Eileen Agar’s Surrealist Sea

Art history is a collaborative project, constantly being written and revised. Artists’ legacies are developed over time by a small army of contributors and shaped by forces beyond art itself. Together they form an unwieldy collective portrait in which significant stories sometimes fall by the wayside. So it’s a joy when old treasures are rediscovered and refreshed and land on your doorstep. One such gem reached me in the form of a colorfully illustrated autobiography by British-Argentinian surrealist Eileen Agar, whose eyes peer out from the swirling, electric-blue collage on the front cover.

The memoir was originally published in 1988, when the artist was 89. After the death of her husband, the Hungarian writer Joseph Bard, Agar created a mountain of written fragments describing their life together. The artist’s great-niece remembers her as “a little bird of paradise, wrapped in a huge red-and-white striped armchair, surrounded by pyramids of colored paper,” and was productive until the end. But Agar had to weave these scraps of information into a narrative fabric. She had originally wanted to focus on her husband’s life, but as beautiful as her memories of him may have been, her friends wisely steered her toward telling her own story. Andrew Lambirth then helped her write the book, seamlessly reproducing her voice to tie the various threads together. “The true poem is not the work of the individual artist,” Agar writes, “it is the universe itself, in which the artist is a kind of sleepwalker.” Published at a time when surrealism was not in fashion, A look at my life was out of print for decades until a renewed institutional interest in her work – not to mention the centenary of Surrealism itself – led to the volume being reissued by Thames & Hudson.

The book makes great beach reading, though not for the usual reasons. Yes, Agar was a friend of Picasso and Ezra Pound, the lover of Paul Élouard and Paul Nash. She lived freely, far from the Victorian mores of her childhood. Her memoir sails from a wealthy childhood in Buenos Aires to high society balls in London’s Belgravia; from life as a newlywed in a thatched cottage in Normandy to hanging out with Pound in Portofino to vacationing with Picasso in Mougins. Agar’s prose is witty and easy to devour, reflecting the creativity of surrealist automatic writing but avoiding the sometimes self-indulgent excesses of that project. What makes this memoir ideal for seaside consumption, however, is the ever-present echo of the ocean in the artist’s life and the starring role of water forms in her work.

Some of the most important scenes in Agar’s story take place against a watery backdrop. In Argentina, it is the “silken coast of Mar del Plata… where the swirling foam made white calligraphic whispers as it receded.” In Europe, she walks the Italian coast with famous poets and frolics on the beach with the French Surrealists, attending gatherings that anticipated the countercultural “happenings” of the 1960s. Later visits to Tenerife in the Canary Islands renewed and rejuvenated her artistic energy, depleted by the destruction of World War II.

From André Breton L’Amour Fou to the films of Jean Painlevé, the Surrealists were obsessed with the amorphous boundaries between the human and marine worlds. Dora Maar’s photographs merged women and crustaceans, while Yves Tanguy wandered along the beach, using whatever came into view as a starting point for his creative expressions. Marine motifs recur throughout Agar’s work and life. “For me, Surrealism draws its inspiration from nature,” she writes, “the sea and the land sometimes play together like man and woman, producing astonishing results.” When she first met Picasso on a beach in the south of France, she collected pieces of debris washed up on the shore and gave them to him “as a tribute.” This use of sea life as a kind of Duchampian readymade comes to the fore in one of her best-known (and perhaps funniest) artworks, “The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse,” which the artist placed on her head like a giant sand dollar, encrusted with pieces of mussels, seaweed, lobster, and other marine debris.

Wherever she went, Agar seemed to develop a creative familiarity with the great figures of her generation—to the point that it almost becomes the book’s weakness. We move briskly through what she describes as a “shopping list of people,” all equally impressive and sometimes difficult to follow. Figures such as Rudyard Kipling, WB Yeats and Sigmund Freud, as well as corporate bosses and Lord and Lady So-and-so, all stroll into the frame of one paragraph and are gone in the next. (Few memoirs end with an index like this one!) This incessant montage of A-listers becomes its own assemblage, a motley crew of fish in Agar’s intellectual ocean. As she says, “My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials, laying them down in overlapping and contrasting ways.” For Agar, surrealist automatism was catalyzed by the collective forces of nature in which she was immersed: the ocean, time, the universe itself.

A look at my life by Eileen Agar in collaboration with Andrew Lambirth (2024) is published by Thames & Hudson and is available online and in bookstores.