Untitled (for Roy)

Roy Edwards was a close friend of Penrose after the war. He had worked as assistant at the London Gallery when it reopened in 1945, then he helped Penrose write his autobiography and translated Valentine Penrose's poems from the French (Penrose's first wife). The artist's hand triumphantly rises from the ground where a collage reminiscent of Apollo, the god of light and the arts, fighting with the snake symbolizes the artist's struggle. The hand stretches towards a star-like, wheel-like shape - the sun, Time, the universe? - formed by cut-out postcards, recalling Penrose's invention of the postcard technique in 1937. Celebrated by Magritte, among others, it consisted in arranging similar postcards next to each other, or overlapping, or in a fan shape, so that the eye no longer sees what they represented but only new shapes and rhythms. The hand is typically of two colours, the artist's two facets, the material and the immaterial, the literal and the poetic. This drawing was evidently given to Roy Edwards, and signed for him, later (see lot 75).

M.R.