Eileen Agar was a British painter and photographer born

on December 1, 1899 in Buenos Aires Argentina. She was 1 of the

3 daughters of James Agar and Mamie Agar. James Agar was a
businessperson whose sales of agricultural machinery in
Argentina made the family extremely wealthy. Although she was
born in Argentina, the family returned to England for extended
vacations every other year. In 1911, the Agars moved
permanently in London, moving into a fancy house in Belgrave
Square, close to Knightsbridge and next to Buckingham Palace. A
second luxurious home was bought in Scotland for the autumn
holidays after the close of the social season.
Agar's life was typical of a privileged woman. She was
prepared for her intro to society and a good marriage. Educated
at the prestigious Heathfield School, Eileen discovered her talents
of art. Her early interest in art was not only tolerated by her
parents but encouraged as an acceptable pastime for a woman of
the upper class. In her late teenage years, when she decided to
focus less on social convention and make art her life, her
mother Mamie Agar hired a water-color teacher. Eileen attended

classes at the Byam Shaw School of Art in Kensington, spending

long hours perfecting oil painting techniques.
In 1921, she began studying at the Slade School of Art under
Henry Tonks, who was known for his passionate rejection of the
European Modernists and his favoring towards representational
art. In keeping with teaching practice, Agar copied classical busts
and painted from both male and female models. Her progress is
said to have been "respectable but unremarkable." Classmates
included Henry Moore, Gertrude Hermes , Rodney Thomas, and
painter Robin Bartlett. Defying her family in 1925, Agar married
Robin Bartlett, partially to escape parental restrictions.
Both parents of Eileen Agar refused to attend the wedding,
which took place in London's artistic section of Chelsea. Eileen's
American-born mother, one of London's best-known hostesses,
felt her daughter was marrying far beneath her station. Her
father, however, who died a few months later, must have partly
forgiven his misbehaving daughter, as he left her an annual
income of 1,000, a significant sum at the time. The couple
traveled to Paris and Spain, where Eileen Agar first came under

the spell of Goya and El Greco. She soon found, however, that
marriage had its own constraints. In 1926, she divorced from
Bartlett and began her new lifelong relationship with a married
man, Hungarian-born author Joseph Bard.
By 1927, she and Bard were living together in London's
bohemian district of Bloomsbury. After Agar began her
relationship with Bard, she turned away from conventional art and
began developing her own style. Self-Portrait, painted in 1927,
ushered in a new era for her work. Eileen felt she had thrown
away her shackles and started a new life. Her fortune allowed the
couple to travel a lot, and they spent time in Paris and explored
lovely small towns and villages throughout France and Italy. They
met and exchanged ideas with many of the leading avant-garde
writers of the period, including William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound,
Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, who unsuccessfully
attempted to seduce Agar, went on to base one of the characters
on her in one of his novels. In 1929, Agar set up a studio in the
Rue Schoelcher in Paris. There, she met the sculptor Brancusi,

Surrealists Andr Breton and Paul Eluard, and came under the
influence of the Czech painter Foltyn, an abstract Cubist.
By 1930, she and Bard got tired of traveling, and since his
books were increasingly successful in England, they had decided
to live in London. At the time, it was not permitted for an
unmarried couple to live together, so they leased two apartments
in the same building in the unfashionable Earl's Court section of
London. Eileen Agar continued to develop her own artistic style,
which was turning toward surrealism by the mid-1930s. She spent
the summer of 1935 at Swanage, in England, where she met and
became friends with Paul Nash, one of the few British painters
committed to the Surrealist ideas of representation. The two
proved a positive influence on each other. Continuing her interest
with nature, Agar began gathering odd shapes from the beaches,
such as cork, wood, shells, and stone. She also discovered a shellencrusted anchor chain, which Nash called a bird snake and used
in his photomontage entitled Swanage. Attentive to the dynamics
between the sexes, Agar wrote: "The sea and the land sometimes
play together like man and wife, and achieve astonishing results

Agar was one of the few women, and the main British woman,
who came to be recognized as part of the predominantly male
movement. As a movement it may not question the nature of
patriarchy but it at least recognizes its existence," note Grimes,
Collins, and Baddeley.
The fact that desire and sexuality play a pre-eminent role in
much surrealist work, forces an understanding of the presupposed
gender of both artist and audience, a recognition frequently
subsumed in less overtly masculine art Eileen Agar died on
November 7, 1991, and I did my essay on her because I found her
artwork fascinating.

Bibliography
"Agar, Eileen (18991991)." Women in World History: A Biographical
Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia.com, n.d. Web. 8 Jan. 2017.