Eileen Agar

 

Eileen Agar - The Sleep Walkers, 1979-81

"My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting."
– Eileen Agar, 1988

Eileen Agar - Glove Hat, 1936

Surrealism has been much on my mind of late having visited the Leonora Carrington exhibition in Paris (here), and Schiaparelli: Art is Fashion exhibition (to be featured in a future post), at the V&A Museum again. In that last exhibition is one of Eileen Agar's surreal hat designs (above). Agar would most certainly have made the acquaintance of both Carrington and Schiaparelli as they all moved in the small circle of Surrealists active in Paris in the 1930s. This exhibition takes place across town on Cork Street and features a series of Agar's paintings and collages. Agar was known for showing at the Redfern Gallery further along Cork Street (here), but that gallery appears to be undergoing refurbishment or has sadly closed entirely as Alison Jacques now controls Agar's estate. Nonetheless I really enjoyed this small show of Agar's works created over a 30 year period especially the works in the first gallery space here, some of which although painted appear to be of elements stencilled and collaged together. This is all part of Agar's personal artistic language in which she combined surrealism abstraction and to a lesser extent figuration. ‘Abstract art and Surrealism were the two movements that interested me most, and I see nothing incompatible in that, indeed we all walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other surreal – it is point and counterpoint,’ she states. Less is made of Agar's skills as a colourist and the interesting tensions of contrasting vivid and sombre elements in the colour palette within her works. Nature features strongly in her imagery as she drew inspiration directly from whichever environment she happened to be in. Elements such as flowers shells, birds and facial profiles from landscapes as diverse as Cornwall, Tenerife and the Lake District can all be found in these vibrant paintings. Less successful in my opinion were the later works from 1985 in the back gallery known as the 'Rock' series taken from photographs of her visits to Ploumanac’h, Brittany. This is a landscape made famous for its wind sculpted pink granite rock formations along the coastline. They are a range of strongly sculptural, amorphous objects resembling figures, animals and faces. They are fairly representational, and the technique and colours in which they are executed didn't really move me as much as the earlier pieces where Agar lets her creativity, memory and imagination dictate the imagery.

3 Totems, 1964

Robotics, 1978

Untitled (Figures/Faces), 1972

Untitled (Four Forms), 1973

Profile, 1979

Man In Nature, 1972

Sleeping Sickness, c. 1960

People in a Wood, c.1968

The Sleep Walkers, 1979-81

The Sea (The Coast at Eastbourne), 1950

Shells and Starfish, 1957

Untitled, 1969

The Swimming Pool, 1979

Study for Marine Sculpture, 1984

Untitled (Rock Shapes), c.1936

Rock 2, 1985

Rock Series, 1985

Rock I, 1985

Rock 12, 1985

Bum and Thumb Rock Ploumanac’h, 1985

Rock 3, (Hidden Lovers of Ploumanac’h 1), 1985

Hidden Lovers of Ploumanac’h 2, 1985

Eileen Agar

until 25th July

Alison Jacques Gallery

22 Cork Street

London

W1S

Matisse 1941-1954

 

Henri Matisse - Sorrows of the King, 1952 (detail).

"I have attained a form filtered to its essentials" - Henri Matisse.

The second trip to Paris of the year so far, yielded what might very well qualify as the exhibition of the year. Matisse 1941-1954 examines the prolific later years of the artist's output when, despite failing health and having undergone a near-fatal operation for intestinal cancer in 1941 that left him physically weakened, his work underwent a dramatic reinvention or "blossoming" as he described it. Matisse had left Paris, relocating to the south of France, and as well as painting, adopted a radical new language in his practice cutting into gouache-painted papers to accommodate his serious health issues and confinement to a wheelchair. He found a new visual vocabulary by taking up the scissors, creating a wonderful series of colourful collages elevating the status of the technique in the process. This exhibition was created by the team at Centre Pompidou but is presented in the vast space of the Grand Palais. It is presented chronologically, starting small with Matisse having moved to an apartment at the Régina hotel in Nice. We see some still life paintings from the period and a series of paintings of posed models as well as a rediscovered love of drawing in which Matisse obsessively draws the same motifs- reclining women, vases of flowers, faces repetitively. Each time he is refining the line and composition, paring everything down to the barest essentials. In 1944 he was asked to make a book about colour, the next series of works encountered in the exhibition are the Jazz collages for this book project which stand out like vivid shimmering shards of colour in the darkened gallery space. It was such a treat to see these original collages as well as the published versions. the strong, graphic shapes and punchy colour combinations unite to create something particularly special that does indeed evoke the liveliness of jazz music. After a series of air raids on Nice, Matisse decamped to the hills of Vence further inland in 1943 where he stayed until 1948. Here the paper cut-outs became larger in scale occupying whole walls of his bedroom from floor to ceiling, as he grew bolder and more ambitious with the technique. New paintings and drawings were also created, simplified forms in vibrant colours and in stark contrast, a series of bold black and white drawings which occupy the next galleries in the exhibition. During this period Matisse was invited to create designs for a chapel in Vence and threw everything into this project designing the priests' vestments, stained glass window panels, furniture and decorated ceramic tiles. The Chapelle Du Rosaire was completed and consecrated in 1951 with Matisse declaring - "this work has taken me four years of exclusive and diligent work, and it is the result of my entire working life. Despite all its imperfections I consider it to be my masterpiece." Designs for this project fill the next galleries in the exhibition and do inspire a quiet sense of reverence and spirituality in the visitor. It is plain to see why the artist considered his work on the chapel to be his magnum opus. These works lead on into the next section of the exhibition which feature more monumentally scaled collages such as the Tate's L’Escargot, and Acanthes (Acanthus), before we are lead into another darkened, circular space full of large simplified, gestural portrait drawings where Matisse reduces elements down even further with one portrait consisting of just seven brushstrokes. The exhibition concludes on a high with even more of the huge paper-cut collages - La Tristesse du Roi (The Sorrow of the King), Zulma, Danseuse Créole (Creole Dancer) and the Nus Bleus (Blue Nudes), truly an embarrassment of riches. These collages are a master class in colour, form and line, a glorious end-of career reinvention and joyous late flourishing, created on an immersive scale redefining the parameters of art. There are significant loans from private collections, as well as national and international institutions bringing together 300 pieces including major ensembles from the artists' prolific late period. There have been some very similar shows to this in the past which look at this late period in Matisse's life or his collages in particular (here), but none have gone into this depth, or put together elements of the whole gamut of his entire oeuvre - paintings, drawings, prints, textile designs, stained glass, graphic design and original collages from the period on such a scale as this. It is a magnificent blockbuster exhibition, full of hits (paintings as well as collages), and is almost overwhelming in scale, but an absolute joy and privilege to have witnessed.

Matisse 1941-1954

until 26th July

Grand Palais

Square Jean Perrin 

17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower 

75008 Paris