Hailed as Britain’s only true Surrealist by writer Anthony Powell, supported by Duchamp, partied with the Bright Young Things, and lived a defiantly queer life decades before it was safe to do so – then vanished from history. This is the book that brings John Banting (1902–1972) back.

Hailed in 1933 by The Architectural Review as Britain’s greatest Surrealist, John
Banting moved in the century’s most rarefied artistic circles – championed by Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim, exhibited alongside Miró, Dalí and Breton at the landmark 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, and courted by Walter Gropius to relocate the Bauhaus to London. He designed for Constant Lambert and Frederick Ashton’s pioneering British ballet, illustrated book covers
for Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and was Nancy Cunard’s favourite artist at Hours Press.

Orbiting the Bright Young Things – dancing, often naked, at the era’s wildest fancy-dress bacchanals alongside Eddy Sackville-West, Brian Howard and Elizabeth Ponsonby – Banting was also the mischievous hand behind one of the great art hoaxes of the twentieth century: the invention of fictitious painter Bruno Hat, a conceit so convincing it fooled the London press and art world alike. Yet for all his high-society revelry, Banting was famously indifferent to class and lineage, moving as easily among Bloomsbury intellectuals and Mayfair aristocrats as he did among the socialists and activists who shaped his politics.

A committed left-wing activist, he co-compiled the ground-breaking Negro Anthology with Cunard, accompanied her to the Spanish Civil War, and later brought his Surrealist eye to wartime propaganda films written by Dylan Thomas. A gay man who refused to conform, and an outspoken critic of racial injustice, his life and politics feel strikingly contemporary.

Yet as tastes shifted toward Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Banting’s star faded – reduced to factory work and heavy drinking even as the movement he helped define was rewritten around him.
 
This first-ever biography rescues a dazzling, complicated, and long-overlooked figure from the margins of art history – fearless, brave, outrageous and courageous to the last, for whom Surrealism was not just a way of painting but a way of living.