Exhibited in the 1930s alongside the work of friends Nash, Picasso, Breton and co, Eileen Agar’s singular collages, sculptures and paintings tell their own lyrical story in an eagerly awaited show opening later this month
By a quirk of fate, and museum tastes, the British artist Eileen Agar is still best known for a single sculpture in the Tate collection: a magnetically outlandish male head titled Angel of Anarchy (c1936). Constructed from diamante, osprey feathers, cowrie shells and piratical black satin, it resembles a sort of 3D Arcimboldo. But it has a mate called The Angel of Mercy, which is equally stunning, yet practically never seen outside a private collection.
This monumental head, with its whiskered seashell eyes, stone chin and hair like an outcrop of molluscs, looks like an ancient object dragged from the bottom of the Aegean, sea-bleached and crusted. Yet it also appears startlingly modern. Both sculptures will appear together in a forthcoming survey of Agar’s art at the Whitechapel Gallery, which includes more than a hundred works, from early drawings to late constructions. The revelation of this much-anticipated exhibition will be Agar’s gift for making the past feel as new as today, with an art of evergreen imagination and vitality.
