 |
Eileen Agar (1899-1991)
1927
Oil on canvas, 765 x 641mm (3018 x 2514")
National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 5881)
Eileen Agar moved to England
from her birthplace, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1906. She studied
at the Byam Shaw School of Art (1919-20), at the Leon Underwood
School of Painting and Sculpture (1920-21), where her peers
included Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Gertrude Hermes (see
pp.86-7), and then at the Slade School of Fine Art (1922-6).
The death of her father in 1925 provided her with a private income
which enabled 'une vie d'artiste' in Paris between 1928 and 1930.
In the late 1930s Agar found herself in the milieu of the Surrealist
avant-garde. She was the only British woman painter included
in the International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington
Galleries, London, in 1936. Paul Nash (1889-1946) and Sir
Herbert Read (1893-1968) selected her for inclusion in the
show and described themselves as 'enchanted by the rare quality
of her talent, the product of a highly sensitive imagination
and a feminine clairvoyance'. (Quoted in D. Ades, 'Notes on two
women Surrealist painters: Eileen Agar and Ithell Colquhoun',
Oxford Art Journal, iii/I, 1980, p.37.) She spent the summer
of 1937 at Mougins with Nash (with whom she also had an affair
between 1935 and 1940), Paul Éluard (1895-1952), Sir
Roland Penrose (1900-84), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Pablo
Picasso (1881-1973). World War II disrupted her painting
and she did not start working again seriously until 1946. She
exhibited with the Surrealists in New York, Tokyo, Paris and
Amsterdam.
Painted onto coarse canvas, this work bears the confidence of
youth. Agar portrays herself in a robust three-quarter pose using
black to delineate her features. The green that she wears recurs
in the shadows on her face and her auburn hair is rendered in
impasto. The work is painted in a loose post-Impressionist style.
Eileen Agar's work is in the collections of the Tate, the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art and Leeds City Art Gallery. Birch
and Conran Fine Art, London, gave her a retrospective in 1987,
which revived her career. Agar wrote her autobiography
A Look at My Life with Andrew Lambirth in 1988. This painting
was purchased from the artist's niece in 1986.
|
