A surrealist snap | Eileen Agar at Austin/Desmond
EILEEN AGAR (1899-1991), Rolling Ball, Brittany, 1936, Black and white photograph, 15 x 15 cm, Provenance James Birch Fine Art, London, courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine Art1936 was quite a year for Eileen Agar. In the spring she was visited in her studio by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, who, to her surprise, declared her a surrealist and selected two paintings and five objects for inclusion in the International Surrealist Exhibition they were organising at the New Burlington Galleries in Mayfair, running from June 11 to July 4.
At the opening Salvador Dali famously gave a speech in a deep-sea diving suit, and Dylan Thomas wandered round with a cup of boiled string, asking visitors if they would like it ‘weak or strong’. The show drew approximately 1,000 visitors a day, to see works by the likes of Dali, de Chirico, Duchamp, Ernst, Magritte, Klee, Giacometti, Penrose, Man Ray, Edward Burra, and Paul Nash. If she didn’t quite become an overnight star, Agar’s reputation was greatly enhanced.
After the exhibition was over, she went on holiday to Brittany with her partner Joseph Bard, the expat Hungarian writer, partially to escape the attentions of Nash, with whom she was having an emotionally exhausting affair. The couple were very taken by the rock formations at Ploumanac’h on the north coast, so much so that Agar made a trip to Brest, where she bought a Rolleiflex square-format camera to take pictures of these outlandish and occasionally comic forms, some reminiscent of menhirs or standing stones, others of party hats, and in one case a ‘bum and thumb’. On the holiday she took around 70 photos (or six films’ worth).
The photos of the rocks are now in the Tate collection, and you can view them online . This photograph, the only print from the negative, was taken on the same trip. The origin and purpose of the large globe, made of metal ribs held together with studs, remains obscure, but the location of the photograph is clear. It can be ascertained from the geology and architecture in the background that it was taken on the Plage de Trestraou, a short hop from Ploumenac’h. Is it a surrealist photo? One could claim the globe to be a ‘objet trouve’ and there is a vague sense that the unknown figure behind it (unlikely to be Bard, who had lighter hair) has been captured within it.
Henceforth photography became a new medium for Agar, and she carried her Rolleiflex camera wherever she travelled. In 1937 her good friend Lee Miller took a picture of Agar’s silhouette at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, and you can clearly see the shape of the camera around her waist. After seeing the photograph, Picasso remarked Agar to be ‘pregnant with camera’.
Agar’s photographs, however, were undervalued by their author, and she did not exhibit them until 1976. This one can currently be seen at Austin/Desmond’s exhibition Notes from the Shore (until July 28), alongside pieces by Prunella Clough, John Craxton, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Paula Rego, Julian Trevelyan, Keith Vaughan and others.