Original citation: Campbell, Louise. (2012) Surrealism, domesticity and subversion : Eileen Agar at home. Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture, Vol.3 (No.3). pp. 227-246. ISSN 2041-9120 Permanent WRAP url: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/49825/ Copyright and reuse: The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes the work of researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for- profit purposes without prior permission or charge. 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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] http://go.warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Eileen Agar at Home: Domesticity, Surrealism, and Subversion Louise Campbell Louise Campbell is ABSTRACT This article examines the work of Professor in the History of Art Department, Eileen Agar, one of several women to University of Warwick, participate in the 1936 London International and is a specialist in late Surrealist Exhibition, as a patron of modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century design and an originator of remarkable architecture. She has assemblages, costumes, and interiors. In 1932, published widely on Agar, a wealthy, Slade-trained painter and British architecture and modernism, public art in patron of the arts, took possession of a London the postwar period, and studio flat remodeled for her by the architect the studio environment in Rodney Thomas. This place - customized by England and France in the nineteenth and Agar later that decade - was instrumental in twentieth centuries. She Herbert Read's decision to include her in the holds a Senior Fellowship exhibition. The decor of Agar's studio flat, with from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in its dense mosaic of images and objects, British Art for 2011-12 in contrasted with approaches to interior order to complete a book decoration in 1930s England and embodied a on artists' habitats in the twentieth century. critique of both old and new modes of L.E.M.Campbell@warwick domesticity. This article suggests that the .ac.uk domestic interior, with its Victorian associations of privacy and family life, a place redolent of hidden secrets, was of great interest to English Interiors Volume 3, Issue 3 pp 227-246 Louise Campbell Surrealists. It also explores the ways in which Agar - an upper-class beauty whose participation in the Surrealist exhibition fascinated the press - deftly took advantage of the publicity she attracted in order to parody the preoccupation of the contemporary debutante and society hostess with furnishing, dress, and entertaining, and to provide a subversive reconfiguration of it. KEYWORDS: Surrealism, women and fashion, domestic interior, Eileen Agar, the Surrealist studio, modernist design, Rodney Thomas Introduction Herbert Read's provocative essay of 1935 entitled "Why the English Have No Taste" suggested that the Industrial Revolution and Protestantism had encouraged a utilitarian approach to the arts. Capitalism had blighted taste and morals worldwide, suggested Read, but in England — when combined with pressure to conform to a bourgeois norm — it produced an indifference to art and resistance to ideas. While enjoying the material benefits of capitalism in abun- dance, the English paid for this in a degraded physical environment and in what Read termed the "death of the spirit." The English home, he wrote, demonstrated in its full horror a national obsession with goods and social convention (Read 1935, 1938). Read's essay, pub- lished in the Parisian magazine Minotaure, provides a starting point for considering the links between Surrealism and architecture, partic- ularly interior architecture. Recent exhibitions devoted to Surrealism and design have tended to focus on examples from France (Wood 2007; Alison 2010). This article suggests that, in interwar England, with its deep divisions of class, wealth, and privilege, architecture and design assumed a different and arguably greater significance. The extraordinary work commissioned by Edward James for his London home and for Monkton, the Sussex shooting lodge transformed by Dail and the architects Christopher Nicholson and Hugh Casson, is well documented (Coleby 1998; Wood 2007: 205-12). Far less well known is the architectural patronage of the artist Eileen Agar, and the way in which her work and living space facilitated her entrée into Surrealist circles and had a lasting impact on her subsequent career (Figure 1). This article uses archival sources to reconstruct the habitat of Agar, and considers reactions to it in terms of the myths of creativity current in Surrealist circles, the reception of Surrealism by an English public, and the wider significance of the domestic interior in 1930s England. Modern Women, Modern Art Agar belonged to the generation of women who had gained the vote Interiors in 1918 but who, until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, were not able 228 to use it until they reached the age of 30. The art world mirrored such Eileen Agar at Home Image can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/204191212X13470263746951 Figure 1 Exhibitors at the International Surrealist Exhibition, London, 1936 (from: Agar 1988). Agar is seated in the center of the front row. anomalies. The Royal Academy was slow to respond to increasing numbers of female students and practicing artists in the 1920s. Despite the conspicuous showing of women at the 1921 Summer Exhibition (the so-called Flapper Academy), it was 1927 before Laura Knight — although enjoying enormous success — was made an Associate of the Royal Academy and 1936 before she was elected a full Academician (Deepwell 2010: 105-9). In contrast to this slow recognition, women were successfully laying claim to many professions closely connected with the home — housing reform, social work, and interior design. Meanwhile, starting with the introduction of a gossip column in the Sunday Express in 1926, there was close scrutiny of society figures, details of whose clothes, activities, and homes featured in the popular press (Ross 2003: 41). It was during these very years that Agar matured as an artist. And it is in the light of the reconfigured relationship between the private and the public arena that her habitat should be viewed, a habitat which suggests that some women artists regarded the legacy of the Victorian home with as critical an eye as novelists like Ivy Compton- Burnett, and proposed a different kind of framework in which to Interiors conduct their lives (Light 1991). 229 Louise Campbell The design, decoration, and arrangement of Agar's home which was also of course her workplace — reveal the diversity of her practice, her nuanced engagement with modernist design, and the theatricality which accompanied Surrealism's introduction to the English public. Agar's studio flat belonged to the privileged genre of the artist's studio home, something that had been the hallmark of the successful artist in Britain since the 1870s (VValkley 1994). Agar had the confidence conferred by her wealth and social position to commission an architect, to work with him, and then to customize and adapt his design in order to create an environment appropriate to her artistic practice. The commission was part of Agar's patronage of the arts, which included giving funds to Leon Underwood to enable him to travel to the United States in 1925 and subsidizing the publication of The Island, a magazine devoted to art and literature, in 1931 (Neve 1974: 91, 133). Agar's flat provided a place for the private delectation of a collection of objects as well as a venue for meetings and social events, a dualism that Fijalkowski suggests was an important aspect of the Surrealists' use of architecture, providing both a space of poetic encounter and a social space (Fijalkowski 2005: 19, 21). Agar was born in 1899 in Argentina, one of the three daughters of a successful Scottish businessman, and came to live in England with her family when her father retired in 1911. Agar's parents envisaged no career for their daughter, but were persuaded to let Agar attend the Byam Shaw School of Art, then Leon Underwood's Brook Green Academy, and finally in 1921-4 the Slade School of Art (Simpson 2000: 89). Although she disliked the academic nature of teaching at the Slade, she found there the courage to leave her parents' house in Belgrave Square for a flat in Chelsea in 1924. The Slade also introduced her to a fellow student, Robin Bartlett, whom she married in 1925. On her father's death that year, Agar inherited an annual income of £1,000, allowing her to cut free of Bartlett and to go to Paris in 1927 to study art, accompanied by a new partner, the Hungarian writer and editor Joseph Bard. In Paris, Agar took painting lessons with Frantisek Foltyn, a Czech-born artist who had made an intensive study of Cubism (Agar 1988: 85). Foltyn belonged to a loose group of abstract artists who exhibited with Mondrian, Hans Arp, and Sophie Taeuber, and joined the group Cercle et Carre in 1930 and Abstraction-Creation in 1934 (Simpson 2000: 34 n.14).