#eillenagar

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Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy

Throughout her pioneering career that lasted 70 years, Eileen Agar brought together the abstract qualities of cubism with the anarchic edge of surrealism. She worked in many medias including photography, collage, painting and sculpture. Furthermore, she also offered a commentary on society during a massive period of change. Agar was fascinated by classical art, ancient mythologies and the natural world, she took inspiration from these sources while creating her own biography of work and the content that fuelled her career.

Born in Argentina and raised in various boarding schools in London, Agar never forced a certain type of media, she went with a flow and chose formats and processes suited to her and the work of art. Although she lived through two world wars she still retained a happiness for life, this was reflected in her work as she was commonly using natural found objects, and also some of her work focuses on sexual pleasure there was also a theme of architecture and mythological aspects.

Agar lived a very fulfilling but at times traumatising life, when she was six years old she was sent from Argentina to London via boat by herself, a trip that would have taken two weeks. Her mother was an heiress and was dismayed by the idea of her daughter becoming an artist. Agar wanted more than what her parents expected of her. At one point she shaved her head in protest to her parents wanting her to get married. Her father was more accepting of her art career and when he died he left a small amount of money to help Agar keep afloat and also start a career in art. Agar’s career began at the age of 24, at this point she married a working class artist from The Slade school of art in London and moved to France. Although free of her parents grip, she was deeply unhappy until she met a Hungarian writer while in France. He encouraged her artistic style and lifted her out of her depressive state. In 1928, they moved to Paris where Agar took lessons in more modern forms of art to avoid the more conservative styles of British art. With surrealism she found sex and power and way to comment on social issues like patriarchy and the ever growing threat of fascism within Europe, at this point she is unmatched with her high standard of work in Britain.

Agar had a habit of painting over her work, hence why some of work has only been seen through photographs. However, some of her well known works include “Three Symbols” which represents themes like modernism and the patriarchy with images of roman pillars, the Notre Dam and a bridge which was designed by Barbier, Benard, et Turenne who also designed the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore, due to her habit of painting over works she only has one piece of cubist art remaining, this piece is called “Movement in Space” which is a painting made with darker earth tones and is made up of shapes, there is also a good use of lighting and tone with the top half of the canvas being much lighter than the rest. The use of lighting looks like a sun rise in the morning, with only a small corner of the canvas being touched by it.

Agar and her husband left France and moved back to London in the early thirties, once back in London Eileen and her husband created a journal that focused on pacifism in a growing world of Fascism and their disagreement with the Spanish civil war. Heavily feminist, Agar wrote how Europe was being dominated by overbearing masculine power. Agar’s work was very feminist, in 1933 she created “Autobiography of an Embryo” at two and a half metres long the work opposes the rhetoric and normality of linear life. This is one of her early masterpieces, instead of the seven stages of mans life, it focuses on the four stages of an embryo’s development. There are images of fossils and natural imagery, which became a central theme throughout Agar’s work later on.

In 1936, she met two curators who were creating an exhibition based on surrealism, this was the first watershed moment In her career, although a breakthrough moment in her career only 1/5 of the artists featured in the exhibition were women. Unfortunately there is little documentation of the event, but experts have decided that she definitely showed her piece called “Quadriga” this piece included imagery that foreshadowed the looming war in Europe and demonstrated Agar’s fears of such an event, her fears are represented by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The war had a huge effect on Agar and her work, she found it hard to focus and found very little inspiration due to the lack of travel and overall general mood of society at the time. She turned to collage as this was seen as a very political form of art, in certain collages Agar is almost dreaming of life before and after the war and this was seen as an outlet for her anxiety and feelings about the war.

Another seminal piece of work in Agar’s collection includes her 1936 “Angel of Anarchy and Mercy” this was another feminist comment on the fact that she was only seen as a muse and not as a serious artist. For example when she met Picasso, he didn’t appreciate her work and only looked at her and made comments on her looks. The sculpture is a cast of her husbands head, covered in brightly coloured fabrics the model is seen as a comment on the anxiety over the fact that he may of had to leave England due to the fact that he is Hungarian.

After the war, she traveled to Tenerife and this was the second watershed moment in her career. Free of the struggles of war her creativity flowed and she began to use brightly coloured paints depicting her new era of her life. Through the 1960’s she gained some recognition that resulted in her first retrospective in 1971. Agar moved to west London around this time which further abled her creative energy through the form of a larger studio enabling her to paint much larger canvases. However, sadly in 1975 her husband died and due to the shock she didn’t paint for four years, the piece “The Bride of the sea” is an homage to him. Some of the last pieces of work are brightly coloured paintings of the rocks she saw while on holiday with her husband in 1936, these can be seen as cyclical and makes viewers think that her career came full circle.