Family Trio
Eileen Agar (Buenos Aires 1899 - London 1991)
Category
Art / Prints
Date
1930 - 1931
Materials
Woodcut on paper
Measurements
410 x 270 mm
Order this imageCollection
Dudmaston, Shropshire
NT 813721
Caption
‘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!’ Eileen Agar remembered a visit to her studio by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose that led to her being labelled a Surrealist and her inclusion – one of only a few women artists – in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. Throughout her 70-year career, Agar brought together the anarchic tendencies of Surrealism and the abstract qualities of Cubism. Her practice moved seamlessly from drawing, painting and collage to sculpture and photography, drawing on classical art, ancient mythologies and the natural world. Born in Argentina, Agar travelled to England as a young child, studying first under Lucy Kemp-Welch, who instructed her to ‘always have something to do with art’, then at Leon Underwood’s Brook Green School of Art, and later the Slade School of Fine Art. During the 1920s, Agar forged her creative vision in Paris, a crucible of the intellectual avant-garde, where her circle included André Breton, Man Ray and Lee Miller. Agar and her husband Joseph Bard founded The Island journal, ‘dedicated to the plastic arts, poetry and the imagination’. Family Trio featured in the September 1931 issue, during the time Agar was building her ‘womb magic’ theory. She wrote that ‘the importance of the unconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine order over the classical and more masculine order’. The piece is composed of three figures – one representing ancient patriarchy, the central floating feminine form straddling land and sea, and the embryonic child forming in the sea under a crescent moon. Agar was a keen photographer and she made a series of photographs of Ursula and Ernö Goldfinger in their new home, 2 Willow Road, London (Tate collection). She showed three paintings alongside Ernö Goldfinger in the Surrealist section of the Artists International Association exhibition, held in 1937, and her work was included in the Aid to Russia exhibition curated by Ursula Goldfinger at Willow Road. Agar was elected a Royal Academician in 1990 and published her autobiography, A Look at My Life (1988), when she was nearly 90. A copy resides in the book collection at 2 Willow Road.
Summary
Woodcut, Family Trio by Eileen Agar (Buenos Aires 1904 - London 1991), recto inscribed in pencil publ: 'The Island'. / Eileen Agar: Surrealist design 1930., published in The Island, September 1931, p. 63.
Provenance
Lady Labouchere collection.
Marks and inscriptions
Recto, below image: publ: 'The Island'. / Eileen Agar: Surrealist design 1930
Makers and roles
Eileen Agar (Buenos Aires 1899 - London 1991) , artist
References
Conroy, Rachel, Women Artists and Designers at the National Trust, 2025, pp. 208-9