Eileen
Agar

Aileen Agar was born into a very wealthy family in Buenos Aires.
Her father was an Irish businessman and her mother an American. She described her childhood as "full of balloons and St. Bernard dogs". The family returned to Britain when Eileen was ten, sailing from Argentina with an orchestra for entertainment and a cow for access to fresh milk. In London, they lived in a mansion with a ballroom, and sent a Rolls Royce to the Slade School of Fine Arts for their daughter.

Although the artist herself was a representative of high society, she did not seek to follow its rules.
Agar didn't want children and never had any; as a teenager she read about the likelihood of explosive growth in the Earth's population and later recalled breathing a sigh of relief at finding an excuse to be childless.

Eileen noted that the women of her circle were always elegant and looked refined, which was in contrast to other artists - representatives of the bohemian environment, who wore sloppy, paint-stained clothes. Agar herself walked around London wearing a hat of her own made from an overturned cork basket with seashells stuck in it.

Eileen Agar never limited herself to painting, she also created collages, sculptures, photography and made ceremonial hats.

Eileen Agar continued to work into the 1990s (the artist passed away in 1991), never stopping experimenting! After her death, lipstick, pollen and liquid pigment were found in her studio and used as paints in her works. One of the experiments is the sculpture Angel of Anarchy (1936-40), for which Agar used feathers, small shells and drapery and was half a century ahead of Damien Hirst with his inlaid skulls.

Although several of her works were included in a large Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936, Agar herself disliked being included in the Surrealist movement and criticized the objectification of women in that milieu. Women artists were considered to be muses, awakening the fantasies of men, rather than full-fledged creative units. Eileen referred to her art as a mixture of abstraction and surrealism. Nevertheless, the words she used to sum up her life suggest that she was more of a surrealist than she was willing to admit: "I have spent my life rebelling against convention, trying to bring color, light and a sense of mystery to the everyday"