Eileen Agar, like many women in the world of 20c art, often played second fiddle to more famous male artists. She was seen as a 'muse' as much as she was seen as an artist but that is not to dismiss her art as much at it is to dismiss critical, and general, attitudes towards women, and women in art specifically, during most of the last century.
The fact that she was neither a surrealist not a cubist, yet combined aspects of both genres in her work, also made her difficult to classify. The combination of being a woman and being something of an outlier to, though directly involved with, developments in the modern art of the last hundred years has meant that her story is not as well told as it should be.
Dance of Peace (1945)
The Whitechapel Gallery's recent Eileen Agar:Angel of Anarchy sought to remedy that and, I think, made a pretty good job of it. With two large floors given over to her work and story, it was as comprehensive a retrospective of hers as anyone, fan or newcomer alike, could wish for.
There are paintings, photographs, sculptures, and collages and there is humour, irreverence, love, and a deep respect for both nature and creation within each and every work on display. Her own background was reasonably unusual so perhaps set a template for how her life and career would pan out.
Born, in 1899, in Buenos Aires to a wealthy and, we're told, 'flamboyant' family, Agar rebelled against parental strictness and got herself sent alone, at the age of just six, to the UK where she was forced to attend a series of rigorously academic schools. It can be assumed it was an attempt by her parents to straighten her up but it was an attempt that would spectacularly fail.
At Heathfield school, in Ascot, she came under the tutelage of horse painter and Royal Academy member Lucy Kemp-Welch who instructed Agar to "always have something to do with art". She didn't need telling twice and familial plans for Agar to enter 'society' as a 'debutante' were jettisoned pretty quickly. In her early twenties, Agar enrolled at The Slade School of Fine art in London.
Self-portrait (1927)
Which soon proved not to be radical enough for Agar's tastes. She ran away to Cornwall, destroyed her early work, and shaved her head to celebrate her "new freedom". 1927's Self-Portrait, hair growing back, marks her new start. Free, in her own eyes, from academia and other men's teaching.
It's a confident portrait of a confident woman but soon even this style would become too traditional, too figurative for her. In 1929, Agar visited Paris where she met with the Surrealists Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. While she was attracted to Surrealism's sensuality and irrationality, at the same time the idealism and logic of Cubism drew her in and she sought to fuse the two while also keeping her own personal touch within her work.
Sleeping Head of Joseph (1929)
She remained resolutely in control of her own destiny. When she met the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard in 1926 and began an unconventional relationship, they didn't marry until fourteen years later - an unthinkably long courtship in the era, he became her 'muse' rather than she his. 1929's Sleeping Head of Joseph is as tenderly rendered a portrait as any made.
It captures the serenity we find when we look at someone we love asleep and wish only that we can remain in their dreams, and they in ours, for eternity. This tenderness and affection, it seems to me, seeped into most of Agar's work. 1930's Three Symbols, one of her first attempts to synthesise Cubism with Surrealism, includes Greek columns (representing the ancient world), the Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame (medieval Christianity), and a bridge built by Gustave Eiffel (symbolic of modern technology).
It was intended to show humanity's desire, and need, for creation through the ages and into the future. It reads like the fever dream of an overactive imagination. The work of a mind that cannot be stilled by convention and one that desires to not just paint what life looks like but also what life feels like.
Three Symbols (1930)
Family Trio (1931)
It's a painting of things you can see but also of things you can feel. Agar formulated a loose theory of 'womb magic' in which the unconscious, both in literature and art, establishes feminine dominance over more classical, masculine, orders. While Three Symbols showed three different ages of engineering, Family Trio did the same thing for human forms.
Ancient patriarchy is usurped by a floating feminine form and, ultimately, an emergent child forms in the sea beneath a crescent moon. I'd not see this, I would need to be informed by the exhibition's curators, but, once made aware, it becomes clear how Agar's work of this era sought to upset orders and create a new hope. A hope of peace.
In the early thirties - we all know how that turned out. Agar was not ignorant of the coming storm. On making The Modern Muse, in 1934, she remarked that "apart from rampant and hysterical militarism, there is no male element left in Europe". It seems to me that Agar felt male society had abandoned creativity and hope for a seemingly inexorable headlong rush into hatred and conflict. The Modern Muse has been disfigured as much by Picasso's concept of womanhood as by the world she is witnessing being made.
The Modern Muse (1934)
Quadriga (1935)
The following year's Quadriga was one of Agar's most admired works of the era and was included in London's International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 alongside Dali, Duchamp, Picasso, Giacometti, Klee, Miro, Man Ray, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, and Dora Maar. It shows Agar's trick of combining the surreal with more classical references. In the case of Quadriga, horse heads from the chariot of Selene, the Moon goddess, as represented on the Parthenon in Athens.
In 1935, it would not be hard to see these four horses as those being ridden by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Journeying into what remains of rational Europe to presage the coming fascist destruction of the continent. Winter was coming to Europe and the world and all Agar, and other artists, could do was paint it.
Winter (1935)
Which she did, rather beautifully. Terror has its own beauty and it's one that the distance of time allows us the privilege of some kind of warped appreciation. For Agar as most others, it must have been terrifying. It must have felt so far away from more formal exercises like 1931's Constructivist Composition, a celebration of organic shapes and natural textures and something of an analytical one.
It's not the most compelling inclusion in the show, perhaps included for canonical value as much as to demonstrate just how many strings Agar had to her bow, and the avenue towards pure abstraction is now, it seems, one Agar did not follow for long. Events, as much as her own personal ambitions, dictated that.
Constructivist Composition (1931)
The Bird, Two Lovers (1931)
Movement in Space (1931)
Le Compotier aux Fruits (1931)
In the early thirties, many of Agar's creations made use of muted hues and were rendered almost as if in soft focus. She made Japanese inspired woodcuts of birds that could also be read as entwined lovers, meditations on movements and/in space that made use of flattened perspectives, and still life paintings inspired by Juan Gris. All of which are lovely to look at and speak of a desire to bring sensuality to modernity as much as one to bring modernity to sensuality.
Even as the decade marched inevitably towards horror, Agar dressed up the horror in its best glad rags. Ever the Angel of Anarchy. On viewing a plaster cast of her lover's, Bard's, head she took the white plaster to look like a 'death sculpture'. Quite correctly so. Soon it was adorned with silks, furs, gemstones, seashells, and even ostrich feathers.
Angel of Anarchy (1936-40)
Angel of Mercy (1934)
In creating, way before its time, the missing link between Keith Richards and The New York Dolls, Agar had made a work that suggested Bard, and everyone else, hiding behind a blindfold so that they cannot see the coming tragedy. Angel of Mercy, also modelled on Bard, has the temerity to at least look out at the world as it really is.
Alongside the paintings and masks, Agar made collages and assemblages. For her, it was a good way of creating juxtapositions, collisions even, between images and icons previously unconnected. This combined with Agar's growing interest in the natural world and soon bones, shells, fossils, leaves, and horns were appearing in her work. Agar:- "I surround myself with fantastic bric-a-brac in order to trigger my imagination. For it is a certain kind of sensitive chaos that is creative, and not sterile order".
Beach and forest combing became missions for collections of material as she aimed to displace the banal with 'the fertile intervention of coincidence'. Images of snakes, insects, birds, butterflies, and flowers would join an arsenal that already consisted of classical mythology, contemporary politics, and the human body.
Untitled (Box) (1935)
Marine Collage (1939)
Precious Stones (1936)
A dried seahorse lies wrapped in a fishing net surrounded by coral, leeches and lampreys are arranged on a grid of silhouettes of heads and busts, and profiled portraits are embossed with a selection of carefully chosen precious stones. Subconscious thoughts and desires are prodded and provoked as Agar used the emphasis that Surrealism placed on imaginative freedom to envision a world where anything was possible, not least a loosening of strictures when it comes to definition of both gender roles and gender boundaries.
It's possible the curators, eager to please millennial audiences, overstate Agar's work in the field of equality and gender fluidity but this exhibition, as with all, is an interpretation of her work and not a definitive answer. Guardian of Memories, from 1938, manages to combine a well ordered composition with opaque and translucent imagery to create a mildly discombobulating image while the same year's Surrealist Collage is a far more polite work.
A year later, Agar based Muse of Construction on a photo of Picasso on the beach at Mougins in France. It is suggested the title, which Agar changed from The Urn Goddess, was Agar warning herself, and Picasso, that she would not allow herself to be pulled too far into his orbit. She neither wished to be his muse and nor, it seems, did she desire to become one of his many 'conquests'.
Guardian of Memories (1938)
Surrealist Collage (1938)
Muse of Construction (1939)
Good on her. Even if being able to say you've shagged Picasso is quite a story. Not that she was short of either stories to tell or names to drop anyway. Ursula Goldfinger, whose portrait is below, was the husband of Brutalist architect, and bete noire of Ian Fleming, Erno Goldfinger. The Goldfingers were not only friends of Agar's but displayed her work in their Hampstead home - alongside that of Max Ernst and Henry Moore.
It's telling that Agar made a portrait of Urusula rather than Erno. She felt, quite rightly, that women were getting a raw deal. 1936's Ladybird features a photo taken of Agar, by Bard, which has had any potential eroticism inverted by squiggles, doodles, and, yes, a ladybird. It was Agar's way of taking control of her own image. Wresting it from patriarchal art institutions and taste makers.
Portrait of Ursula Goldfinger (c.1938)
Ladybird (1936)
Unknown - Photograph of Agar wearing a Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936)
This constant fight for equality seems to me to have got in the way of what Agar really wanted to do. Find a harmonious fusion between modern art and nature. "You see the shape of a tree, the way a pebble falls or is formed, and you are astounded that dumb nature makes an effort to speak to you" - she marvelled. She, in return, spoke back to nature.
She thought of the sea as a master sculptor, as nature itself as the truest of all Surrealists and, at the Whitechapel, there are photographs taken from sites such as the Neolithic stones of Avebury in Wiltshire as well as fallen tree trunks on French beaches, figureheads in Dorset harbours, and a decaying wooden sculptures of the Virgin Mary.
They all fed into her imagination and artistic sensibility and even when World War II broke out she continued working. Despite being a pacifist, she recognised the existential danger of a Nazi victory and enlisted in the war effort, volunteering in a canteen on Savile Row and serving, with Bard, as a Fire Watcher on night duty in London.
Agar and Bard hosted friends fleeing persecution in occupied Europe and those made homeless due to the Blitz. Messerschmitts flying low over the treetops seen through the window of her house at first distracted Agar from her work and then, later, informed it. As did the anxiety, and sense of urgency, the world was collectively undergoing.
Abundance (1942)
Erotic Landscape (1942)
Demeter (1949)
When the war finally ended and the Nazis had been defeated, Agar felt (in a way that is recognisable to those of us who have lived, and are living, through the pandemic) that humanity had a chance to reshape the world for the better. As we're finding out those in power have deeply vested interests and are almost violently resistant to change.
As they control the media and thus the narrative, it is easy to whip up an angry mob to protect the interests of the powerful and prevent improvement in general society. Agar travelled to Cornwall and the Lake District to renew her relationship with nature but anxiety remained, as often is this case coming out of a tragedy.
The almost sinister sexuality of her wartime works gave way to more playful pleasures, witness Demeter flashing her bare bottom as opposed to the strategically positioned black triangle of Erotic Landscape, and the works that connected with nature, be that Cumbria or Tenerife, seemed to be innocent celebrations of landscape rather than loaded meditations on what horrors may lurk within.
Lake District (1944)
Adam's Apple (1949)
Tenerife Frottage (1952)
The Sea (the coast at Eastbourne) (1950)
Agar saw Lewis Carroll as "a prophet of Surrealism" so the addition of a caterpillar to 1949's Adam's Apple is, presumably, a nod to his influence. While Tenerife Frottage and Lake District are about as near to postcard perfect renderings as Agar ever made it was not long before her restless mind, and restless legs, began another journey.
A 1950 image of the coast at Eastbourne borders on the abstract, the sea is inky blue but other than that looks nothing like any sea I've ever seen, and shows Agar entering a more experimental era. An era in which she felt that "surely room must be made for joy in this world". She allowed her hand a freer, more automatic, reign when creating and this gave way to a remarkably prosperous decade when she hit her fifties.
Portrait of the Artist's Mother (c.1960)
Pollen (1960)
An Exceptional Occurrence (1950)
There's hope for us all. Eight years after Agar's mother died, the artist made her only portrait of her. In it you can see the nature of their conflicted relationship - they spoke regularly and shared a love of textiles and embroidery but their priorities diverged. It's a maelstrom of fiery colours and obscure shadows. It's more a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship than of a mother solely.
Around the same time, Agar could also make borderline abstract, and tonally muted, meditations on natural subjects like pollen and joyful explosions of colour like An Exceptional Occurrence which celebrates ocean life. Amorphous creatures float idly in the deep sea as if in a crazed tar's nightmare.
Perhaps they are the dreams of 1963's Apocalyptic Head. That's a head that doesn't look too happy. Agar created the work following the assassination of John F Kennedy although you'd be hard pressed to work that out simply by looking at it. It doesn't look remotely like Kennedy. Instead it is an everyman, or everyhead, bemused and puzzled by the infinite ways in which the world expresses its cruelty and hostility.
Apocalyptic Head (1963)
Homage to Braque (1963)
The Bird (1969)
Alice with Lewis Carroll (1961)
But the world, too, has a never ending way of expressing its creativity, its beauty, and its wonder too. Agar didn't forget that. Other paintings she made in the sixties focused on the very things that gave her most pleasure in life. Cubist pioneer Georges Braque also died in 1963 and Agar was eager to celebrate his work (the flattened perspectives, the bold use of colour that led to Fauvism) and the influence he had had on her (interestingly, she preferred Braque to the louder and more confident Picasso).
Nature and Lewis Carroll, again, feature in this era. A simple, yet beautiful, acrylic Bird from 1963 expresses Agar's vision of hope as well as, I think, her desire to always remain both literally and metaphorically on the move and 1961's Alice with Lewis Carroll shows Agar indulging her desire to exist not just in different places in this world but in different worlds entirely. Fantastical worlds of the mind that Carroll committed to print and Agar to canvas.
The Horned Woman (1978)
Throughout the seventies and eighties, Agar died in London in 1991 - aged 91, she honed these instincts further. She created larger paintings than ever before and paintings that appeared, at first, to be collages but that still celebrated the nature she had taken solace and inspiration in her entire life. Birds, shells, fossils, and leaves were joined by an image of Cleopatra painted after Agar has visited the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum.
Her lifetime partner Joseph Bard had died in 1975 and Cleopatra was the first painting Agar had made for four years following her loss. That it depicted a historical figure who was notorious for being part of one of the most decadent love affairs of all time seemed a typical way of Agar saying farewell and thankyou to Bard. That even this work, and others painted in her dotage, remain imbued with passion, colour, and, of course, celebrations of nature speak of an artist who, while taking on new movements and ideas within the realms of modernity, was unwavering in her quest to paint a better world. She may have lived through the darkest of times but she sure saw life in bright colours. The Whitechapel Gallery's Angel of Anarchy show gave her, finally, her due.
Cleopatra (1979)
Untitled (1979-80)
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