Eileen Forrester Agar (1 December 1899 – 17 November 1991) was an Argentine-British painter and photographer associated with the Surrealist movement.
Biography
Agar was born in Buenos Aires, to a Scottish father and American mother. Her father was the head of a family business selling windmills and other agricultural machinery to Argentina. At a young age, Agar became fascinated by pictures by Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham. Before attending school, she grew up in her family villa, Quinta la Lila, learning from her nanny and a French governess. Agar describes her childhood as being "full of balloons, hoops and St Bernard dogs". The family travelled to Britain approximately every two years during her childhood.
Aged six, Agar was sent to England to a private school in Canford Cliffs. At her second school, Heathfield School, Ascot, Agar's teacher, Lucy Kemp-Welch, encouraged her to continue to develop her art. In 1914, at the onset of World War I, Agar was sent away to Tudor Hall, then in Kent, to avoid the hardships of war. The music master, Horace Kesteven, introduced Agar to various artists, in particular, Charles Sims, who exposed her to some of Paul Nash's early works. Of her time with Sims, Agar said: "I found myself in a milieu of art where art was a valued part of daily life".
Before the war ended, Agar attended the Demoiselles Ozanne finishing school to improve her French, and took weekly oil painting lessons at the Byam Shaw School of Art in Kensington. Agar found the Byam Shaw too academic and pleaded with her family to allow her to look elsewhere to continue her schooling. That infuriated her mother and, after an argument with her parents, Agar noted in her diary that she got up early, ate lunch with her sisters, packed her bags, and departed from Paddington station. She left a note for her parents stating that she was on her way to Truro and St Mawes, where she would stay with family friends, the De Kays.
From 1920 to 1921, she studied under Leon Underwood at his school at Brook Green. There, she made friends with Blair Hughes-Stanton and Gertrude Hermes, amongst others. From 1921 to 1924, she studied part-time under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, alongside Rex Whistler, Cecil Beaton, and her first husband, Robin Bartlett. Agar resisted the wealthy lifestyle she was privy to and pointedly refused to make use of the Rolls-Royce her parents sent to pick her up from the Slade each day. With Bartlett and others, Agar travelled around France and Spain. In 1925, she married Bartlett and, in the same year, she destroyed the majority of her early work. The pair lived together in a house in Dieppe. Agar described Bartlett as "the escape-hatch which freed me from the clutches of my family".
In 1926, Agar met a Hungarian, Joseph Bard, with whom she would spend the next 50 years, and whose passion for jewels she would integrate into her artistic practice. Between 1927 and 1928, Agar and Bard lived in London, but went to Portofino in the winter, where Agar met Ezra Pound, who was to become a friend. In 1928, Agar and Bard moved to Paris, where she met the Surrealists André Breton and Paul Éluard, with whom she had a friendly relationship. In the period 1928 to 1930, Agar studied with the Czech cubist, František Foltýn. With Pound, Agar visited Constantin Brâncuși's studio.
In 1930, Agar returned to England, and painted her first surrealist piece, The Flying Pillar, based on André Breton's surrealist manifesto. Agar describes her piece in her memoir as her "first attempt at an imaginative approach to painting and although the result was surreal, it was not done with that intention". Agar said that "Surrealism was in the air in France and poets in France, later in England, were kissing that sleeping beauty troubled by nightmares, and it was the kiss of life that they gave". The Flying Pillar was later renamed the Three Symbols, and was described by Agar as a reference both to Greek art and to Gustave Eiffel and his famous tower, the symbol of modernity. The painting represented the classical world merging with the modern at a crossroads in time. In her 1928 diary entry, she described the various images in her painting as showing Greece as the meeting place of Judaeo-Egyptian and Greco-Christian culture, followed by the words "the Judaeo-Graeco pillar", as if it were a note to bear in mind and to later be developed.
In 1931, the first of four issues of The Island was published, edited by Leon Underwood and Joseph Bard. Agar contributed to all four issues. Two years later, she had her first solo show at the Bloomsbury Gallery. She was a member of the London Group from 1934 onwards, and made her first collage in the same year.