Whether dancing on the rooftops in Paris, sharing ideas with Pablo Picasso, or gathering starfish on the beaches of Cornwall, Eileen Agar transformed the everyday into the extraordinary.
Agar’s life was no less extraordinary than her art. In A Look at My Life, 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 boheme 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 Agar’s 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 Agar’s personal selection of photographs of family, friends, and lovers alongside over fifty colour illustrations of collages, paintings, and assemblages spanning her life’s work.
