Lee Miller, Picasso and a Lost Summer: Anna Thomasson's A Vast Horizon

In late summer 1937, five couples gathered at the Hotel Vaste Horizon in Mougins, in the South of France: Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard, Nusch and Paul Éluard, Ady Fidelin and Man Ray, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. Anna Thomasson's new group biography, A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War (Pegasus Books, 304pp, $29.95 hb, published 7 July), reconstructs what she rightly terms that "fleeting community" — and then follows its members into catastrophe.

The holiday's magnetic centre was Picasso, whom Agar christened "le peintre soleil". He urged everyone to work; half the party took photographs instead. Maar, Man Ray and Miller worked as professionals, while Agar and Penrose added snapshots. Thomasson combed this scattered visual archive of a moment through which photography, as Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, "mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially". The hedonism on display defied its moment: civil war had already been running for a year in Spain, and totalitarianism was advancing across Europe.

What happened to them?

Thomasson's narrative then, in the reviewer's phrase, plunges its participants into war. For each, it meant a restructuring of values — not the transformation the Surrealists had hoped for, but one enforced by what the source calls the destructive triumphalism of Nazi extremism.

Two strands carry the weight. Paul Éluard turned a love poem for Nusch into a litany for "liberty" that captured the spirit of the resistance; the RAF dropped copies over Occupied France. Lee Miller reported the savagery of combat and, eventually, the concentration camps. The book dwells on the transience of bodies caught by photography: those willingly posed at Mougins, exchanged between partners, later grew fragile through wartime deprivation. The sunlit bodies on the beach stand as the distant opposite of the corpses of Buchenwald — and Miller, the photographer in both cases, never fully recovered from witnessing such deliberate inhumanity.

There was no reciprocal gathering after the war. Thomasson traces the endgames as each participant ages in varying degrees of dignity, creativity and despair.

Whose lives get rebalanced?

Many of these figures are already well documented — autobiographies exist for Agar, Man Ray and Penrose; biographies for Éluard, Miller and Picasso. Thomasson's synthesis draws on recent research, and its particular strength is correcting longstanding gender biases. Ady Fidelin, the double-marginalised Guadeloupean woman, gains greater presence and is somewhat rescued from being simply Man Ray's model. Nusch Éluard also comes into sharper focus.

A caveat follows every promise, though. Substantial traces of these women's own voices remain unfound, and the book confines them to an unknowability ascribed to devotion to their partners. That framing may be overstated in the suggestion that in 1946 Nusch "died in the service of Paul's pursuit of freedom".

Words over pictures

Late in the book Thomasson cites Emily Dickinson's belief that veracity is "more affecting, if told indirectly". It reads as a foundational conceit: a volume inspired by photographs reproduces only four of them. Instead of showing, the author offers often highly evocative descriptions of images the reader never sees. That is a surprising choice for a narrative sparked, we are told, by the author being drawn into "their distant world by their photographs".

The cover then assumes disproportionate significance. The British edition uses Agar's photograph of Maar, Picasso and the Éluards at Juan-les-Pins. The US edition uses Miller's picnic photograph of "half-naked women sitting among fully clothed men" — the jarring image that introduces the whole narrative — but airbrushes the half-naked torsos, rather ineptly. That publishers chose to manipulate a famous 90-year-old photograph sits awkwardly beneath a narrative of artists embracing freedom before disaster struck. What this changes for the reader is simple: a compelling story, told at one remove, in every sense.