Eileen AgarAngel of Anarchy 1936-40

The blindfolded Angel of Anarchy is loosely based on an earlier painted plaster head. Agar stated that with this new work she wanted to create something ‘totally different, more astonishing, powerful ... more malign’. It suggests the foreboding and uncertainty that she felt about the future in the late 1930s. Believing that women are the true Surrealists, Agar wrote: ‘the importance of the unconscious in all forms of Literature and Art establishes the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order.’