Encountering Biodiversity Down Below

The most captivating section of the Surrealist bestiary is by far its underwater menagerie. Here, visitors are treated to a marvelous display of creatures from the benthic to the littoral, delivering an invitation to plumb the depths of the imagination. Within this realm it is especially the interwar works featuring thalassic fauna which are a sight to behold, despite having garnered little attention for their exaltation of the marine. As a reflection on representations on biodiversity in art, this contribution considers the breadth of marine species highlighted in one work by British Surrealist, Eileen Agar (1899—1991). Much of her work relates to the natural world, especially the sea as an ecosystem and all the life within it, referred to here as the marine. This discussion aims to briefly present imbrications of scientific and esthetic representations of these faunae, where it is possible to reflect upon encounters between Surrealist gathering and research laboratories in the 1920s and ‘30s in the pursuit of a turn towards an anti-ocularcentric, marine-life based perspective. 

These two decades coincided with a scientific trend that centered a rebirth of Lamarckianism, pre-Darwinian theories established by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) which presented a recognition of the impact of environment on evolutionary adaptation that tie into the importance of onsite, field-research-focused observation in the biological sciences.[1] James Leo Cahill describes that this approach to research led the scientist “to move beyond the walls of the anatomist’s cabinet, gallery and laboratory to consider the natural world from an ecological perspective.”[2] Similarly, these artists ventured out into nature, especially the seaside, to conduct scientific inquiry to gather specimens and return to their studio-laboratories for their work. Concurrently, trauma was continuing to resonate throughout Europe following the Great War — a conflict described as an assault on the senses. These artists’ use of marine fauna — beings which often employ alternative modes of perception — provided a new perspective of the world to help navigate a changed society.

Eileen Agar’s Evolving Hat

Agar was an instrumental figure within the British Surrealist group and can be counted as one of its earliest members, having participated in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Her œuvre consists of photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, assemblages and sculptures which convey her connection to the natural world, especially the marine. The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (henceforth Ceremonial Hat) is one of Agar’s most iconic works and particularly exemplifies biodiversity and the interface between surrealist gathering and Lamarckian evolution and onsite observation. This consideration of Agar’s wearable sculpture features an overview of its inherently biological nature stemming from its evolutionary nature and its ability to expand and elevate vision, providing an alternative scopic regime. 

Image

Ceremonial Hat entered the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection in London as a donation from Agar’s niece following the artist’s passing. It is a fanciful sartorial assemblage which was initially conceived in 1936 but would go on to metamorphize for the remainder of the hat’s — and Agar’s — life.[3] 

Despite its transformations over the years, certain elements have nevertheless been steadfast. This wearable sculpture has always featured a hat base with aquatic creatures and other nature-related ornaments adorning its top. Based on photographic evidence dating from 1936, 1948, 1991 and 1993, the hat underwent significant decorative transformations which reflect the Lamarckian evolutionary nature of Agar’s artistic approach and as an adaptation to her own environment, with said changes manifesting in the form of a rich diversity of creatures which would go on to inhabit its surface. This environmentally adaptive element is especially evident in the images from the 1940s where a chin strap is added, which suddenly lent it a military helmet-like quality, reflecting Agar’s own anxiety about the Second World War. The next known image dates to the early 1990s, and the strap had disappeared, with the London Blitz but a faded memory.

Considering the structural composition of the work, its piecemeal construction directly connects to concepts evoking collage, with its elements affixed onto the base with glue and arranged together, with the resulting effect creating a resonating dialogue. Assembled in what would go on to transform over time, Agar adapted the piece to different eras of her life. As Elza Adamowicz states, “collage effectively anchors surrealist activities in the real thanks to the ‘reality effect’ of its processes, which unmask, critique and renew the perception of utilitarian reality and modes of representation and expression.”[4] Ceremonial Hat is exemplary of Agar’s bringing together of surrealist gathering in a research laboratorial context that together are able to help critically challenge anthro-ocularcentrism. The animals found here possess a privileged vantage point due to the elevation inherent to being posed atop the wearer’s head. Their own modes of sensing, many of which are typically denied to the human, contribute to a questioning of the hierarchy of modes of sensing, which has historically placed retinal vision at the top.

Known for her beachcombing activities which brought about fortuitously marvelous trouvailles and treasures that she would then keep in her studio, which served as her laboratory for experimentation, until she felt compelled to conscript the elements, calling upon the works in the service of surrealist subversion of vision. In the case of Ceremonial Hat, this allowed her to exercise some sort of Darwinian control over the hat’s evolution, which morphed from tall and rather vertical to a wider, more horizontal aspect at the end of its evolutionary life. The hat inherently remained the same, despite having gone through remarkable physical changes. As Rosalind Krauss summarized, “sculpture is a medium peculiarly located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing.”[5] This tension, she says, is what gives it its power, which allowed the hat to remain itself and still evolve. It is a single moment over the span of many moments, which unite to form Ceremonial Hat’s perpetual evolution. 

Furthermore, Agar was known for modifying her surroundings, which facilitates the understanding of the metamorphization of a work which was in Agar’s possession until she died. “Throughout the thirties my studio transformed itself, it seemed at the blink of an eye, one day suggesting Magritte, the next de Chirico […] I was collecting and storing […] surrounding myself with raw material which could be transmuted into paintings and objects […] the décor changed like sea-wrack cast up by the tide.”[6] Campbell describes, “Agar employed a collage-like approach and the effect was improvised and ephemeral rather than immaculately crafted and luxurious. The interiors […] were thus gradually reconfigured by Agar in a way that provided an extension of her practice as a Surrealist.”[7] Agar embraced evolution as artistic methodology and used her studio-laboratory to execute these transformations.

The hat’s original conception consisted of a base made of a cork basket found in St Tropez. She then inverted it, painted it blue and covered it “with fish net, a lobster’s tail, a starfish and other marine objects.”[8] However, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s conservation report shortly after the 1993 accession, the hat “is constructed on a cork bark base painted in blue and yellow and decorated with a large orange coloured plastic flower, a blue plastic star, assorted shells, two varieties of coral painted in green and pink, two star fish, twists of paper, a large glass bead, a piece of jigsaw puzzle, a piece of bark from a plane tree and a large fish bone.”[9] These incongruous descriptions indicate a prominent difference between the hat’s first and final versions, adding to its biodiversity, despite not all specimens being the actual animals themselves but rather imitation in wood or other materials. In addition to the written descriptions, there are dated pictures allowing the observation the object’s evolution over time. In images dating around 1936, the hat is shown soon after it was first made. It has considerable verticality, though it is difficult to determine the details due to the lack of image clarity. Neither lobster nor starfish are clearly distinguishable, only two shells, or perhaps a dried sea sponge or other tubular-shaped sea creature capable of adding gravity-defying height.

This twelve-year-old version sports a chin strap made of fishing net and features bird feathers, a starfish, seashells and a carved basket carrying a wooden fish and lobster. Agar was featured on-screen several times in 1948. She appeared on television in August with fellow British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) and at the end, the host compared her practice to that of a scientist.[10] She appeared in October on a program hosted by fashion historian and keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, James Laver, where she attempted to create a new hat live on air but featured her Ceremonial Hat instead due to a lack of adequate materials.[11] Another instance was for a British Pathé news reel program, "New Pictorials" which aired in December where Agar strutted down a London high street in her hat, catching people’s eyes and turning heads. The narrator describes it as “eighteen inches high and eighteen inches wide, with lobster, tiger fish, a prawn, seashells, marine flowers and a starfish.”[12] It also had tall feathers, an egg, silk foliage and a dart inserted into the end of a seashell. The pictures from October show that same shell, with no dart, indicating it had been added between October and December 1948, narrowing the hat’s evolutionary transformation to a span of just a few weeks. 

A 1991 picture of Ceremonial Hat, seen for the first time in polychrome, displays its vibrant, technicolor details, though its plane has shifted from vertical to horizontal. At 92 years old, this modification suggests that Agar had become less daring, and as she progressed in her career felt less of a need for the periscopic sentinel or felt less of a need to distinguish herself by sticking her head up above the parapet now that the wars were long over. Indeed, 43 years later, the feathers, chin strap, lobster, fish, basket, egg and the shell-dart have disappeared without a trace, with this version reflecting a complete metamorphosis. 

This final version looks similar to the previous image, with slight changes such as the addition of plane tree bark and fishbone as a return of vertical elements. The V&A’s catalog image can be viewed here, and according to their conservation report, colleagues from the Natural History Museum identified many of the final iteration of the hat’s species and their respective habitats, listed here below, and were 

likely to have been collected in the south of France along the Mediterranean coastline.

Mytilus edulis (edible mussel), worldwide distribution 
Neptunea despecta (Neptune's whelk), Arctic seas 
Callista cf chione (smooth callista), English Channel to Mediterranean 
Cerithium vulgatum (common cerith), Mediterranean 
Venerupis pullastra (carpet shell), Norway to North Africa 
Asterias sp. (red starfish) 
Ophioderma sp. (brittle star).

The fish bone was identified as from Solea solea, the common sole found around the British and Norwegian coasts and in the Mediterranean. Quercus suber (the cork oak) is also a native tree of the Mediterranean region. Platanus hybrida (the London plane) is a garden hybrid. It is not found in the wild but is grown throughout Europe. However, it is said not to fare well in the extreme north or south. The piece of plane tree bark used on the hat to support the fish bone may therefore not have been collected in the South of France and would seem from the evidence already discussed not to be part of the original form of the hat.[13]

The specified geographic distribution of the various species invites an additional consideration of methodologies of Surrealist gathering practices centering biodiversity and connecting to objective chance. Beachcombing was a favoured pastime during her countless trips to the seaside across Europe, collecting different items that had washed up on the shore, either natural or manmade. 

Agar’s studio was filled with objects found while she was out in nature. “I’m very fond of putting different things together to make a totally new object. I used to have a big box full of things that I’d collected and one day I’d look for something and find it, you see, what I wanted.”[14]  They serve as visual accounts and physical manifestations of her life from a time and place, as recounted in her memoir of a 1937 holiday where she displayed her littoral trouvailles to Picasso in Mougins. It was an activity that served as both source material for her artwork and provided souvenirs commemorating significant moments in her life.

Ceremonial Hat evolved over time with a push from Agar’s Lamarckian hand. The museum received the assembled work soon after Agar’s passing, leaving minimal time between the artist’s studio and the Victoria & Albert’s reserves. There is “evidence of adhesive deposits at several places on the hat suggesting that other elements may have been present at some time and that possibly alterations had been made to the original configuration of the decorative elements.”[15] This indicates that it was indeed a modular work, and gives a better insight into the way she worked in her studio-laboratory to enact the changes in appearance of the marvelous sculptural hat dedicated to a French seafood dish. 

It is of significant note that Agar briefly moved to Paris in the fall of 1928, and by January 1930 she had already returned home. In her memoir, written nearly sixty years later, she recalled the impact that Paris’ Muséum d’histoire naturelle had on her work, and archival research from this time draws a direct link between the museum’s display practices and her artistic output, whereby specimens on display from this time reappear in her work. Moreover, it is from this moment onward that nature emerges as a formal device. For Agar, the prominence of animals, especially marine specimens as well as the occasional inclusion of bones and fossils in her works demonstrates the influence this institution would go on to have on her artistic output. Her sojourn coincided with the Natural History Museum’s 1928 expansion and opening of a satellite maritime research laboratory in Brittany, connecting to an ongoing trend in neo-Lamarckianism.[16] Though there had already been a marine research station nearby in Brittany, it is likely that there was promotion of the opening that likely reached Agar, especially given her frequent visits to the Museum. 

Her locations of gathering and her studio served as a research laboratory. As seen in the different iterations of the object, her hat evolved over time, and to varying degrees the changes directly related to environmental changes. Much like the way Agar obtained many of the elements which adorned Ceremonial Hat by means of beachcombing, relying on oceanic providence to reflect the biodiversity of the given environment.

Towards an Undersea Vantagepoint 

Eileen Agar’s work is located at the intersection of surrealist gathering practices and laboratories of research, which were in the service of an anti-ocularcentrist marine perspective at a time following great collective trauma following World War I. The highlighting of the biodiversity through this work and many others in her œuvre reflects the wealth of ways in which these messages could be expressed. These systems of accumulation of marine fauna, tying into a marine objective chance, provided a medium through which these and other artists associated with the Surrealist movement were able to challenge paradigms and invite their viewers to consider an alternative scopic regime. Her research laboratory and studio were one and the same, it was a space which was a veritable crucible from which the alchemic entwining between surrealist collecting practices and these research laboratories in the pursuit of an anti-ocularcentrist undersea marvelous emerged.

Notes

[1] Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field, 99.

[2] Cahill, Zoological Surrealism, 40.

[3] Kite, “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: Eileen Agar 1936.”

[4] Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, 11.

[5] Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 5.

[6] Agar, A Look at My Life, 101.

[7] Campbell, “Eileen Agar at Home: Domesticity, Surrealism, and Subversion,” 237—238.

[8] Agar, A Look at My Life, 168.

[9] Kite, “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: Eileen Agar 1936.”

[10] Agar, A Look at My Life, 168.

[11] Agar, A Look at My Life, 168.

[12] “Ceremonial Hat – British Pathé.” 

[13] Kite, “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: Eileen Agar 1936.”.

[14] Eileen Agar interviewed by Cathy Courtney.

[15] Kite, “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: Eileen Agar 1936.”.

[16] “L’histoire du Muséum | MNHN." 

Works Cited

Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. New York; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Agar, Eileen. A Look at My Life. Edited by Andrew Lambirth. London: Methuen, 1988. 

de Bont, Raf. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Cahill, James Leo. Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 

Campbell, Louise. “Eileen Agar at Home: Domesticity, Surrealism, and Subversion.” Interiors 3.3 (2012): 227-246.  

“Ceremonial Hat – British Pathé,” British Pathé, accessed October 21, 2024, https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/78652/.  

Eileen Agar Interviewed by Cathy Courtney. NLSC: Artists’ Lives. Recorded June 1, 1990. British Library Archives.

Kite, Marion. “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse: Eileen Agar 1936,” Conservation Journal 14 (January 1995), accessed October 11, 2024. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-14/ceremonial-hat-for-eating-bouillabaisse-eileen-agar-1936/ 

Krauss, Rosalind. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

“L’histoire du Muséum | MNHN," Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, accessed October 11, 2024.  https://www.mnhn.fr/fr/l-histoire-du-museum