Viva Lewes Issue #128 May 2017

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The Old Forge Spring Open House visit a wild spring garden & enjoy the work of 15 professional artists and makers 2 weekends April 29-30 & <strong>May</strong> 6-7 Open 10am - 6pm christian funnell sarah gamble sarah lock spring upholstery camper knits emily jolley carol butler susan ashworth joy fox victor stuart graham jonathan alden gabrielle vary hannah downton alva funnell rebecca callis cream teas - everyone welcome www.theoldforgeopenhouse.com instagram: theoldforgeopenhouse The Old Forge South Heighton BN9 0JH card payments taken
ON THIS MONTH: ART Eileen Agar Bride of the Sea In Eileen Agar’s autobiography, A Look at My Life, a chapterheading asks: ‘Am I a Surrealist?’ It was a question that had been causing her mild bemusement for over half a century, since examples of her work had appeared in the International Surrealism Exhibition which opened at the New Burlington Galleries in June 1936. Agar commented: ‘one day I was an artist exploring highly personal combinations of form and content, and the next I was calmly informed I was a Surrealist.’ Perhaps Agar was one of the artists Conroy Maddox had in mind when he refused to take part in the exhibition, ‘because many of the British artists weren’t Surrealists at all.’ Eileen Agar resisted all labels, and, though subject to obvious influences, her work remained firmly sui generis. The art critic Andrew Lambirth, who co-authored Agar’s autobiography, described her as ‘a painter of playful seriousness’. That sounds about right. Certainly, her relaxed attitude to both her life (‘I’ve enjoyed life, and it shows through’) and her numerous loves (‘I just sleep with them if I want to. I don’t do it otherwise’) suggest that the Surrealist issue didn’t cause her many sleepless nights. Bride of the Sea is a one-room show devoted to Eileen Agar that runs at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings until 4th June. The exhibition is one of the gallery’s ‘In Focus’ series, in which a work from the Jerwood collection (in this case, the 1969 Pigeon Post) is displayed alongside loans from public and private institutions. So, for example, her portrait of Dylan Thomas from the Tate is supplemented by photographs from the Tate’s Agar archive. The inspired selection of work has a twofold purpose. Firstly, thematic links are explored. So Bride of the Sea (1979) is complemented by Butterfly Bride (1936). The Jerwood’s proximity to the sea is referenced by Fisherman (No. 100 in the 1958 London Group Show, priced at £60). I suppose the photographs of Eileen Agar feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square, Venice that are in the Tate archive would have provided a rather too obvious connection with the keystone painting Pigeon Post. Secondly, there are excellent examples of Agar’s work at all the crucial stages of her artistic development: the revival inspired by her discovery of Tenerife in the early 1950s after the years of depressed wartime inactivity (‘on the whole the war did not inspire me, and I longed to get it over and done with’), the stylistic reinvention of the 1960s (‘In 1965 I found inspiration in a new medium – acrylics. I have never gone back to oil since.’) Eileen Agar published her autobiography when she was eighty eight, but her story is certainly not an example of that comforting delusion: ‘you’re never too old’. The picture that gives the exhibition its title: Bride of the Sea, was painted in the year Agar reached her eightieth birthday on December 1st, 1979. She wrote: ‘Ridiculous! I feel more like fifty and I had no desire to celebrate the event. There were many more important things to do.’ David Jarman Pigeon Post, 1969 © The Estate of Eileen Agar, The Bridgeman Art Library 41
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Viva Lewes Issue #128 May 2017

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