Eileen Agar’s fish tank

My ongoing catch-up reading has caught up with a couple of Oxfam bargains. The first is Michel Remy’s very useful 2017 monograph Eileen Agar. Dreaming Oneself Awake. (Useful for the biography and for the sheer wealth of colour images of Agar’s works, perhaps more than for the attempts to interpret them.)

Eileen Agar in 1935. Solarised photo by Helen Muspratt

British surrealist Agar turns out to have been a rather posh person, with a handy private income. Though she was mightily talented, some of her work – her collage in particular – seems light and uneven to me, and one wonders if it might have shown tighter quality if she’d had to graft for a living, rather than partying round the Med with the Surrealist artistocracy. (I’ve always considered The Apes of God, Wyndham’s Lewis’s merciless 1930 satire on the painting classes as privileged dilettantes, to be a little harsh, but sometimes you do wonder.)

However, much of Agar’s work is both skilfully composed and unexpectedly tasteful, including this evocative untitled box of 1935 (below), tastefully stuffed with netting, coral, a seahorse and a (readymade?) eye of Horus. All it lacks is (discounting the recumbent seahorse) some fish. I think it may pre-date narrowly the surrealist boxes of Joseph Cornell (n.b. an impoverished artist who was obliged to survive by menial work). It suggests, as Remy notes, a miniature theatre, but it also seems to me to sit in the traditions of aquarium design and prehistoric submarine landscapes.

I’m out of my zone here, but I seem to recall that home aquaria started with the Victorians. My late parents’ 1940’s Concise Household Encyclopedia has full instructions on how to knock one up from wood, slate and “cathedral glass”.

Interestingly, the version illustrated (above) is just water, fish and plants, with none of the complex drowned skeletons, submarines, wrecked pirate ships, steampunk spaceships etc that these days dominate display tanks in garden centres, sidelining the fish. I guess that ornamenting your tank with plastic clutter must have started in the ‘sixties. (In case you’re concerned that the fish here look a bit claustrophobic, a helpful note explains that they are rendered in scale with each other but not with the tank.)

To me, Agar’s box also hints at those visionary prehistoric underwater dioramas that have long been a staple of children’s improving popular science books; my 1950’s Time Life The World We Live In had some great fold-out plates of prehistoric panoramas of improbable busy-ness, including one chock full of swimming trilobites and the like. Losing myself in these other-worldly painted landscapes was about as far as I ever got with science. Above is an early version of the same idea – an “Ideal view of marine life in the Carboniferous Period” from my edition of Louis Figuier’s The World Before the Deluge of 1866. (One of many such plates in the book, mostly populated by oddly drawn dinosaurs biting each other, at least until Adam and Eve turn up in a primevally pastoral frontispiece.)

I did wonder about the detached eye of Horus in Agar’s box, until I noticed the squid-like thing in this diorama photo, whose eye floats among the fronds and tentacles, alone and disconcerting, in much the same way. This Ordovician diorama is in the American Museum of Natural History, and the photo is on the back cover of Celeste Olalquiaga’s The Artificial Kingdom. A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (1998), which gallops exhaustingly through as many aquaria, cabinets of curiosities, paperweights and grottoes as you can handle. The text is academically impenetrable in some places but illuminating in others. Ms Olalquiaga’s very interesting website is here. (I emailed her about something kitsch-related in 2012 but I never had a reply.)

My wife and I, house hunting, once looked around a suburban semi that had been imaginatively done out by its owner, who claimed to be a builder and decorator. The kitchen was in black and white, with a chess themed ceiling, but the most impressive feature was a tank of tropical fish in the hallway, its front glass set flush into the hall wall, so that the fish, plants and pirate ships were completely recessed. The hallway turned out to be adjacent to the garage, into which projected the full depth of the tank.