A Vast Horizon

Late summer 1937. Europe is inching towards war. In the South of France a group of friends picnic in a secluded clearing. The women have peeled down their dresses to their waists. Shoes have been cast aside. A couple kiss playfully while the others look on, laughing. The moment is captured in a now-iconic image by photographer Lee Miller.

Some of the friends - the dancer Ady Fidelin, the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, the Surrealists Man Ray and Roland Penrose - are well-known, others less so. They are spending the summer at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon with fellow artists Dora Maar, Eileen Agar and Pablo Picasso. A Vast Horizon tells the story of their creativity, friendships and pursuit of freedom set against the tense political backdrop of the 1930s, the Second World War and its aftermath.

In a series of evocative scenes, biographer Anna Thomasson traces the group’s individual and intertwined lives through the photographs they took, the art they made and the poems and letters they wrote. From the heady, fertile weeks of creativity, sex and collaboration of that Mediterranean summer through the tumultuous years that followed, it is the story of rebellious lives and the redemptive power of art.