Octavia, 1939
Penrose is best known for having introduced Surrealism into Britain during the 1930s. He worked with Picasso (1881-1973) and Max Ernst (1891-1976) in Paris in the 1920s, and continued to contribute to Surrealist exhibitions and publications in England well into the 1940s. Octavia is a powerful example of a Surrealist work. The woman is based on studies of Penrose's then close companion and later second wife, the photographer and model, Lee Miller. It demonstrates Surrealism's preoccupation with machines and metamorphosis, and the woman, with her vicious spikes and heavy chains, is both victim and aggressor. The distant tunnel appears like a watching eye. Painted just before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Octavia is a disturbing picture, full of ambiguity and discord. The War was to mark the end of British Surrealism as a recognisable movement. Always a loosely connected group, artists drifted away, some into the Services, others succumbing to the establishment by accepting commissions from the War Artists' Advisory Committee. Looking back, Penrose felt that the War had had a negative effect on his artistic development, cutting him off from the heart of Surrealism in Paris.
