Eileen Agar

Eileen Forrester Agar was born on 1 December 1899 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a Scottish father and an American mother. The family sent her to England as a child, and she was educated at English schools including Heathfield in Ascot. She began formal art training at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London around 1919, then studied under the sculptor Leon Underwood at his Brook Green School of Art in 1924. She went on to study part time at the Slade School of Fine Art, under Henry Tonks, from 1925 to 1926.

Between 1928 and 1930 Agar lived in Paris, where she studied with the Czech painter Frantisek Foltyn and met figures including Picasso, Man Ray, and Ezra Pound, an immersion that pushed her work toward abstraction and, soon after, Surrealism. Back in London, she became associated with the British Surrealist circle around Paul Nash and Roland Penrose, and in 1936 Read and Penrose selected three paintings and five objects of hers for the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, where she was the only British woman included. She exhibited regularly over the following decades at the Redfern Gallery in London and continued to develop her collage and object based practice.

Late recognition followed a long working life: the Commonwealth Institute gave her a retrospective in 1971, and in 1988, the year the Royal Academy elected her a Royal Academician, she published a memoir, A Look at My Life. Eileen Agar died on 17 November 1991 in London, two weeks before what would have been her 92nd birthday. A small number of secondary sources give her death date as 7 November 1991, but the weight of institutional sources, including Tate, Britannica, and the Royal Academy, supports 17 November.

Agar's critical reputation has moved from that of a marginal Surrealist footnote to a central figure in modern British art. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art gave her a retrospective in 1999 that traveled to Leeds City Art Gallery, and in 2021 the Whitechapel Gallery in London mounted Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, described as the largest exhibition of her work to date, with more than 150 pieces on view. Reviewing that show, Laura Cumming in The Guardian and Ben Luke in the Evening Standard both wrote favorably of the exhibition, describing Agar as an underappreciated modernist figure with a distinctive artistic voice. The recurring critical theme is reassessment: a woman Surrealist whose long career and formal range, from oil painting to photography and assemblage, were underrepresented in the standard Surrealist canon until relatively recently.

Agar's auction market is thin relative to her museum standing, with results concentrated in the last decade. Her current auction high is The Muse Listening, a 1940 sculpture, which sold for USD 148,300 at PIASA in Paris; the exact sale date has not been independently confirmed in the sources available. That result followed a run of rising prices, including a work, Rite of Spring, that sold at Christie's London on 9 March 2022 for GBP 81,900, well above its estimate and then a record for the artist. Secondary market reporting also references a sale of roughly EUR 136,600 (about GBP 115,000) said to exceed that 2022 Christie's result; this may be the same PIASA sale reported in a different currency, but the exact date could not be independently confirmed and should be treated with caution.

There is no catalogue raisonne of Agar's work, and authentication runs through the estate's gallery representatives, including the Redfern Gallery in London and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. Some older auction catalogues have printed her birth year as 1904 rather than 1899, an established misprint rather than evidence of a different artist, and it is a useful reminder to check dates and provenance carefully against institutional sources such as Tate or the Royal Academy. Her auction record is recent and built on a small number of high-value sales, so any single result, including the PIASA sale of The Muse Listening, should be read against a thin trading history rather than as a stable trend line. Renewed museum attention, especially the 2021 Whitechapel retrospective, appears to be a meaningful driver behind the market's recent strength.