EILEEN AGAR (BRITISH 1899-1991) §
LEDA AND THE SWAN
£18,900
Auction: 15 JANUARY 2025 FROM 10:00 GMT
Description
signed, pastel and gouache on paper
Dimensions
37cm x 50cm (14 ½in x 19 ¾in)
Provenance
Sandra Lummis Fine Art, London, from whom acquired by Bernard Kelly.
Footnote
Literature:
Lewinski, Jorge, Portrait of the Artist, Photographs by Jorge Lewinski, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2005, illustrated
Eileen Agar is celebrated as one of the great woman Surrealist artists - yet she found the ‘Surrealist’ label a limiting imposition, and resisted stylistic categorisation of her work. Certainly, her oeuvre was genre-bending: across painting, photography, collage, found object assemblage and hat-making, she overlaid and juxtaposed diverse visual motifs to elicit new meaning. Agar was a lifelong beachcomber, and applied the same roving eye in her search for ideas and images. Eclecticism was the only constant.
Agar’s family moved to London in 1911, where she trained at various art schools including the Slade. Here, she met and married fellow student Robin Bartlett, and in 1925 the couple travelled to France and Spain, where she found her academic training upended by avant-garde artistic ideas. She promptly moved to Paris, falling in with André Breton and Paul Éluard. Agar was one of the few women to have work included in the famous 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries in London.
Leda and the Swan is an extraordinary interpretation of a mainstay classical subject. Two heads in profile, like cameo silhouettes rendered in black and creamy off-white, face away from each other. From the mid-1930s until 1944, Agar engaged in an affair with the artist Paul Nash, and swans recur across their love letters. This work might therefore allude to their illicit romance. Contrasting tones meet along edges that are serrated or gentle undulate, creating a visual tension. This is interspersed with nautical imagery, such as the criss-crossing of netting and spirals recalling waves or whirlpools, promising to ensnare.