By a quirk of fate, and museum tastes, the British artist Eileen Agar is still best known for a single sculpture in the Tate collection: a magnetically outlandish male head titled Angel of Anarchy (c1936). Constructed from diamante, osprey feathers, cowrie shells and piratical black satin, it resembles a sort of 3D Arcimboldo. But it has a mate called The Angel of Mercy, which is equally stunning, yet practically never seen outside a private collection.
This monumental head, with its whiskered seashell eyes, stone chin and hair like an outcrop of molluscs, looks like an ancient object dragged from the bottom of the Aegean, sea-bleached and crusted. Yet it also appears startlingly modern. Both sculptures will appear together in a forthcoming survey of Agar’s art at the Whitechapel Gallery, which includes more than a hundred works, from early drawings to late constructions. The revelation of this much-anticipated exhibition will be Agar’s gift for making the past feel as new as today, with an art of evergreen imagination and vitality.
Agar (1899-1991) remains the most under-represented of all British surrealists. She painted scenes of indelible strangeness, constructed collages out of wallpaper, foliage and lino, fashioned ceremonial hats – including one to wear when eating bouillabaisse, made from an upturned cork basket stuck with crustacean shells. A hilarious fragment of Pathé newsreel shows Agar sporting her art hat through London to the slack-jawed bemusement of every passerby.
She came from wealth. There are tales of Agar sailing home to England from Argentina as a child, accompanied by musicians for her education and a cow for fresh milk. Her parents used to send a Rolls-Royce to collect her from the Slade. She lived in Portofino, Fitzrovia, Paris and Rapallo, and her social circle included Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound, Picasso and Breton, Oskar Kokoschka and Mahatma Gandhi.
There are the usual surrealist tropes: photographs of the artist bare-breasted, notorious fancy dress parties, triangular relationships. Agar was married to a British painter when she met her second husband, the Hungarian novelist Joseph Bard. She had a short relationship with the poet Paul Éluard, and a very long one with the painter Paul Nash. Both of the Angels are based on a cast of the loyal Bard’s head, and exquisite portraits of him exist in every medium, not least a beautiful early watercolour in which he appears to be sitting beside the sea – or is he in fact in it? There is an enchanting doubleness to so many of Agar’s works.
This is surely because collage is her essential modus operandi, from painting to paper. Not the puns and ho-ho lewdness of the male surrealists, splicing body parts together, but a marvellous talent for overlay and juxtaposition. Precious Stones, for instance, presents a cut-out profile (again of Bard, who collected gems) that appears to be filled with glinting stones and tiny classical cameos – cameos within a cameo – and all of this is laid over a page of red paper, one corner (apparently) folded back to reveal Agar’s signature, and then upon another of parchment, and so on and on. It is almost impossible to see what is uppermost in this collage, perfectly poised between two and three dimensions, between classical frieze and modern graphic art.
Agar first met Nash in Swanage in the 1930s, where they collected flotsam from the Dorset beach – rusted anchors, bleached bones, the dried starfish that feature throughout her work. Later, she would take celebrated photographs of the seaside rocks at Ploumanach in Brittany, describing them as they look in her images: “enormous prehistoric monsters … a great buttock ending in a huge thumb, a foot rearing up”. The natural world, for her, is anthropomorphic.
A leaf glued over a nude self-portrait covers her body even as it seems to become that body – a kind of arboreal odalisque. A chalk rubbing of woodgrain casts a moonlit rack over a poacher’s face. Starfish become hands or planets or emotional exclamation marks. This is an art of beachcombing, of the shoreline and the rock pool, of objects and people suspended in a fluid tidal drift.
The paintings operate like nets, trawling material out of the subconscious to float in Agar’s aquatic colours, the deep blues and sea greens of her art over 70 years. She was a brilliant colourist, varying her palette to abrupt orange or arsenical green when a scene turned sinister. But her visions are rarely agonised, overwhelmingly lyrical. The presiding influence is surely Matisse and not Breton or Ernst.
Agar was included in the historic 1936 International Surrealist exhibition (and in many more). “One day I was an artist exploring highly personal combinations of form and content, the next I was calmly informed I was a surrealist!” She always resisted the term. And the curators of the forthcoming show have justly decoupled her from the surrealist movement as far as possible in their presentation of her work.
For Agar’s sheer independence is fully apparent – in the rock photographs, the poured enamel paintings, the curious constructions, large and small but always as condensed as sonnets. So often she seems ahead of her times. A little wooden aquarium of nets and sea creatures from the 1930s seems to prefigure the more famous boxes of Joseph Cornell. Erotic Landscape, a nude collaged among various signs of the times, anticipates Richard Hamilton’s pop collages by half a generation. And Agar’s gilded skull (1921-4), encrusted with tiny pink shells like a baby’s fingernails, precedes Damien Hirst’s skulls by more than half a century.
“I’ve enjoyed life, and it shows through,” Agar once said. “Like a transparent skirt, or something like that.” There are photographs from the 1930s of her dancing in just such a skirt; and others, by Lord Snowdon, of her modelling Issey Miyake in her late 80s. She worked in her London studio right into her 90s, and never stopped experimenting, using paint like lipstick, pollen or bright liquid on the canvas, fashioning new sculptures from old objects.
Some of these were found in the studio after Agar’s death. A nautilus shell making love to a clam; a cushion of coral glued to a plastic tripod to make a fantastical stool; a pair of tailor’s scissors poised like a ballerina en pointe on top of a wooden plinth.
All of these works will be on show at Whitechapel, in an exhibition guaranteed to revive mind and eye with its joie de vivre. “Life’s meaning,” Agar wrote, “is lost without the spirit of play.” And playing, for her, meant art.
