n 1950 Pablo Picasso made a rare trip to England to visit the renowned American photojournalist Lee Miller and her husband, surrealist painter Roland Penrose, at Farley Farm House in Sussex. Their three-and-a-half year-old son, Antony, was attracted to the world-famous artist, but for other reasons: “To me he was charming, generous, incredibly inventive and avuncular. And he liked to play games.”

Specifically, Picasso taught young Antony the game “Bullfight”—not surprising, considering the Spanish artist made over one hundred works of art on the theme. “It was grand,” Antony laughs. “He was the bull fighter and I was the bull. I’d run at him and see if I could gore him. I never could. He was almost 70, but incredibly spry, the youngest old man I ever knew.”

As a child, says Antony, “it was incredibly frustrating. So frustrating that I crept up and bit him!”

And what was the artist’s response?

“He bit me back! Then said, ‘Pensez! C’est le premier anglais que j’ai jamais mordu!’ (“It is the first Englishman I have ever bitten.”)

Antony recalls the incident in The Boy Who Bit Picasso (Abrams Books for Young Readers). The two remained fast friends, but Antony had learned his lesson: “Picasso bit hard enough to discourage me from biting anyone ever again.” Laughing, Antony—an artist as well—adds: “A pity, I could have made a career of it.”

It would have been quite a career. In addition to Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Henry Moore and Paul Éluard all spent time at Farley Farm House. The Bloomsbury Group lived in a village just seven miles away.

Today, Antony heads up the Lee Miller Archives and the Farley Farm House, www.farleyfarmhouse.co.uk a museum filled with paintings, statues and photographs by his parents, their friends and other artists, and open to the public.

“Picasso had known both of my parents before the war, in the south of France,” he explains. “He painted six portraits of my mother.” Nude on the Beach (1932) is still at Farley Farm, as are many other pieces. “Man Ray was always doing clever things,” says Antony. (After the end of their affair in 1932, Man Ray affixed a photo of Lee Miller’s eye on his celebrated metronome, Indestructible Object.)

Over the years, Antony and his parents visited Picasso in the south of France, first at Vallauris and later at Villa Californie in Cannes. “Art scholars always suggest that the artists were constantly locked in heavy conversations and deep arguments,” notes Antony. “In fact, mostly those times were very funny interludes interspersed with serious conversation…. Picasso loved masks with funny noses, and often we’d all wear them. Everyone was expected to dress up; I remember one time he dressed my father up like a woman in a painting. It was a great ice breaker.”

On sunny days Antony would go to the beach with Picasso’s son Claude and daughter, Paloma. He also liked to play with Esmeralda, Picasso’s pet goat. “Picasso let the goat sleep in a packing case just outside his bedroom door on the first floor—he was worried she might get lonely. I loved that! I couldn’t bring our animals into our house.” A few years earlier Picasso had pieced together the She Goat sculpture, using an old basket for her belly and a palm branch as her backbone. Antony wrote that in the garden “[t]he nanny goat looked so alive I thought she was Esmeralda’s mother.” (It’s now at the Museum of Modern Art.)

“There was a wonderful informality to those days,” Antony says. “I really didn’t realize that Picasso was famous until one year, back at school after Easter holidays, our teacher asked us all what we did, and I said we went to Cannes. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We were visiting Picasso.’ There was a sharp intake of breath.”

Photo credits:
At Farley Farm: ©Roland Penrose Archives, England 2012. All rights reserved.
In the south of France (2):©Lee Miller Archives, England 2012. All rights reserved.