艾琳·艾加认领

Figures in a Garden was originally exhibited under the title October and later, after some additions were made to the canvas, The Dark Wood. It shows two figures dressed in elaborately decorated masquerade costumes. They stand against a dark leafy background and their brightly coloured bodies are fragmented as though caught in the shadows.Agar had studied art at the Slade School in London before moving to Paris, where she was befriended by the artists Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henry Moore (1898-1986), Man Ray (1890-1976), the novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) and the poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Two years later she returned to London and was hailed as an important figure by the new Surrealist movement. Her work at that time included collage and sculpture which incorporated found objects.In 1965, Agar began to use acrylic paint. She liked its ease of handling, the speed with which it dried and the fact that it was a new medium. 'After four hundred years of oil painting, I felt artists should move on to something else' she said. 'It was a period of constant experiment, of testing the effects of new pigments, new colour combinations … In acrylics, I had found what I considered to be an ideal medium, and I wanted both to master it and to stretch it.' (Simpson, Gascoyne and Lambirth, p32).In the late 1960s, she was asked to produce ten large canvases for a major retrospective exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in 1971. She used the opportunity to develop her use of this newly adopted medium. The large colourful canvases were constructed by laying amorphous patches of colour on the canvas in a manner reminiscent of her earlier collages. They played with illusion in much the same way, tricking the eye into seeing more than is placed before it.In his catalogue introduction to the exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, Roland Penrose (1900-1984), an artist, collector and champion of the Surrealist movement in Britain, noted his reaction to these paintings:"I find that I am led into deep sensations of time and space in some recent paintings where sharply delineated forms hover in darkness so that the blackness that surrounds them is alive in its own right and others where transparent forms with softer edges merge together creating new volumes and a magic sense of depth, a vortex of colour which carries the eye with rhythmic motion into a realm which transcends our limited field of observation". (Chloe Johnson)

Eileen Agar often made collages and in this picture she added a leaf to a gouache. As in her painting Autobiography of an Embryo, Agar was exploring the themes of life, death, the passing of time and seasonal cycles. She uses a single, simple image to encompass a range of universal themes. Although it looks abstract, the collage shows a mechanical reaper cutting a crop on a farm, a metaphor for the end of life. She described and explained the collage in 1978:"The leaf came from a 'dry garden', a book I have which dries and preserves leaves pressed between special paper. It was dead originally when used for the collage, but it was one I must have picked myself. The whole watercolour was intended to suggest a symbolic reaper with the flailing movement of the scythe-like concentric forms. The title indeed relates to time, the seasons and especially death the Great Reaper. The dead leaf being the hub of the whole.Time is expressed more especially by the large black sun, which at the bottom left hand corner is sinking. The little triangle suggests a country roof and the two black spots two people riding the machine. There is also the outline of the back of a cow, with the small forelegs implanted on either side of the stem of the leaf." (Conversation of 29 July 1978, quoted in Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1976-78, p.27.The painting is mounted on blue paper and the frame was a 'found' object painted in silver and gold. Although the artist denied that the framing had any 'special significance' she agreed that the mount and frame work with the painting to evoke secondary associations, for example the blue and gold can be linked to the sky and the sun.The picture was first exhibited in 1965 when Marlborough Fine Art reviewed the avant-garde of the 1930s in the exhibition Art in Britain 1930-1940. (Chloe Johnson)

Between 1928-30 Eileen Agar lived in Paris where she met Max Ernst (1891-1976), Joan Miró (1893-1983), and André Breton (1896-1966), among others. Although her acquaintance with the leading figures of European Surrealism manifested itself in the Surrealist strategies apparent in her own work during the 1930s, she did not subscribe to the radical politics of her European counterparts. In 1936 she was invited by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose to exhibit work at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London. The notoriety of the exhibition raised Agar's public profile considerably and, in 1937, she was one of the few artists asked to submit work for the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.In the spring of 1939 Agar and her partner, Joseph Bard, moved to the vicinity of Toulon in the South of France. According to the artist, one day, while watching fishermen haul in their nets at Carquieranne, a small fishing port nearby, she noticed a Greek amphora broken into two pieces caught in one of the nets. This amphora, which she acquired from the fisherman, forms the central element of Marine Object. She had found the crustaceans and flotsam applied to the amphora two years earlier on a beach near Mougins, Côte d'Azur. On the base of the assemblage is a ram's horn that she had picked up in Cumberland. Describing the making of Marine Object as 'short work', Agar added, 'though it took me and the amphora a long time to attempt such a conjunction!' (Agar, p.144).Agar had collected seemingly unremarkable ephemera found on the seashore and in various publications since childhood, but it was only in the mid 1930s that she began to incorporate these objects into her work. The surrealist practice of transformation of found objects through unexpected juxtapositions was for Agar, like collage, 'a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence' (quoted in Agar, p.147). Discussing the ephemerality of her assemblages and those of other Surrealists, Agar commented that the objects had been found 'at the behest of chance and went that way also' (Agar, p.140). While many of Agar's assemblages were made for a particular event, it is not known if Marine Object was. (Toby Treves)

Eileen Agar painted this small portrait of the poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) seven years after his death from a sketch she had made more than twenty years earlier. In March 1962 Agar wrote about the first time she met him (Chamot, Farr and Butlin, p.6). It had been in either 1938 or 1939, when he had arrived with the writer and poet David Gascoyne (b.1916), halfway through a dinner party Agar was hosting."Dylan (then about 25 I believe) sat on the floor and began reciting very lively limericks. Suddenly all the lights went out - a fuse - and when they had come on again the whole mood of our rather dull party had changed. It had come alive with the advent of the two poets. This is when I made a sketch of Dylan, from which, after much meditation and many years had passed, I painted (very quickly) the head now in the Brook Street Gallery" (Agar quoted in Chamot, Farr and Butlin, pp.6-7).Agar developed this style of painting from her experiments with automatism, the technique of painting spontaneously in an attempt to tap into the unconscious. Ultimately, she found 'the process of automatic artistic creation' rather unsatisfactory. She explained, 'I am suspicious about the whole idea of working from dreams. I find that daytime dreams can be inspiring, but not night-time ones - they are too confusing. My own method is to put myself in a state of receptivity during the day' (Agar quoted in Simpson, Gascoyne and Lambirth, p.26). She also found the technique associated with automatism, which involved dribbling oil paint and lacquer onto the canvas from a height, left too much to chance effects. She preferred to guide the paint and achieve a calligraphic style. (Chloe Johnson)