Artist Profile: Eileen Agar (1899-1991)

Bridgeman Copyright artist Eileen Agar was one of the few female painters accepted into the male-dominated circle of the Surrealists.

 

 

In fact, she was the only British woman to be featured in 1936’s International Surrealist Exhibition in London, the exhibition that catalysed the British public’s interest in the movement.

Eileen Agar was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and moved to London as a child in 1911, travelling over to Britain accompanied by a cow and an orchestra as her wealthy mother believed fresh milk and good music to be vital to her daughter’s well-being. Ten years later Agar would embark on her career as an artist, going on to study at the prestigious Slade School of Art in 1925 before moving to France.

 

 

It was in Paris in the early 1930s that Agar’s association with the Surrealist movement began, after she befriended Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Ezra Pound. She enjoyed her first solo show at London’s Bloomsbury Gallery in 1933 and a year later became a member of The London Group, a group of artists who aimed to challenge the hegemony of the Royal Academy of Arts, which they felt had become conservative and unadventurous. Within the next few years, Agar’s work was not only featured in the immensely popular International Surrealist Exhibition but was also exhibited in Amsterdam, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

 

In the late thirties Agar branched out from painting, the medium she had been trained in, and she experimented with new materials and media: taking photographs, making collages and creating mixed-media sculptures. Arguably the most famous of her mixed-media works is Angel of Anarchy (1936-40), a plaster cast head covered in found material and objects such as feathers, beads, shells, diamante and embroidered silk. This interest in using found objects in her artistic practice was sparked by meeting with Paul Nash, who introduced her to the concept. After embarking on a passionate affair with Nash, she also began collecting and arranging found objects and incorporating them into her work.

 

 

With her innovative use of media and materials, to label Eileen Agar a Surrealist is perhaps to pigeon-hole her. After all, she did not even identify herself as a Surrealist, this was the given to her by the organisers of the International Surrealism Exhibition, Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, when they visited her studio. In her own words, Agar was excited by Surrealists painting ‘what goes on inside our heads’ as opposed to imitating the outside word. However, she did not subscribe to all the tenets of Surrealism, such as working from dreams and the unconscious. Rather, the spirt of Surrealism most present in her work is the value the movement placed on wit and irreverence. Agar thought art ought to be playful and this is certainly reflected in her body of work photographing unusual rock formations in Brittany, such as ‘Bum-Thumb Rock’ (1936).

While Agar’s artistic activity was disrupted by World War Two, she began to paint regularly once again in 1946 and went on to enjoy 15 solo exhibitions between 1956 and 1985. Her work soon gained renown thanks to her innovation, sense of humour, and ability to find connections between unrelated forms and materials.

 

 

After spending the majority of her artistic career in Paris, on her death in 1991 Agar was buried in the city’s iconic Pere Lachaise cemetery.

 

 

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