Eileen Agar

Biography

Agar painted her first Surrealist picture in 1930, after returning to England, and called it “The Flying Pillar”. The canvas was later renamed “Three Symbols”. Greece and the Eiffel Tower meet in it, the classical world and the modern one; in her diary she noted down the idea of a “Judaeo-Greco pillar”, as if leaving herself a memo for later work. The artist herself insisted that she had made the picture without Surrealism in mind.

Eileen Forrester Agar was born on 1 December 1899 in Buenos Aires. Her father, a Scot, headed the family firm that sold windmills and agricultural machinery to Argentina; her mother was American. Her childhood passed at the family villa, Quinta la Lila, with a nanny and a French governess, and she remembered it as full of balloons, hoops and St Bernard dogs. The family travelled to Britain about every two years, and at six the girl was sent to a private school in Canford Cliffs. At Heathfield School in Ascot her teacher Lucy Kemp-Welch encouraged her interest in drawing. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Agar was moved to Tudor Hall in Kent. The music master, Horace Kesteven, introduced her to artists, among them Charles Sims, who showed her early works by Paul Nash.

Before the war ended she took weekly oil painting lessons at the Byam Shaw School of Art in Kensington, found them too academic and, after a quarrel with her parents, left for Cornwall to stay with family friends, leaving a note. In 1920–1921 she studied under Leon Underwood at his school at Brook Green, where she made friends with Blair Hughes-Stanton and Gertrude Hermes. From 1921 to 1924 she studied part-time under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art. The wealthy life she was born into weighed on her, and she pointedly refused to get into the Rolls-Royce her parents sent to collect her from the school. In 1925 she married a fellow student, Robin Bartlett, settled with him in Dieppe and in the same year destroyed most of her early work.

In 1926 she met a Hungarian, Joseph Bard; their partnership lasted about fifty years. Bard’s passion for jewels she later brought into her own practice. In 1928 they moved to Paris, where she became friendly with André Breton and Paul Éluard, and in 1928–1930 she studied with the Czech Cubist František Foltýn. With Ezra Pound, whom she had befriended in Portofino, she visited Constantin Brâncuși’s studio.

In 1931 the first of four issues of The Island appeared, edited by Underwood and Bard, and Agar contributed to all four. Her first solo show took place in 1933 at the Bloomsbury Gallery. From 1934 she was a member of the London Group, and in the same year she made her first collage.

In the summer of 1934 Agar and Bard rented a house at Swanage, in Dorset. There she met Paul Nash; in 1935 he introduced her to the idea of the “found object”, and together they made works such as “Seashore Monster at Swanage”. Nash recommended her to Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, the organisers of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. Agar was one of few women among the exhibitors, and she showed with the Surrealists in England and abroad, but she rejected the label of Surrealist to the end of her life. To my mind, that reservation matters more than any manifesto: she took from the movement what suited her and did not join the group.

In the 1930s she was drawn to natural objects, most often with a light touch. The photographs titled “Bum-Thumb Rock” record an unusual rock formation she had noticed in Brittany. Agar tried automatic techniques and new materials, photography, collage and objects. “The Angel of Anarchy” (1936–1940) is a plaster head covered in fabric and other materials. The first version was lost on its way back from an exhibition in Amsterdam, and in 1940 she made a second from the same cast of Bard’s head, keeping the title. The bust is divided in two: one half covered in white fur, the other in black, while the head is almost entirely dressed in green osprey and ostrich feathers and in doilies given to her by her mother, who had worn them as a headdress. The “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse” (1937), made on a piece of cork board with fish bones, shells and coral, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In photographs Agar wears it herself.

In 1937 she travelled to Cornwall with the Éluards, Penrose and Lee Miller, and then visited Picasso and Dora Maar at Mougins, where Miller photographed her. By 1940 her work had been shown at Surrealist exhibitions in Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

Then the war interrupted her work.

After the war came a new productive period: between 1946 and 1985 she had about sixteen solo exhibitions. In the 1960s she painted Tachist pictures (gestural, spontaneous abstraction) with Surrealist elements. Her autobiography, “A Look at My Life”, appeared in 1988; in 1989 she was one of the five artists featured in the television series “Five Women Painters”; and in 1990 she was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. She died in London on 17 November 1991. Her paintings are in Tate, in Derby Museum and Art Gallery and in the UK Government Art Collection. In 2021 the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a retrospective, “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy”.