Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy
Whitechapel Gallery, London
In the summer of 1936, long before London’s Trafalgar Square was colonised by living statues, the resident pigeons were perplexed by the apparition in their midst of a woman in white with a bouquet of roses for a head. Sheila Legge was no mere tourist attraction: dressed as a Dalí painting, she was a living advertisement for the London International Surrealist Exhibition up the road in Mayfair.
A picture of Legge’s performance by the Surrealist woman photographer Claude Cahun features in “Phantoms of Surrealism”, a new archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery highlighting the contributions of 11 women artists to a movement largely dominated by men. Another of the 11 was Eileen Agar (inset), whose 70-year career is celebrated downstairs in the major survey “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy” (until 29 August).
