A Look at My Life

Book excerpt: Whether dancing on the rooftops in Paris, sharing ideas with Pablo Picasso, or gathering starfish on the beaches of Cornwall, Eileen Agar (18991991) transformed the everyday into the extraordinary. Her legacy as a pioneering figure in the Surrealist movement is firmly established, and her work continues to captivate audiences with its otherworldly beauty and imaginative power. Agars life was no less extraordinary than her art. Here, she traces her life from her birth in Argentina to the late 1980s. She gives an intimate account of very different worlds: grand house parties in Buenos Aires and Belgravia as a young girl give way to la vie bohème in London and Paris, and a peripatetic existence with her lifelong partner, Hungarian writer Joseph Bard. She enjoyed enriching friendships with contemporaries Paul Nash, Ezra Pound, Evelyn Waugh, Gertrude Hermes and Henry Moore, while a summer spent in the South of France with Picasso, Lee Miller and Man Ray had a lasting impact. Agar introduces them and many others into the narrative of her artistic development; above all, it is Agars own unwavering resilience, infectious energy and drive that permeates this compelling memoir. Bringing her work to life in all its vibrancy and variety, this updated autobiography is populated with Agars own personal selection of photographs of family, friends and lovers alongside over fifty colour illustrations of collages, paintings and assemblages spanning her lifes work.