Group biography follows Lee Miller, Pablo Picasso and friends on holiday in the South of France

A group biography balances between a choir and a cacophony. Each person lies at the heart of a network, opening the potential for an exponential chain of many walk-on parts. Rooted in the photographs of what author Anna Thomasson rightly terms the “fleeting community” of a late summer holiday in 1937, A Vast Horizon succeeds remarkably in marshalling a complex tapestry of egos, events, ideals and disappointments.

The individuals gathered in the Hotel Vaste Horizon in the French village of Mougins formed the chain of couples constituting this community: Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard, Nusch and Paul Éluard, Ady Fidelin and Man Ray, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. They were drawn to the South of France by their inter-linked friendships and by “le peintre soleil”, Agar’s witty characterisation of Picasso. As Picasso urged everyone to work, half the witnesses took photographs. Maar, Man Ray and Miller were the relaxing professionals; snapshots were added by Agar and Penrose. Thomasson has searched through this rich, if scattered visual archive of a moment through which photography (as Roland Barthes recognised in Camera Lucida) “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially”. Their hedonism caught in this moment defied the political instability and totalitarianism, with civil war already a year old in Spain.

Plunged into war

From this carefree and creative escape, Thomasson’s narrative plunges its participants into the war. For each of them it constituted a restructuring of values—not as hoped for by the Surrealists, but as enforced by the destructive triumphalism of Nazi extremism. Here the account turns to Paul Éluard’s transformation of a love poem for Nusch into a litany for “liberty” that captured the spirit of resistance (copies were even dropped over Occupied France by the RAF). Equally powerful was Miller’s reportage of the savagery of combat and, eventually, the revelations of the concentration camps. In this way, the book touches upon the transience of bodies captured in photography: those at Hotel Vaste Horizon were willingly posed for the camera and exchanged in partnerships, before growing fragile through wartime deprivation.

There was no reciprocal gathering in the post-war period. As a result, Thomasson traces the endgames, as each of the participants ages in varying degrees of dignity, creativity and despair. Those bodies displayed on the beach in southern France become the distant, optimistic opposite to the tragic, haunting corpses of Buchenwald; it is little wonder that Miller, the photographer in both cases, would never fully recover from the experience of witnessing such deliberate inhumanity.

While the lives of many of these central figures are, to varying degrees, familiar—from autobiographies (Agar, Man Ray, Penrose) and biographies (Éluard, Miller, Picasso)—Thomasson’s synthesis draws on recent research and extensive reading. A particular strength is the rebalancing of longstanding gender biases and assumptions. The repositioning of Ady Fidelin, the double-marginalised Guadeloupean woman, is especially timely; drawing on fresh scholarship, she is given greater presence and somewhat rescued from simply being Man Ray’s model. Nusch Éluard is also brought more sharply into focus. Substantial traces of these women’s own voices remain to be found, however, confining them to an unknowability ascribed to their devotion to their partners, although this may be overstated in the suggestion that, in 1946, Nusch Éluard “died in the service of Paul [Éluard]’s pursuit of freedom”.

Words over pictures

Late on Thomasson cites Emily Dickinson’s belief that veracity is “more affecting, if told indirectly”. This emerges as a foundational conceit in a volume inspired by photographs but in which only four are reproduced. Instead of showing, the author presents often highly evocative descriptions of what she sees in a wide range of images that the reader is not shown. This is a surprising decision for a narrative stimulated, as we are told, by the author being drawn into “their distant world by their photographs”.

With such a limitation on images, the book’s cover photograph assumes disproportionate significance. Where the British edition favours Agar’s photograph of Maar, Picasso and the Éluards at Juan-les-Pins, Miller’s picnic photograph of “half-naked women sitting among fully clothed men”—the jarring nature of which introduces the whole narrative—appears on the cover of the US edition. Although unaltered when reproduced inside the volume, on the cover the half-naked torsos are rather ineptly airbrushed. That the publishers chose to manipulate a famous 90-year-old image seems an unfortunate undermining of an otherwise compelling narrative of artists embracing freedom before disaster struck.

ª A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War, by Anna Thomasson, published by Pegasus Books, 304pp, 4 b/w reproductions, $29.95 (hb), 7 July