Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War

A story of friendship, love, and the pursuit of art—including Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, Paul Éluard, and Man Ray—set against the precarious backdrop of the late 1930s, World War II, and its aftermath.

“Thomasson captures the creative and sexual ferment of the group of talented free spirits—Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Man Ray, the photographer Lee Miller and the poet Paul Éluard among them—who took over the hotel in the summer of 1937, in an exuberant last gasp of artistic abandon as World War II loomed.”—The New York Times Book Review

Late summer 1937. Europe is inching toward 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 in Mougins with fellow artists Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, and Pablo Picasso.

In this evocative setting, 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, this is the story of rebellious lives and the redemptive power of art.