Laura Freeman
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Agar was a surrealist with a little s, not a big S, said her lover and collaborator Paul Nash. A sui generis surrealist, then, belonging to no movement but her own. But how she moved. The first room is dedicated to Agar’s portraits, self-portraits and drawings of the 1920s and early 1930s. They are Picasso-esque and uncertain. It is as if she is trying to speak not just another man’s language, but in another man’s voice.
After 1933 or so it is a different kettle of bouillabaisse. There is a sense of pinwheeling freedom. We follow her into uncharted waters, off the map and over the edge. Two ghoulish heads greet us in glass vitrines. The first is the ‘Angel of Anarchy’ (1936-1940) which gives the show its title. The Angel started as a plaster bust of Bard, given a carapace of doilies and fur, seashells and ostrich feathers, the skull of a seagull and the gemstones from the buckles of Agar’s mother’s evening slippers. This version, lost or destroyed, was remade as a great flamboyant totem. The nose is set with glittering stones, the neck is threaded with Frankenstein seams, a fringe of cowrie shells frames an uncanny face. More stripped back, though no less bizarre, is the ‘Angel of Mercy’ (c.1934) with its dice for a nose, its spiralling snail shell chin and its crown of plaster pebbles and thorns.
It is in Agar’s collages that we truly see the artist at play. She delights in flotsam and jetsam, odds and ends, bits and beachcombing bobs. ‘Fantastic bric-à-brac’, she called it. Bard was a connoisseur and collector of ancient gems and in ‘Precious Stones’ (1936; see p31) she cut his portrait like a Roman cameo in a silhouette snipped from a guide to antique medals and jewels. Elsewhere, her materials are bones and horns, fossils and seaweeds and, in the case of one untitled box made in 1935, a single desiccated seahorse. Agar and Nash used to meet in the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum to look at butterflies and stones. Hers is an Ariel’s Song: ‘Of his bones are coral made/ Those are pearls that were his eyes.’ One of her works, marbled, lagoonish, is called ‘Sea Nymph’ (1950). Agar takes the tradition of Victorian decoupage, flower-pressing and album-making and gives it a turn of the screw. No prim Victorian Miss ever cut and pasted a composition as lawless as Agar’s ‘Untitled Collage’ (1936) with its sinister lacework and squid-like stickers. Even the sycamore seeds start to look like crocodile jaws.
Not all of it is unnerving. ‘Fish Basket’ (1965) is like a lobster trap designed by Matisse. The starfish in ‘Etoiles de Mer’ (undated) seem to shimmy on the shingle. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? Agar in Wonderland.
Upstairs, her black-and-white photographs of rocks at Ploumanach, taken in Brittany in 1936, show that nature needs no intervention to be rendered surreal. Her acrylic paintings of the 1970s feel flat and unsatisfying after the layering and accretions of the collaged works elsewhere. Still, in its richness and strangeness, its wildness and wit, this is a five star(fish) show.
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