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Lot Essay
Held in the same family collection for over 35 years, Wandering Minstrel is a rare and important work painted at the start of the decade that is widely regarded as the highpoint in Eileen Agar’s career. By the end of 1930, Agar had returned to London, having spent three years in Paris with her husband Joseph Bard. There she met both André Breton and Paul Eluard, and experienced the birth of Surrealism first-hand in the work of Max Ernst. This period of experimentation in Paris, in which she also spent time in Picasso’s company and studied painting with the Czech cubist František Foltýn, underpinned the ideas and the style which would colour the artist’s work throughout her prolific seventy-year career.
The present work demonstrates the transitional quality of the early 1930s: ‘In the beautiful and unusual Wandering Minstrel… abstract pattern-making conflicts with representation but is reconciled by lyricism. The parts do not quite cohere and yet the very insubstantiality of the image has a delicate poetry’ (A. Lambirth, op. cit., p. 24). Certainly, the Surrealist movement and its championing of the irrational and the liberation of the mind chimed with Agar’s personal encounters with her own subconscious. She herself observed that it ‘opened up new possibilities in subject matter’ (Eileen Agar, ‘A Note on Painting’ (no date), Tate Archive, TGA 9222/2/3/7, pp. 1-2). Indeed, she was one of only a few female artists to exhibit at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London in 1936, and had friendships and love affairs with some of the movement’s leading figures, Henry Moore and Paul Nash.
However, in characteristic ingenuity, Agar’s Surrealism was not inherently introspective as in the work of her contemporaries such as Paul Klee and Joan Miró, but intertwined with the spiritual essence of the natural world around her that she experienced on the Dorset and Cornish coasts. Laura Smith comments on the artist’s kaleidoscopic synthesis of the mythological, spiritual, and natural worlds: ‘Agar is a card player who holds a deck of cards, asking us to play with her. Her cards are butterflies, fish, birds, sea-shells, leaves and flowers, and she shuffles them and deals them to us, with audacity, provocativeness and vivaciousness, in a kind of orphic homage to the versatility and inexhaustibility of creation’ (L. Smith, Exhibition Catalogue, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2017, p. 8).
In Wandering Minstrel, under a crescent moon, the natural, animal and human kingdoms coalesce towards a truly universal organicism. As the minstrel confronts the viewer with its sun-like head rising high in the moonlit sky, Agar deftly combines her interest in music with her fascination for nature. Clearly, the sun and moon had a significance for Agar: ‘As an artist, the Sun and the Moon have a greater significance for me than the highly rarefied idea of the Holy Trinity. For natural symbolism has a greater emotional appeal to the woman than has religious mysticism’ (Eileen Agar quoted in M. Remy, Eileen Agar: Dreaming oneself awake, London, 2017, p. 35). The variety of surface texture and dynamic pattern-making also reveal Agar’s astonishing handling of paint and materials. Agar was inspired by the different textures and patterns of the creatures and objects she found around her.
Wandering Minstrel is a poetic example of the rhythmic musicality of Agar’s contribution to the British Avant-Garde.
The present work demonstrates the transitional quality of the early 1930s: ‘In the beautiful and unusual Wandering Minstrel… abstract pattern-making conflicts with representation but is reconciled by lyricism. The parts do not quite cohere and yet the very insubstantiality of the image has a delicate poetry’ (A. Lambirth, op. cit., p. 24). Certainly, the Surrealist movement and its championing of the irrational and the liberation of the mind chimed with Agar’s personal encounters with her own subconscious. She herself observed that it ‘opened up new possibilities in subject matter’ (Eileen Agar, ‘A Note on Painting’ (no date), Tate Archive, TGA 9222/2/3/7, pp. 1-2). Indeed, she was one of only a few female artists to exhibit at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London in 1936, and had friendships and love affairs with some of the movement’s leading figures, Henry Moore and Paul Nash.
However, in characteristic ingenuity, Agar’s Surrealism was not inherently introspective as in the work of her contemporaries such as Paul Klee and Joan Miró, but intertwined with the spiritual essence of the natural world around her that she experienced on the Dorset and Cornish coasts. Laura Smith comments on the artist’s kaleidoscopic synthesis of the mythological, spiritual, and natural worlds: ‘Agar is a card player who holds a deck of cards, asking us to play with her. Her cards are butterflies, fish, birds, sea-shells, leaves and flowers, and she shuffles them and deals them to us, with audacity, provocativeness and vivaciousness, in a kind of orphic homage to the versatility and inexhaustibility of creation’ (L. Smith, Exhibition Catalogue, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2017, p. 8).
In Wandering Minstrel, under a crescent moon, the natural, animal and human kingdoms coalesce towards a truly universal organicism. As the minstrel confronts the viewer with its sun-like head rising high in the moonlit sky, Agar deftly combines her interest in music with her fascination for nature. Clearly, the sun and moon had a significance for Agar: ‘As an artist, the Sun and the Moon have a greater significance for me than the highly rarefied idea of the Holy Trinity. For natural symbolism has a greater emotional appeal to the woman than has religious mysticism’ (Eileen Agar quoted in M. Remy, Eileen Agar: Dreaming oneself awake, London, 2017, p. 35). The variety of surface texture and dynamic pattern-making also reveal Agar’s astonishing handling of paint and materials. Agar was inspired by the different textures and patterns of the creatures and objects she found around her.
Wandering Minstrel is a poetic example of the rhythmic musicality of Agar’s contribution to the British Avant-Garde.