[Roland Penrose (born in 1900) was founder Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and was its president from 1969 to 1976. He has been responsible for many Arts Council exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in recent years, including those of the works of Picasso (1960), Max Ernst (1962), Miró (1964) and Picasso's sculpture (1967). He also helped to organize many exhibitions for the ICA, among them '40,000 Years of Modern Art' (1947), 'Wonder and Horror of the Human Head' (1953), 'Illusion in Nature, Science and Art' (1974) and 'Man Ray' (1975). He is now helping to organize an exhibition of the Surrealist movement which will open at the Hayward Gallery, London, early next year.

Probably the most famous exhibition with which he is associated is the International Surrealist Exhibition which took place at the New Burlington Galleries in London during the summer of 1936. He lived in Paris during the twenties and early thirties, and became a friend of many Surrealist painters and poets, among them Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Paul Eluard.

His publications include several studies of Picasso, books on McWilliam, Miró and Man Ray, as well as a Surrealist 'image diary' of photographs and poetry, The Road Is Wider Than Long (1939).]

Alan Young talked to him in his London home, and began by asking him about his years at Cambridge after World War I:

IN 1919 there was an atmosphere different from Cambridge or Oxford in ...