institutional
Eileen Agar
(1899 - 1991)
The Happy Breakfast, 1937
Institutional Collection
Eileen Agar (1899 - 1991)
Oil on canvas
Signed
30 x 19.5 cm
Size:
Height – 30cm
Width – 19.5cm
One of the key signatures of Surrealism was the inspired juxtaposition
of collage, and Agar practised this resource with sustained inventiveness.
Although this exquisite small painting does not employ collage as such,
it mimics the formal procedures of collage (the variation of texture, the
juxtaposition of unrelated imagery), with Agar using the wooden end
of the paintbrush to scratch through the paint layers, thus varying the
surface and breaking up the colour. The distinctive patterning, which
alternates geometric chequering with organic star(fish) and flowering
foliage, is typical of the way she built up a complex image from discrete
parts which were eventually resolved into a new and unexpectedly
harmonious unity. The mazy black linearity in the centre of the figure’s
chest recalls the patterns of the black Victorian cut papers she collected
and also the decoration on African bark cloth she used in other works
of the period. The Janus double-profile – the Roman god of entrances
and exits, looking both ways ‚Äì features frequently in Agar’s work of
the 1930s. In fact, she loved the human profile and made innumerable
variations on it through a long career. Happy Breakfast is clearly intended
as a cheerful image and might also allude to the lovers coming and going
in her life at this time: Agar had an affair with the French poet Paul
Éluard and a more long-lasting liaison with Paul Nash, and was touched
in her art by both.
Commentary by Andrew Lambirth, writer, critic and curator who assisted Eileen Agar to write her autobiography
(published as A Look at My Life in 1988) and curated the Agar retrospective exhibition An Eye for Collage
at Pallant House Gallery in 2008.
Eileen Agar was born in Buenos Aires and moved to England as
a child, attending the Byam Shaw School of Art (1919), Brook
Green School of Art (1924) and the Slade School of Fine Art
(1925-6).
In 1929, she left her husband and moved to Paris, where
she associated with Paul Ãluard, Ezra Pound and Andr Breton
(1896’1966).
She held her first solo show in 1933, at London’s
Bloomsbury Gallery, and became a member of the LG in 1934.
Over the next decade her work became increasingly Surrealist,
and she contributed artworks to the 1936 International Surrealist
Exhibition in London.
Agar painted radical works that explored female sexuality and
womanhood. Remarking on her painting Autobiography of an
Embryo (1933’4) in relation to her decision to remain childless,
she explained, âI was more interested in becoming a painter than
in being a motherâ. Her autobiography, A Look at My Life, was
published in 1988.
