Eileen Agar - Another Look

EILEEN AGAR–ANOTHER LOOK SELECTED WORKS

EILEEN AGAR–ANOTHER LOOK SELECTED WORKS Including Artists: Linder | Lucy Stein | Florence Hutchings | Nadia Hebson | Olivia Fraser

19 May – 17 July 2021

20 Cork Street London W1S 3HL +44 (0)20 7734 1732

redfern-gallery.com

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Introduction

One should be able, ideally, to make paintings which throw off imagery of different kinds at different times to different people, continually unfolding different aspects of themselves .

– Eileen Agar

To celebrate this year’s major Eileen Agar retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Redfern Gallery have invited five contemporary artists to respond to Agar’s work.

Eileen Agar: Another Look confirms Agar’s place as one of the most spirited, intriguing, and prolific artists of her generation, whilst offering a new perspective on her practice by exhibiting her work within and alongside contemporary artists.

Photo: Eileen at home

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Rock 3 (Hidden Lovers of Ploumanach 1), 1985 Acrylic on canvas 61 × 61 cm Included in Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, Whitechapel Gallery, 2021

Imagination Can Continually Take Wing: The Enduring Spirit of Eileen Agar Hettie Judah

In play, all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression. To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic, and to give the lie to the inconvenient world of fact, and the hideous edifice of unrelieved utility.

In play the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to enter a world where different laws apply, to be free, unfettered, and approach the divine.1 – Eileen Agar Born in Buenos Aires in the final days of the nineteenth century, Eileen Agar came of age in a British art world on the turbulent brink of transformation. As a young woman studying at the Slade, the eminent Professor Henry Tonks counselled her to ignore “that rubbish that they’re producing in France.”2 Fortunately she did no such thing.

In 1924 Agar left home, shaved her head and embarked on a life of peripatetic experimentation that extended over seven decades. She died in 1991 leaving a body of work that included sculpture, surrealist assemblages, photographs, collage, experiments with lettering, and paintings in oils and acrylics.

an emblem of overbearing patriarchal power (“I think my empathy with toxic masculinity has worn thin” she says.)

In Into the Woods with Humpty Again, 2021 he looms behind a smoking woman in fishnet stockings.

From early in her career, in works such as Marine Collage (1939) and Quadringa (1935), Agar experimented with the layering of forms within her works, evoking a series of apertures that frame sequences of scenes and settings.

In both Quadringa and Marine Collage Agar used found shapes: the dominant motif in the earlier painting is the silhouette of a marble horse’s head from the British Museum. (The head once adorned the Parthenon, and belonged to a horse driven by Selene, goddess of the night.) The silhouette repeats four times, like cuts in a dark veil revealing fantastical forms. The heads Agar outlines in Marine Collage are human, and through them we glimpse images of Hellenic statuary and deep-sea creatures, like fragments of the unconscious. During the 1930s, the photography of W.H. Longley and Charles

“It encouraged me to know it was a life’s project,” observes Lucy Stein, whose immersion in Agar’s world came through Andrew Lambirth’s An Eye for Collage (2008). “One thing that Agar taught me is that your progression through subject matter and motifs isn’t linear – they come back.” In painting, performance and film, Stein’s work has explored ties between the sexual, gustatory body and the natural world, and her own complex relationship with literary and art historical figures, neo-paganism and psychoanalysis. Like recurring emblems from dreams, motifs from Agar’s work ­– among them shells, moons and owls –­ thread through Stein’s recent paintings.

Stein shares an interest in the wonderland of Lewis Carroll, in which Agar identifies an intrinsic British tendency to the surreal. A loose series of paintings feature Alice’s irascible ovoid interlocutor Humpty Dumpty as

Photo-collage, 1980 Pencil and photocollage on paper laid on card 20.6 × 26.7 cm

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Martin, and the eccentric cinema of Jean Painlevé, revealed mysteries of the underwater world, which fascinated the surrealists.

Linder’s photomontage series The Merry Maidens (2021) takes its name from a circle of standing stones near St Buryan, Cornwall – purportedly the rocky remains of 19 young women who dared dance on the Sabbath. “The women in my works are yet to be fully petrified, they’re still in varying stages of metamorphosis with shells, fossils and crystals acting as catalysts,” says Linder. “Agar said about her love of shells, “I think all women do, I think we have an affinity with the sea, and men with the land.” There’s an ambiguity in The Merry Maidens series, the women can be seen to emerge from, as much as be subsumed by, the natural forms.”

A similar airbrushed pornographic image was used by Agar in her collage Erotic Landscape, shown in a solo show at the Redfern in 1942. Here the nude, whose skin is worn smooth as a pebble, appears amid a flurry of subaquatic creatures, abstract forms and segments of painting and drawing. Sterling’s petrifying women also nod to Agar’s long fascination with the Ploumanac’h rocks in Brittany: ‘found’ biomorphic sculptural forms that she photographed in 1936, and revisited in a series of acrylic paintings in the 1980s.

Laura Smith, curator of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Agar retrospective notes the “striking colour choices” Agar makes in her Ploumanach Rock paintings: “jarring blues against browns, oranges and greens.3” While it found vivid expression in late career paintings in acrylic, such as Wings of a Child (1983) Agar’s experiments with opposing colours date even to the four-panel Autobiography of an Embryo (1933-4) in which a painted colour wheel appears among overlapping apertures and forms, and jangling juxtapositions of blue and orange, purple and yellow.

Florence Hutchings describes her excitement at discovering the “high intensity blues and oranges” Agar often returned to. “She uses colour that’s so intense that it makes you feel uncomfortable and puts you on edge,”

Wings of a Child, 1983 Acrylic on canvas 41 × 61 cm

says Hutchings, who selected the intense colour palette of collage works such as Dining Room Table II (2020) with Agar in mind.

the late 1980s, Nadia Hebson was struck by “how she’d used a modernist language and then built on that to create a phantasmagoria of different elements.”

Hutchings works within a limited palette, pushed “to its full extent in the different tones and textures” of her diverse painted elements. As in Agar’s work, the resulting optic buzz suggests movement – Hutchings’s unoccupied red chairs look ready to scuttle around the table after one another.

This play with associations and connections through layering images and objects chimes directly with Hebson’s own work, which in the past has paid tribute, variously, to Winifred Knights, Christina Ramberg and Marion Adnams. “When I make work in response to people, I’m trying to understand them visually, remaking work and moving bits and pieces around in my studio,” says Hebson.

“In that process I start to formulate an understanding of another artist’s work.” Extending through layers of posters, sculptures, photographs and paintings, Hebson’s biographical compositions are both homage and a commentary on the act of looking at and understanding another artist’s work.

Guitar Lessons (2020) pays tribute to the cubist influence in Agar’s work. “Whenever I make a body of work I will have artists in mind, I always have art books in my studio, which I look at constantly,” says Hutchings. “I thought about the elements of Agar’s work that I found most inspiring: cubist elements, collage, colour, markmaking. The guitar is a form that appears in some of her paintings.”

Agar leapt into Surrealism and Cubism almost simultaneously, and they endured as the two ‘legs’ of her work. In 1929, during the same trip to Paris in which she and her lover Joseph Bard met surrealists André Breton and Paul Eluard, Agar studied painting with Czech Cubist František Foltyn.

Back in London in 1936, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose visited Agar’s studio during preparations for the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in London that summer. Their selection included Quadringa, and Agar became one of the very few British women involved in the show. Read and Penrose had been struck by the overwhelming environment of the studio itself: “I had it done very fantastically with […] all sorts of things. And as somebody said, ‘It looks like an Aladdin’s cave’” Agar later recalled. “My studio was really one immense collage of all sorts of things.” 4 Agar continued this practice of expanded collage, constantly reconfiguring and transforming her living space. After seeing an article on her home published in

As with Ramberg and Adnams, dress played a significant role in Agar’s creative vocabulary – her spirited sculptural headgear included the Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936) and a straw bonnet topped with Schiaparelli gloves. Dwelling on a photograph of Agar in which she stands on a rooftop in a sheer frock, Hebson notes that like Ramberg, she was interested in “the communicative possibilities of dress and the way you can self objectify in a beautiful and healthy way.”

The poster E strides the buoy/bomb and the sensual world explodes (2021) nods to a picture in which Agar appears seated on a buoy shaped like a missile. Having largely encountered Agar’s works in reproduction, Hebson elected to focus on Agar’s identity, and the strong friendships that bound the women of Surrealism.5 In her own writing, Agar contextualized the attention to dress paid by her circle: “our concern with appearance was not a result of pandering to masculine demands but rather a shared attitude to life and style. The juxtaposition by us of a Schiaparelli dress with outrageous behaviour or conversation was simply carrying the beliefs of Surrealism into public existence.”6

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jade of Blue Lotus (2020) and Path (2021) was a favourite colour of Agar’s, seen in works such as Leaf Composition (c.1950.)

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Leaf Composition, c.1950

Fraser derives her pigments from semi-precious stones such as malachite, and sees here, too a connection to Agar, who felt a close bond to the natural world, and to stone in particular. Writing of the dramatic, sculptural rocks of Ploumanac’h that so captivated her, and of the balance she sought in her work, Agar spoke in terms that chime with Fraser’s spiritually-guided practice: “Surrealism for me draws inspiration from nature…

Abstraction would also be exerting its influence upon me, giving me the benefit of geometry and design to match and balance and strengthen the imaginative elements of composition. Outer eye and inner eye, backward and forward, inside out and upside down.” 7

Oil and ripolin on paper 48 × 65 cm

As a teenager, Olivia Fraser became well acquainted with this sartorial self-expression. Agar was her great-aunt, and became close to her family in the late 1970s, after the death of Joseph Bard. “She’d turn up with bright blue makeup and wild 1960s clothes,” Fraser recalls. “She had this extraordinary magnetism and charisma – she knew everybody, all the big artists. She spoke about the surrealist dinners where everybody had to dress up and she made surrealist food. She described Picasso in Mougins, breaking up a handful of matchsticks and making a perfect line drawing of the view.” On visits to Agar’s flat, Fraser would inevitably find the space newly configured, and her great-aunt working her way through the piles of magazines that she used in her collage.

Fraser’s own work draws on her formation in specific Indian traditions, including Jaipuri miniature painting, larger scale pichwai and tantric art used as a tool in meditation practice. Nevertheless she detects Agar’s influence, particularly in the use of intense colour: the rich

Endnotes 1 Eileen Agar & Andrew Lambirth, A Look at My Life (Methuen, 1988) p. 232 2 National Life Stories/ Artists’ Lives: Eileen Agar interviewed by Cathy Courtney 18th April, 1990 3 Laura Smith, Eileen Agar (Eiderdown Books, Modern Women Artists Series, 2021) p.43 4 National Life Stories/ Artists’ Lives: Eileen Agar interviewed by Cathy Courtney 18th April, 1990 5 These are explored, notably, in Whitney Chadwick’s

The Militant Muse: Love, War and the Women of Surrealism (Thames & Hudson, 2017) 6 Eileen Agar & Andrew Lambirth, A Look at My Life (Methuen, 1988) p. 120 7 ibid, p.121, quoted in Laura Smith, Eileen Agar (Eiderdown Books, Modern Women Artists Series, 2021) p.29

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Robotics, 1978 Acrylic on canvas 60.1 × 40.6 cm

LINDER When studying Eileen Agar’s intricate collages, sculptures and paintings at close hand in the archive at The Redfern Gallery, the divide between the everyday world of Mayfair and the magical interior world of Agar soon disappears. Her art invites the viewer into landscapes without vanishing points, so that as I gaze at her works I no longer know quite when or where I am. Agar’s colour palette can be hallucinogenic at times: Salvador Dali said, ‘I am the drug’; Eileen is the opium poppy incarnate.

Eileen Agar’s recommendation to play, and to yield to magic, has recently helped to liberate my practice.

My scissors and scalpels now create cut-outs and compositions far less bound to the shapes and outlines of the found images from which they are composed.

Sphinx and Oedipus deftly illustrate life before and after Agar; I now play with myth and geology in equal measure, my scissors cutting up print media regardless of the inconvenient world of fact.

Merry Maiden (i)

Merry Maiden (vi)

Photomontage 27 × 21 cm

Photomontage 27 × 21 cm

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Merry Maiden (iii)

Merry Maiden (iv)

Photomontage 27 × 21 cm

Photomontage 27 × 21 cm

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The Sphinx Photomontage 35.5 × 34.5 cm

Oedipus Photomontage 36 × 26.5 cm

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LUCY STEIN I’m particularly fascinated by Eileen Agar’s collages.

They have shaped my thoughts about the erotics of making.

Her collage works are intuitive, flippant, joyful and sensual and these attitudes illustrate what the erotic means to me. Things feel right or pleasurably jarring or both. Sometimes her works are ugly and brash but they still have agency. Her characters - heads, embryonic shapes, biomorphic forms - touch playfully,

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The Hearth Remembers, 2021 Acrylic and oil on linen 120 × 140 cm

or are brought forward only to be smeared or smudged back into obscurity so your body feels the relation before your mind asks why. She works with borders, as framing devices and as intertwining porous bodies. She plays with received ideas of the feminine, feeding you clichés only to snatch them back and destroy them. I try to suggest similar processes in my paintings.

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Into the Woods with Humpty Again, 2021 Oil on linen 80 × 40 cm

FLORENCE HUTCHINGS When looking at photographs of Agar’s home and studio you can see the abundance of interesting sculptures, shells and photographs that constantly surrounded her. For myself it is vital to live with objects that inspire me. All of this comes into my work one way or another and I think this to be the same with Agar.

Agar’s work has a fantastic sense of joy and play.

You can see the element of play is not only in Agar’s paintings, collages and sculptures, but also in her entire personality; whether she be posing holding

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Musical Chairs, 2020 Oil paint and collage on canvas 110 × 140 cm

a magnifying glass or wearing a hat made from a lampshade. It is safe to assume that Agar had a celebratory attitude towards life that comes through clearly in her work. Agar herself said ‘there must always be room for joy in this world. There has to be hope and celebration’ I like to think that my work has a similar attitude towards the world we live in and the element of play when making.

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Afternoon Tea, 2020 Oil paint and collage on canvas 110 × 140 cm

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Dining Room Table II, 2020 Oil paint and collage on canvas 30 × 40 cm

Guitar Lessons, 2020 Oil paint, oil bar and collage on canvas 180 × 135 cm

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NADIA HEBSON

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Knokke the elegant Belgian resort, the tide a long way out. E sits astride a buoy, containing her humour for comic effect at the priapic pun. Here with Joseph Bard, some days when it rains too hard they play photography in the hotel room (E’s words). In the photographs she is either lying or sitting -on the beach, in the sand, on a groyne, in a boat, in the sunlight filtered through a venetian blind. Connoisseuse.

Exquisite white sandals with a peek toe, a slight wedge, the top punctured with neat squared holes, black leather laces thread around the sides, black against white.

Intimacy, pleasure, luxuriant time, composed of things that money can and can’t buy slant her towards the exhilaration of self-determination. Heightened by friendship (female, -Lee, Nusch, Leonora) choreographing, collaging: clothing, behaviour,

gesture until it and they stand outside of time.

Schiaparelli and Vionnet. Rodney Thomas designs E. two adjacent studio apartments, a modernist hideout on which a creative life is collaged. Later with P. they find their English mystic, more than his contained seaside modernism, an atmosphere rather that smoulders.

And almost as a fait accompli the paintings and collages recount a lifetime of joy, perpetual experimentation, ludic, sophistication lived and loved.

A long game, of course, subject to these favourable conditions.

Some thoughts on E. strides the buoy/bomb and the sensual world explodes.

Head dress for E, 2021 Marbled paper, walnut veneer, acrylic spray paint, watercolour paper, canvas Edition of 4 24 × 34 × 4 cm

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E strides the buoy/bomb and the sensual world explodes, 2021 Digital print, Edition of 6 Edition dimensions by request

OLIVIA FRASER

EILEEN & ME 22

Eileen properly entered my life when she was in her late 70’s and newly widowed. I was in my early teens. Fiercely independent, and with a wide-ranging collection of friends, she conceded that Sunday lunch with her remaining family might be amusing.

In complete contrast to my beloved grandmother – Eileen’s younger sister – with her neatly permed hair and grey, tweedy outfits, Eileen would appear at the door in a dazzle of colour, pattern, stripes and polka dots with her Cleopatra bob haircut and electric blue eye shadow. In she would step with her retractable walking stick which she would wield like a magician’s wand. I thought she was marvellous.

archetypal icon of yoga used as a tool for visualization with its association with perfection, renunciation and spiritual growth – something beautiful that can grow out of swampy black waters.

In an ever-accelerating world hell-bent on accentuating our differences, I feel this slow art form and my subject matter probing a vision or journey within is a wonderful antidote, emphasizing, as it does, the importance of slowing down, connecting and being present in the moment.

As Eileen said:” room must always be made for joy in this world”. I would add wonder too.

Although she claimed to ‘love all colours’, I loved the persistent sky-water malachite-blue that flowed through so much of her work as if a memory of her long sea voyages to and from Argentina where she spent her childhood.

I would like to think that she’s left a lasting influence as I too am obsessed with colour, patterning and shapes from nature. Like Eileen’s dream-like imagery, my imagery is also rooted in the metaphysical - though in my case it’s more linked to my life in India and reflects the metaphysical imagery used as tools for meditation in yogic visualisations.

In Indian art, especially in the Jain and Tantric traditions from Rajasthan and Gujarat, there is a tradition of assisting yoga practitioners to achieve this by providing what are in effect visual roadmaps to spiritual enlightenment. These take many different forms, ranging from mandalas and yantras, which are believed to store and generate positive energies, to maps of the Subtle Body, which represent the idea of the body as a microcosm of the universe. Inspired by this, I have isolated features from the body - eyes and feet - linking them to the symbol of the lotus as the

Path I, 2021 Stone pigments and Arabic gum on handmade Sanganer paper 26 × 26 cm

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Blue Lotus, 2020 Giclée print on epson enhanced matt paper Signed, dated, titled and numbered from an edition of 100 63.5 × 63.5 cm

Darshan, 2019 Stone pigments, gold leaf and gum Arabic on handmade Sanganer paper 63.5 × 127 cm each

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EILEEN AGAR 1899 –1991 SELECTED WORKS

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Two Figures, 1966 Acrylic on card on board 53.4 × 38.1 cm

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Wings of a Child, 1983 Acrylic on canvas 41 × 61 cm

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Magnolia, 1966 Acrylic on canvas 41 × 56 cm

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Seated Figures, 1973 Mixed media and collage on paper 20 × 25 cm

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Ethnic Totem, 1944 Gouache on paper 22.9 × 17.8 cm

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Bum and Thumb Rock, Ploumanach, 1985 Acrylic on canvas 61 × 61 cm

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Paper Lantern Collage on paper 25.4 × 34.3 cm

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Sketch of Angel of Anarchy (1st version), c.1980 Ballpoint pen on tracing paper 14 × 9 cm

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Studies of Heads, 1922 Ink on paper 39.1 × 27.9 cm Included in Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, Whitechapel Gallery, 2021

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Eileen’s Fish Mixed media and collage on paper 35.5 × 45.7 cm

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Untitled Collage (Gymnasts), 1986 Felt-tip pen, gouache, pencil and collage on paper 20.9 × 14.8 cm

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Untitled, 1982 Felt-tip pen, gouache, pencil and collage on letterhead laid on paper 27.8 × 21 cm

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Shadows, 1964 Acrylic on board 35.6 × 25.4 cm

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Abstract Greetings Card Acrylic, tissue paper and patterned card on paper 15.2 × 20.1 cm

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Gateway to Winter, 1979 Ink and pastel on paper 21.5 × 29 cm

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Untitled Card on photograph 14.8 × 18.8 cm

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Untitled, c.1980 Untitled, c.1980 Gouache and wax crayon on paper laid on card 10.7 × 15.5 cm

Acrylic, felt-tip pen and wax crayon on paper laid on paper 15.5 × 10.3 cm

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Untitled, c.1980

Untitled, c.1980

Pastel and acrylic on paper laid on card 12.8 × 13.2 cm

Wax crayon and biro on paper 12.8 × 8.8 cm

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David & Goliath, 1984 Felt-tip pen, gouache and biro on two pieces of card laid on paper 22.3 × 10.5 cm

Red Peril, 1983 Acrylic on board 78.7 × 53.3 cm

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Untitled

Watercolour and collage on thin card 10.5 × 17 cm

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Untitled Collage (Snail), c.1970

Collage 10.5 × 14.7 cm

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Feminine bundle, 1989 Charcoal on paper 24 × 16 cm

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Untitled, c.1940 Gouache on paper 22.6 × 19 cm

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Scissors, 1986 Mixed media and photo-collage on paper 21.1 × 27.4 cm

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Untitled (Head) Watercolour, wax crayon and pencil on paper 23 × 18.2 cm

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The Presence II, 1966 Acrylic on board 35.6 × 25.4 cm

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The Cockle Shell, 1982 Acrylic on canvas 61 × 45.5 cm

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Leaf Composition, c.1950 Oil and ripolin on paper 48 × 65 cm

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Bird in Flight, c.1980 Mixed media on paper 16.5 × 21 cm

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People in a Wood Acrylic and collage on canvas board 35.6 × 25.4 cm

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Man on the Moon, 1980 Felt-tip on paper 41.9 × 39 cm

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Untitled, c.1960 Ink on paper 19 × 25.3 cm

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Undiscovered Country, 1969/77 Enamel and acrylic on paper 39 × 58 cm

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Untitled, c.1950 Oil on board 31.6 × 41 cm

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EILEEN AGAR RA (1899 –1991)

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BIOGRAPHY 1899 1911 1919 1920-22 1921-24 1925 1926 1928-30 1929 1930 1933 1934 1935 1936

1937 1940 1941 1942 1944 1945 1948 1949 1952-3 1965 1971 1975 1988 1990 1991

Born in Buenos Aires Sent to Canford Cliffs, Dorset, to begin her education Attended the Byam Shaw School of Art, London Taught watercolour painting by Georges William Thornley. Studied under Leon Underwood at Brook Green School of Art Attended Slade School of Fine Art, taught by Henry Tonks Married Robin Bartlett, a Slade student. Moved to Varengeville-sur-Mer in France with Bartlett Met Joseph Bard. Separated from Bartlett Studied in Paris. Met and befriended André Breton, Paul Éluard and Ezra Pound Spent the spring in the Basque country and the summer at Bandol and Menton in France Started to paint abstract works. Moved to Bramham Gardens, London First solo exhibition at Bloomsbury Gallery. Became a member of the London Group at Henry Moore’s suggestion Met Dylan Thomas and David Gascoyne. Became friends with Ben Nicholson, Jacob Epstein and Alexander Calder Met Paul Nash who introduced Agar to the ‘found object’ Exhibited at the landmark ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ in London, alongside Salvador Dali.

Photographed the Ploumanach rocks. Signed the fourth Bulletin International du Surréalisme as a member of the Surrealist Group in England Featured in Alfred Barr’s ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’ exhibition at MoMA in New York.

Holidayed at Picasso and Dora Maar’s home in Mougins; met Lee Miller.

Worked in a canteen in Savile Row as part of her war duty. Married Joseph Bard Exhibited with the London Group First solo exhibition at The Redfern Gallery Spent the summer in the Lake District and painted watercolour landscapes War ended. Visited Cornwall with Bard Appeared on TV programme ‘The Eye of the Artist’ and on a programme introduced by James Laver on ‘Hats’ Met Peggy Guggenheim in Venice on the occasion of the PEN Club meeting Spent the winter in Tenerife. Met Eduardo Westerdahl. Made watercolours, collages and frottages.

Went back every year until 1957 Started to paint with acrylic Participated in the ‘Britain’s Contribution to Surrealism of the ‘30s and ‘40s’ exhibition at the Hamet Gallery, London. Full-scale retrospective of her works at the Commonwealth Institute Joseph Bard died Published her autobiography ‘A Look at My Life’ with Andrew Lambirth Elected a Senior Member of the Royal Academy Died - buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1933 1942 1944 1947 1949 1951 1957 1962 1963 1964 1971 1975-84 1987 / 90 1999 2000 2004 2009 2017 2018 2021

Bloomsbury Gallery, London The Redfern Gallery, London (with Michael Rothenstein) The Redfern Gallery, London Leger Galleries, London Hanover Gallery, London Hanover Gallery, London Obelisk Gallery, London Brook Street Gallery, London Galleria Billico, Rome Brook Street Gallery, London (Retrospective) Commonwealth Art Gallery, London (Retrospective) New Art Centre, London Birch and Conran Fine Art, London (Retrospective) Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Leeds City Arts Gallery The Redfern Gallery, London, ‘Centenary Exhibition’ The Redfern Gallery, London Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, ‘Eileen Agar: An Eye for Collage’ Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, ‘Eileen Agar: Bride of the Sea’ The Redfern Gallery, London Farley’s House & Gallery, Chiddingly Whitechapel Gallery, London, ‘Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy’

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1936 1937

1938

1939 1940

1947 1952 1961 1966 1969 1971 1974 1979 1982 1986 1990 1992 1997 2000 2008 2016-17 2017

New Burlington Galleries, London, ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ MoMA, ‘Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism’ Nippon Salon, Tokyo, ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’ London Gallery, ‘Surrealist Objects and Poems’ Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris Gallerie Robert, Amsterdam, ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ London Gallery, ‘Living Art in England’ Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, ‘Surrealist Work: Artists International Association’ Zwemmer Gallery, London, ‘Surrealism Today’ Galerie Maeght, Paris, ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’ New Burlington Galleries, London, ‘The Mirror and The Square’ Museum of Modern Art, New York, ‘The Art of Assemblage’ Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, ‘Paintings by Eileen Agar, John Bolam, Rama Rao’ Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, ‘John Moores Exhibition’ Hamet Gallery, London, ‘Britain’s Contribution to Surrealism of the ‘30s and ‘40s’ Hayward Gallery, London, ‘British Painting 1974’ Hayward Gallery, London, ‘Thirties: British Art and Design Before the War’ Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, ‘Les enfants d’Alice. La peinture surréaliste en Angleterre 1930-1960’ The Mayor Gallery, London, ‘British Surrealism: Fifty Years On’ Canterbury, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol, 50th Anniversary of the London ‘International Surrealist Exhibition’ of 1936 Galerie Zabriskie, Paris, ‘Collages Surréalistes’ Norwich Gallery, Norfolk Institute of Art and Design, ‘Ten Decades: Careers of Ten Women Artists Born 1897-1906’ IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, ‘El Objeto Surrealista’ Tate Modern, London, ‘Inaugural Exhibition’ Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, ‘British Surrealism & Other Realities: The Sherwin Collection’ Tate Britain, London, ‘Paul Nash’ White Cube, Bermondsey, London, ‘Dreamers Awake’

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Nash, P. (introduction), ‘Eileen Agar and Michael Rothenstein’, London: The Redfern Gallery, 1942 Read, H. (introduction), ‘Eileen Agar. Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Collages 1930-64’, London: Brook Street Gallery, 1964 Agar, E. (with Andrew Lambirth), ‘A Look at my Life’, London: Methuen London, 1988 ‘Eileen Agar 1899-1991’, Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 1999 Byatt, A.S., ‘Eileen Agar 1899-1991: An Imaginative Playfulness’, London: The Redfern Gallery, November 2004–January 2005 Lambirth, A., ‘Eileen Agar: An Eye for Collage’, Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, 2008 Remy, M., ‘Eileen Agar: Dreaming oneself awake’, London: Reaktion Books, 2017 Smith, L., Eileen Agar, Eiderdown Books, 2021

SELECTED COLLECTIONS Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand Bassetlaw District Council, Nottinghamshire Bradford Museums & Galleries Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, New Zealand Courtauld Institute of Art, London Derby Museums and Art Gallery Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Government Art Collection, London The Hepworth Wakefield The Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art National Galleries of Scotland National Museum of Wales National Portrait Gallery, London National Trust Plymouth City Council The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent Royal Academy of Arts, London Salford Museum and Art Gallery Southampton City Art Gallery Tate Victoria & Albert Museum, London Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

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Front cover of A Look at my Life by Eileen Agar in collaboration with Andrew Lambirth,1988, Methuen London

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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EILEEN AGAR–ANOTHER LOOK SELECTED WORKS

19 M a y – 17 J u l y 2 021 Published by The Redfern Gallery, London, 2021 Works by Eileen Agar © The Estate of Eileen Agar, 2021 All All All All All

works works works works works

by by by by by

Linder © Linder, courtesy Modern Art, London Lucy Stein © Lucy Stein, courtesy Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich Florence Hutchings © Florence Hutchings Nadia Hebson © Nadia Hebson Olivia Fraser © Olivia Fraser, courtesy Grosvenor Gallery, London

Essay: Hettie Judah © 2021 Catalogue design: Graham Rees Design Eileen Agar works photographed by Alex Fox Printed in England: The Five Castles Press ISBN: 978-0-948460-86-9 All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publishers, the artist and the copyright owners.

Inside front cover:

People in a Wood (illustrated fully on page 61) Inside back cover:

Man on the Moon, 1980 (illustrated fully on page 62)

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