Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy exhibition review – the pseudo-surrealist at her prime
The artist, Eileen Agar, is donning a hat made up of crustaceans, cork, coral, seashells, fishbone and sea-urchins. The year is 1937, and in the Pathé black-and-white newsreel, she takes to the streets to parade her hat, prompting greyscale faces to gawp in confusion. Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse is one of Agar’s most well-recognised works which you can see at a major retrospective of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London.
The exhibition “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy” hosts over a hundred of her other wide-ranging works – from early line drawings and collages to photography. As London sweltered in the heat last week, the gallery made for a cooling refuge away from the sunburnt hordes.
Agar was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 into an affluent family. Her mother was the heir to a biscuit company, and her father was the head of a family business selling windmills and other machinery. She once described her childhood as both privileged and eccentric – full of “balloons, hoops and St. Bernard dogs”. At the age of six, she was sent to Heathfield boarding school, where her artistic talent was soon recognised by her teacher, Lucy Kemp-Welch RA, who implored Agar to “always have something to do with art”. She eventually took her place at the art school, The Slade, but grew to resent the emphasis on traditional, figurative English painting.
Upon entering the air-conditioned Whitechapel exhibition, you are immediately confronted by her Self-portrait, 1927. Agar has recently left art school and fled to Cornwall to cut off her hair and celebrate her newfound freedom. She painted with newfound strokes of self-confidence, a juxtaposition to her unassured line drawings hanging to your right. Agar herself confessed; “I had thrown off the shackles and started a new life, and I painted what may be considered to be my first successful work.” Perhaps her first, but certainly not her last, as Agar would go on to become one of the most artistically adventurous and prestigious artists of her generation.
In 1929, Agar travelled to Paris, where she met André Breton and Paul Éluard and became fixated by the sensuality and irrationality of the Surrealist movement. The curators of this exhibition, however, have been careful not to over-emphasise Agar’s reputation as a Surrealist. It’s an obvious association to make especially after three of her oil paintings and five of her objects were shown at the historic 1936 “International Surrealist Exhibition” where she was the only female contributor.
However, the exhibition meant that Agar – to her bemusement – had gone to bed an artist and accidentally woken up a surrealist. In her autobiography she recorded how the sudden attention took her by surprise. “One day, I was an artist exploring highly personal combinations of form and content, and the next I was calmly informed I was a surrealist!”
As you move through the galleries, you understand how Agar preferred to make her own mark and the curators make that clear; she admired the Surrealists’ desire to depict the subconscious but preferred to use a Cubist appreciation of form and texture.
Agar disliked how Surrealist women were treated by their male contemporaries, who saw the women as their muses but not as their equals. Agar envisioned a world that was gender-fluid, free from the restrictions of patriarchy. One of the most eye-catching of her works is The Ladybird, 1936. It is a black and white photograph of Agar. She holds a sheet of transparent material over her naked body. Agar then sketched sinuous lines, hands, discs and stars – and a ladybird – on top of the image to create an empowering depiction of herself as an artist in her own right.
On the opposite wall is Agar’s Muse of Construction, 1939. In this image, Agar paints a picture of her friend and contemporary, Pablo Picasso, where she positions him as her muse, again reversing roles to break the gender stereotype of a female muse for a male artist. This remains a strong theme throughout Agar’s work; she had a hungry desire for disrupting traditional gender expectations.
The exhibition’s name comes from her most well-recognised work, Angel of Anarchy, 1936-40. In the second room, sits the covered plastered head of her lover, the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard, which is draped in silk scarves, studded with diamanté and osprey feathers. But, it is her collages, not sculptures, that stand out.
In 1934, Agar started adopting the Surrealist collage and assemblage techniques to reflect her increased interest in the sea and the natural world. A notorious magpie, the artist started visiting forests and beaches to look for natural forms to spark her creativity – collecting stones, seashells, fossils, ceramics and textiles. She once said; “I surround myself with fantastic bric-à-brac in order to trigger my imagination. For it is a certain kind of sensitive chaos that is creative, and not sterile order.”
Marine Collage, 1939, encapsulates Agar’s fascination with synthesising the ocean with classical imagery – using collage as a medium to do so. The collage is divided into four sections and arranged in a portrait format. Onlookers will see silhouettes and busts filled with snakes, leeches and lampreys, which seem to swim through their minds – a homage to both the sea and the power of the subconscious.
As you move upstairs, you see an entirely new artistic period. As well as the aforementioned Pathé footage, either side of the room is framed with black and white photographs. After travelling to Ploumanac’h in Brittany, France, in 1936, Agar became fascinated with the coastal rock formations. She described rocks as “sculpted by the sea, that master worker of all time, as if nature had arranged a show of sculpture in the open air.”
She bought herself a Rolleiflex square-format camera that would become her “constant companion” where she began to document rocks, seascapes, landscapes, and portraits of her partner Joseph Bard and her artistic A-lister friends such as Dora Maar, Paul Éluard, Lee Miller and Picasso.
When war broke in 1939, Agar’s artistic thirst was replaced by great anxieties about the future. The exhibition’s poster features her collage Erotic Landscape, 1942. The collage features a cut-out photograph of a nude woman with half a head, surrounded by a myriad of plant and marine life and wave-like shapes. The collage is jam-packed and gives the impression that Agar is feeling overwhelmed due to the war and is looking to summon into one space all that she treasures. Her other works from the war period show a cautious optimism where she uses softer and pastel hues and tends to avoid brash colour and bold abstractions.
Even after the war, Agar was emotionally burdened by a sense of doom. It was only when she travelled to Tenerife in 1953 that she had a watershed in her life and began to paint and experiment with Surrealist techniques such as frottage, automatism and decalcomania. Collective Unconscious, 1977-8 is emblematic of Agar’s later period. In the painting, she cultivates all the forms and ideas throughout her career and all the forms – from molluscs, shells to fossils – that informed her unconsciousness.
The last work in the exhibit features Agar revisiting her black and white photographs taken in Ploumanac’h, almost fifty years earlier. The drawings edge on psychedelic and fuses striking colour choices. The series shows how Agar’s style was continually evolving – even till the very end. The last work is an apt curtain call for an exhibition that takes you from start to finish through a sequence of rooms that showcase Agar’s wide-ranging talent.
“Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy” shows how Agar lived a full and flamboyant life. She took famous lovers such as Paul Éluard and Paul Nash, mixed in illustrious circles with Pablo Picasso and Ezra Pound and had a travel itinerary most of us can only dream of. Her life may have been fruitful, but the exhibition shows she was much more than just another spoilt heiress. She had an enviable talent that stretched across all mediums and two of the biggest artistic movements. She was willfully independent, provocative, and fantastically fearless. It is a wholly-encompassing exhibition that celebrates an artist who has slipped too far through the net of art history. It is a must-see (if not for Agar, then at least for the air-con).