snap: Miller\u2019s Picnic, a bucolic lunchtime scene showing the group stretched out luxuriantly on sun-striped grass. The date adds a poignant dramatic irony \u2014 war is coming for the picnickers, gathering like the dense forest in the background of the photograph. Fascism was no friend to the experimental artist: just a couple of months earlier, Picasso\u2019s Guernica, inspired by newspaper reports of the brutal Nazi bombardment of the small Basque town, had gone on display in Paris as part of a city-wide international art show that also included the Nazis\u2019 pet architect Albert Speer\u2019s enormous, swastika-crowned granite pavilion. In July Goebbels\u2019s anti-exhibition of \u201cdegenerate art\u201d went on display in Berlin, uniting works by Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Picasso and more in one of the great modernist exhibitions, an irony that comforted no one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Nusch](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/7550fa35-6484-42d2-a537-8c671085fe28.jpg\")
Nusch and Paul \u00c9luard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin in Lee Miller\u2019s photograph Picnic\u00a9 Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk<\/p>\n
But for now, it was still summer. Picnic is a photograph of friendship and friendly sexuality: Nusch and Fidelin are topless, Nusch and Paul about to kiss. Of the hundreds of photographs taken on this holiday, many suggest their subjects were enjoying a summer of love, 1937-style. The women wear brazenly modern two-piece swimsuits called bikinis (Nusch, pictured on the book jacket in a polka-dot halter-neck with a cigarette sticking out of her mouth, wears it best). Everyone is constantly touching, sometimes playfully \u2014 Fidelin perched on Roland\u2019s shoulders, her hands in his hair \u2014 and sometimes more explicitly. Man Ray took a series of erotic shots featuring cupped breasts, penises in hand, heads between bare legs. The intention is clear: the surrealists, which most of these artists would identify as, were all about limitless freedom of imagination \u2014 melting clocks, furry teacups, tangerine-robed cows \u2014 but also other kinds of freedom. Here, by the sea, they shared their bodies and minds.<\/p>\n
Which sounds lovely in theory, but power imbalances, peskily entrenched, are not always easy to magic away, even at the beach. As Thomasson notes of Picnic: \u201cThere\u2019s a jarring asymmetry to half-naked women sitting amongst fully clothed men.\u201d Even the way Paul leans over Nusch for a kiss, his fingers spread across her neck, feels a bit sinister. The book\u2019s account of the holiday\u2019s cross-couple skirmishes are more depressing than enviable. It sounds like less a joyful free-for-all than the women being passed round like luxury cigars. Thomasson writes: \u201cPaul liked to offer Nusch to his friends as a gift, a gesture of friendship, an hommage, he called it.\u201d According to Picasso\u2019s biographer John Richardson, Paul was hurt by his friend\u2019s rejection of this thoughtful present.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Nusch, born in the Alsace region to a family of street performers (her father was an acrobat), was picked up by Paul, aged 23, outside the Galeries Lafayette, probably while she was selling sex. He took her to a caf\u00e9 where she devoured a basket of croissants. For Paul, this was a terribly romantic first encounter; for Nusch, as Thomasson writes, she was perhaps \u201cjust hungry\u201d. Similarly, Fidelin had to leave Guadeloupe, aged 15, after a cyclone devastated the island in 1928 and killed her mother. She was working as a nightclub dancer in Paris when she met and moved in with Man Ray who, like Paul for Nusch, represented not so much romance, or at least not only romance, as an escape route from poverty. He was 44 years old and married \u2014 she was 20.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thomasson writes about these unequal relationships with something approaching an abdication of judgment. Even to someone, like me, who prefers their history served without excessive moral custard, this feels odd. Penrose apparently made his own \u201chommage\u201d to Picasso in the form of Lee\u2019s body. \u201cIt\u2019s not clear whether Picasso accepted,\u201d Thomasson writes, adding soothingly, \u201cbut it\u2019s difficult to imagine [Lee] doing anything she didn\u2019t want to do,\u201d as though confident women are immune to sexual coercion.<\/p>\n
![\"Lee](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/8efd80d5-386b-402f-9dc2-81ffdb2f56e4.jpg\")
Nusch \u0116luard and Lee Miller in 1937\u00a9 Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk<\/p>\n
People sometimes behave better in a crisis than on indulgent holidays, and several of these artists are much more likeable when war arrives. Picasso hunkered down in occupied Paris, despite offers of asylum from America and Mexico, \u201csinging at the top of his voice to drown out the clamour of the gunfire\u201d when the Allies approached. Penrose made himself into an expert in camouflage, so impressing General Montgomery that he was put in charge of the Eastern Command\u2019s camouflage school. In his lectures, he used a photograph of Miller, her naked body stretched kinkily out beneath a net, saying that if he could conceal her beauty, he could conceal anything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Paul\u2019s poem Libert\u00e9 became a hymn of the resistance, while its writer and his wife spent the war in terrified restlessness, moving from hiding place to hiding place in France. But Miller\u2019s war was the most momentous: ignoring the American embassy\u2019s instructions to board the next ship home, she shot hats for a beleaguered but bullish Vogue in the rubble of Blitz London, then, restless for action, got herself to Europe, following in the liberating armies\u2019 wake. Incredibly, it was American Vogue that published her pictures of Dachau, beneath the headline \u201cBELIEVE IT.\u201d In Munich, she and her lover at the time, the photographer David Scherman, blagged their way into Hitler\u2019s private apartment and, in a piece of performance art so bizarre, tasteless and death-defyingly funny it still feels avante-garde, snapped themselves naked in his bathtub, washing off the death camp mud.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not everyone came out of the war well: Man Ray made his way back to America, but left Fidelin behind, telling Penrose he couldn\u2019t get her a visa. There he married a beautiful young model and moved to Hollywood, while his lover had to survive the war in Paris as best she could, protecting his studio like a shrine and largely disappearing from history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Vast Horizon is not a terribly good book, favouring clotted description (\u201cThe freedoms they sought were social, sexual, creative, political, physical, psychological\u2026\u201d) over primary sources. Where are the letters, diaries and memoirs of these wonderfully idiosyncratic, compulsively self-mythologising people? You crave their voices. Given the book\u2019s subject, there are also frustratingly few photographs \u2014 so google them instead, especially Miller\u2019s shots of Picasso, which bottle something of his sinister pocket-rocket charm. Enjoy the wonderful photograph of the two of them reunited in Paris in 1944, Miller towering over Picasso, both of them beaming \u2014 a moment of joy, relief and friendship between two great artists who had somehow survived it all.<\/p>\n
A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War by Anna Thomasson (Picador \u00a320 pp294). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a>. Free UK standard P&P on orders over \u00a325. Special discount available for Times+ members<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s something dangerous about a group holiday. Apparently sturdy social arrangements have a way of softening under the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550648,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-550647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/cc129159-bb84-4533-aa08-7332ee093103.jpg\")
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