Eileen Agar was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a wealthy Scottish businessman and an American heiress in 1899. Aged six she was sent alone to receive a rigorous academic education in England, eventually attending Leon Underwood’s Brook Street School, before training at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks. In 1936 she participated in the landmark 'International Surrealist Exhibition' at London’s Burlington Galleries, which marked the beginning of a long and prolific career as one of the most important figures in the history of Surrealism in England. Her artistic practice combined elements of surrealism and cubism and encompassed collages, found-object sculptures, abstract paintings, and photographs.
Painter Eileen Agar was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a wealthy Scottish businessman and an American heiress on 1 December 1899. Enjoying a privileged childhood, aged six she was sent alone to be privately educated in England. Among her teachers was Lucy Kemp-Welch (illustrator of the 1915 edition of Anna Sewell's famous children's book, Black Beauty) who first encouraged Agar’s artistic abilities. Agar subsequently studied at Byam Shaw School of Art (1919), attended Leon Underwood’s Brook Green art school (1920–21), and took taking part-time classes at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks (1921–4). Dissatisfied with its traditional figurative style, Agar moved to Paris, although Tonks warned her not to listen to ‘that rubbish that they're producing in France’ (National Life Stories), where she first encountered modern art and received painting lessons from Czech cubist Frantisec Foltyn. In 1926 she met her second husband, Joseph Bard, a Hungarian expatriate writer and in 1929 she encountered surrealists André Breton, Paul Éluard and Max Ernst. In 1931 she published her artistic credo, entitled Religion and the Artistic Imagination, in Bard’s progressive journal The Island, expressing her faith in natural symbolism rooted in ‘three emergent cultures in Russia, Europe, and America’. She also stated that ‘In Europe the importance of the subconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order’ (Remy 2017, p. 221). In 1933 she held her first solo exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery and participated in London Group exhibitions during 1933–34, contributing linoleum designs and the ‘stylised and genderless’ Modern Muse (Buck 2021), included in Ben Uri’s Uproar: the First 50 Years of The London Group in 2013.
In 1936 she was the only professional woman artist to be selected by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read for the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s Burlington Galleries, featuring, among others, Pablo Picasso, Juan Mirò, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico. This was also scene of the famous moment when Salvador Dalí appeared in a diving suit. However, Agar did not think of herself as a 'surrealist' until Penrose and Read visited her studio and declared her to be one. She later observed: ‘One day I was an artist exploring personal combinations of form and content, and the next I was calmly informed I was a Surrealist’ (Heflin 2021). The exhibition marked the beginning of a long and prolific career as one of the most important figures in English Surrealism, Agar's kaleidoscopic artistic practice encompassing collages, found-object sculptures, abstract paintings, and photographs. However, her relationship with the movement was complex and she questioned two key tenets: automatism and reliance on dreams, declaring that ‘For me, intuition combined with controlled emotion and intellectual consideration produce the best effects’ (Agar 1988, p. 126).
Agar's art combined elements of surrealism and cubism into a body of work that challenged the male dominance of both movements and was profoundly individualistic. She was ‘simultaneously drawn to the sensuality and irrationality of surrealism, as well as the idealism and harmony of cubism’ (Whitechapel Gallery Podcast). Unlike European Surrealists, who preferred assembling manmade objects found in flea markets, Agar favoured the ocean and the natural world, collecting stones, bones, horns, shells, fossils and leaves which nurtured her organic imagery. Among her most iconic pieces were two eccentric ceremonial hats – one to wear when eating bouillabaisse, made from an upturned cork basket stuck with coral, sea-shells, and found objects, and the other made of straw with a pair of leather gloves (with red-painted fingernails) pinned to the front (1937 and 1936, V&A collection). In 1936 she produced one of her best known pieces, Angel of Anarchy, a plaster head of her husband adorned with exotic scraps of cloth, feathers, beads (Tate Collection).
During the Second World War, Agar's work featured in Modern Paintings and Sculptures, held in aid of Russia, at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, home of Hungarian émigré architect, Ernő Goldfinger. The war profoundly affected Agar's life and art and she felt her work was to some extent on hold. However, she found new inspiration in the 1950s when she visited the Canary Islands, creating highly coloured, imaginative, and lyrical paintings mixing myth and nature. Agar continued to paint until 1986 and in 1988 she published her autobiography, A Look at my Life. Eileen Agar died in London, England on 7 November 1991. Her work is represented in UK public collections, including the Tate, V&A, National Gallery of Scotland and Government Art Collection. In 2021 the Whitechapel Gallery held the largest retrospective of Agar’s work to date. Her life story interview is held by the British Library sound archive.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Eileen Agar]
Publications related to [Eileen Agar] in the Ben Uri Library