Eileen Agar

(Argentina-England, 01/12/1899 - 17/11/1991)

Born in Buenos Aires to a prosperous Anglo-Argentine family, Agar moved to England at the age of six where she quickly found herself drawn to art. During the First World War, she studied oil painting at the Byam Shaw School of Art but found the medium too academic and so, beginning in 1920, started taking classes at the more progressive Slade School of Fine Art.

Here, she not only expanded her technical skills into a Modernist sensibility, but combined this with her own far-reaching curiosity led to her development of a distinct visual vocabulary defined by clarity of form, rhythmic patterning and an interplay of natural and organic motifs.

In the 1920s, she began making frequent visits to Paris where she absorbed the ferment of ideas circulating among the avant-garde figures she encountered and, after marrying for the first time in 1925, destroyed the majority of her early work. The marriage was not to last however, and the following year she began a relationship with Hungarian writer Joseph Bard, with whom she moved to Paris in 1928.

In Paris, she deepened her friendship with the leading Surrealists, whose celebration of the irrational, the unconscious, and the marvelous resonated deeply with her own sensibilities. Although she maintained an independent artistic identity, Surrealism provided her with a liberating conceptual framework, especially visible in her collages and assemblages, where disparate objects could be transformed through new contexts and poetic association.

Agar’s inclusion in the landmark 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London marked an important public affirmation of her practice. Works such as Angel of Anarchy, her celebrated headdress-like sculpture encrusted with sequins, feathers and shells, exemplify the vitality and wit that became characteristic of her approach. Whether using materials gathered from the seashore, domestic objects, items of clothing or fragments of photographs, she brought a sense of exuberance and metaphorical richness to her compositions. Nature, particularly the weathered forms of rocks and marine life, remained a recurring source of inspiration, aligning her work with a broader Surrealist interest in the uncanny and the biomorphic.

Throughout the mid-century, Agar continued to refine her visual language while expanding the range of her materials and her paintings from the 1940s onward reveal an increasing fluidity, often incorporating pulsating lines, translucent washes and layered, Abstract shapes that evoke both landscape and dreamscape, although, despite shifts in style, she consistently engaged with metamorphosis, reality, chance and the interplay between intention and accident. It was also at this time that photography became a crucial part of her practice, enabling her to explore fragmentation of the body and the performative potential of objects.

Between 1946 and 1985, Agar held almost 16 solo exhibitions along with having her work featured in numerous major international exhibitions and, by the early 1960s, she had developed into a Tachist style informed by Surrealist elements. Enjoying success in her lifetime, her autobiography A Look At My Life, was published in 1988 and she was one of the five artists featured in the television series Five Women Painters the following year before being elected as a Royal Academy Associate in 1990.

Agar’s work transcends the boundaries of artistic categorisation, balancing elegance with eccentricity and rigor with joy. In doing so, she expanded the possibilities of Surrealist practice while establishing herself as a singular, enduring voice in twentieth-century art and, today, her work is held in the collections of several major British institutions including Tate, the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Trust collection.

Image: Eileen Agar, Slow Movement (1970). Oil on canvas, 151.2 x 151.2 cm. National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One.