?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
EILEEN AGAR (1899-1991)
My Muse. Ink on paper collage and found objects on card. 155x211 mm; 6x8 3/8 inches. Signed in ink, lower right recto. 1936.
Provenance: The New Art Centre, London, with the label on the frame back; Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London, with the label on the frame back; Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, with the label on the frame back.
Exhibited: "Objects from a Landscape- Ploumanach and Port-Cros," New Art Centre, London, November 29, 1985-January 11, 1986; "1936 Surrealism: Objects, Photographs, Collages, Documents," Zabriskie Gallery, New York, February 18-April 4, 1986; "Collages Surréalistes," Galerie Zabriskie, Paris, March 22-May 3, 1990.
Agar was born in Buenos Aires, the daughter of a Scottish father and American mother. Educated in Britain as a child, she studied art under Henry Tonks (1862-1937) at the Slade School of Art. Inspired by André Breton's (1896-1966, see lot 142) manifesto, she painted her first surrealist work in 1930. She exhibited with the Surrealists in England and abroad, including at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, where she was the only British woman to be included. Throughout her career, she worked in painting, collage, photography, and sculpture, incorporating imagery from the natural world, found objects and classical art. While she at times rejected the label "Surrealist" she believed in the playful nature of art and gained a reputation of being among the most adventurous and influential artists of the Surrealist movement in Britain.
