SURREALIST TEXTILE OBJECTS: EILEEN AGAR
Image: British painter and photographer, Eileen Agar.
By Deborah Nash
Who would not want to meet the Surrealist artist Eileen Agar (1899 – 1991)? Born in Buenos Aires to a Scottish father selling windmills and an Anglo-American mother who was heir to a biscuit company, Eileen Agar was destined for a life of eccentricity and adventure from the get-go. When her parents returned to England, they travelled with a cow and an orchestra to provide them with milk and music. Later, when Eileen married, her husband said that she was always “trying to do something in a way that cannot be done, such as making love standing up in a hammock”.
Several Eileen Agar paintings are on display in Tate Modern and her Surrealist object Angel of Anarchy was recently included in Surrealism Beyond Borders. This sculpture of a larger-than-life plaster head enveloped in fabrics and found materials has both a raffish and unsettling air. Is it representing some sadomasochist game with its silk blindfold and gagged mouth? Or is it some revolutionary that has been guillotined at its stitched leather neck and stashed away as an object of devotion? Concealed by luxury wrappers embroidered with Chinese motifs, strung with strings of beads and cowrie shells, pinned with ostrich and osprey feathers – reputedly from her mother’s wardrobe – Agar’s Angel is international in character; this head comes from faraway lands.
Image: Angel of Anarchy 1936-40, Eileen Agar © The estate of Eileen Agar. Image courtesy of Tate
Many are the responses, eulogies and interpretations of Angel of Anarchy. It is one of the favourite pieces of the director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson: “It anticipates, in its bodily metamorphoses and cultural syncretism, the fierce and erotic Afro-futuristic sea goddesses of Ellen Gallagher and Wangechi Mutu.”
Image: Fish Circus, Eileen Agar © The estate of Eileen Agar
Art historian and curator Patricia Allmer has claimed that, “The angel is one of the key symbols of women surrealists [standing for] hybridity and becoming”, and as such enabled women surrealists to “challenge patriarchy” and “to overcome its own blindness” towards women.
But I prefer the artist’s summary:
“I have spent my life in revolt against convention, trying to bring colour and light and a sense of the mysterious to daily existence.”