Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy review – a fish’n’chips surrealist
Johnathan Jones, The Guardian
May 2021
‘A vintage Pathé newsreel from 1936 is playing on a loop at the Whitechapel Gallery with a commentary so comically steeped in archaic sexism, the “jokes” are hard to decipher. It’s a light item about an artist called Eileen Agar, who has made herself a hat covered in fake seafood, in which she is filmed walking along a London street while people stop and stare, amazed.
It says as much about Britain before the second world war as it does about Agar, whose artistic life the Whitechapel has been reclaimed in a copious exhibition. This was a society in which wearing a mildly eccentric hat was considered outrageous enough to get you on the news. The people who gasp at Agar seem to belong to an ordered, rule-bound Britain that’s hard to imagine now. It’s not the past we’ve been watching in The Pursuit of Love – this actual footage from the 1930s reveals an age too drab to inspire nostalgia.’ […]