Independent spirit
Andrew Lambirth on how a chance meeting propelled him into working with Eileen Agar
It’s possible that my life would have been quite different if I hadn’t met the literary agent Jacintha Alexander at a party in 1985. At the time I was an impoverished researcher and aspirant writer, with a specialism in 20th-century British art. As we chatted of this and that, it emerged that Jacintha had a project that might interest me — working on the memoirs of an artist who’d already written quite a substantial text but needed help to prepare her book for publication. The artist in question was the distinguished surrealist Eileen Agar, and I jumped at the suggestion that I might work with her.
I remember our first meeting, at a group exhibition of English surrealists. Eileen was tiny but immensely chic, wearing black and white and red, with a beret and dark glasses. She was imperious and carried a stick. Desmond Morris, himself a surrealist painter as well as as a popular behaviourist, came and stood over her in his white raincoat in a wonderful display of body language that (on another occasion) I’d have loved to have heard him analyse. Nothing daunted, Eileen held her ground and soon escaped. She showed me examples of her work on the gallery walls and we agreed to meet at her flat and discuss further the idea of working together on her book.
I duly presented myself at her eyrie in Melbury Road, Kensington. Eileen had already written a lengthy tribute to her late husband, the Hungarian man of letters Joseph Bard, but the various publishers who’d been shown the typescript all made the same response. They wanted to know more about Eileen and less about Joseph. One famous editor asked specifically for details of her sex life. It became clear that she wasn’t averse to writing about herself (indeed was rather gratified that people should want to know); it was simply that unaided the task seemed rather daunting.
So this was my role: to act as catalyst in the creation of Eileen Agar’s autobiography; not to be a ghost writer, but a collaborator who would ask the right questions to set Eileen recalling her past. I interviewed her on tape and transcribed the results, I encouraged her to write short sections of text and I wrote some myself in her style. These various components I then attempted to weave together into a seamless narrative of her life. And what a life it had been. Born into a wealthy English family in Argentina, she had not only decided to be an artist (very unsuitable) but had also then run off to marry a fellow Slade student, much against her parents’ wishes. Her life had been thrown into further disarray when she met and fell in love with Joseph Bard in 1926. They were to remain together, despite flagrant and at times sustained infidelities on both sides, until his death in 1975.
Eileen had led a full life, working hard as a painter, but also playing hard, holidaying with such sacred monsters as Evelyn Waugh, Ezra Pound, Picasso and Lee Miller, and enjoying affairs with the French poet Paul Eluard and the English painter Paul Nash. All this was perfect material for her autobiography, and I learned a great deal about the art world through which Eileen had risen. As I spent more time looking at her work, I began to recognise its fundamental independence of spirit. When the organisers of the 1936 surrealist show had visited her studio, they told her she was a surrealist. Her very proper response was ‘Am I?’ It suited Eileen to exhibit with the surrealists — with such international figures as Max Ernst, René Magritte and Joan Miró, not to mention Salvador Dalì — but she was never really a card-carrying surrealist.
This is the point I have tried to make in the Agar exhibition I have been organising for Pallant House Gallery in Chichester (it opens on 25 October and runs until 15 March 2009). Eileen’s work comes out of the great English Romantic tradition, its origins lying in medieval manuscript illumination, which reached one of its highest points in the work of William Blake. She was heir to the distinctly English gift for fantasy and invention, so apparent in the work of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and didn’t need to draw inspiration from European surrealism. She was always her own boss.
When Eileen was about to move house in the summer of 1987, she told me about a painting in the attic she hadn’t seen for years. It was seven feet long and painted on hardboard. She said it was too big to fit into her new flat, and might have to be sawn in half. I suggested that we had a look at it first. It proved to be a masterpiece of her early period, became the centrepiece of her next exhibition and the Tate bought it. My selection for the Chichester exhibition began with a request for this picture, and I’m delighted to report that ‘The Autobiography of an Embryo’ (1933–4), as it’s called, is now on loan to Pallant House for the show.
There was another early work I’d rediscovered in Eileen’s attic which I hoped to secure for my selection. This is ‘Angel of Mercy’ (1934), a decorated plaster head, and a benign counterpart to her more famous ‘Angel of Anarchy’ (also in the Tate, but too fragile to be lent). Around these two key pieces I built a selection of Eileen’s paintings, drawings and collages which reflect her great strengths as a colourist and inventor of evocative shapes. Eileen’s works nearly all involve collage or the allied strategy of layering, and this became the theme of the show. I also wanted to demonstrate how vital a role abstraction played in her work, and how some of her paintings from the 1960s and 1970s relate to abstract expressionism.
Selecting an exhibition is always a balance between including a few familiar works that art lovers will recognise and trying to locate less-known works which will illuminate the subject rather than confuse it. I decided not to include one of Eileen’s most famous objects, her ‘Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse’, because it could lead all too readily into the area of Surrealism and Fashion, extensively covered by the V&A in a recent exhibition. But I did borrow three exhibits from the Tate, one from the National Galleries of Scotland and another from Leeds. In contrast to these more public works, I managed to unearth a number of collages and drawings from private collections that hadn’t been exhibited for some time (if ever). In addition, Eileen’s family lent an array of pictures, most of which will be unfamiliar even to those who know her work.
The revival of interest in the 1980s inspired Eileen to embark on a late flowering of collages of undiminished inventiveness and wit. It was important to me to end on this high note, partly because I witnessed some of these works being made. The fact that the show is such a fine representation of Eileen’s long career (born in 1899, she lived until 1991) is due entirely to the generosity of lenders. I’m particularly glad to see again two small works which used to hang in her flat and which I always enjoyed: ‘Bug of Genius’ (1943) and the joyful ‘Beach Scene’ (1952), full of dancing figures. It’s a great pleasure now to be able to thank Eileen and celebrate her life with such a glorious display of imaginative art. ❑
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