Eileen Agar, Surrealism and Tenerife's Mountain Landscape

As part of the Lives of Mountains Seminar Series, Dr Anna Reid will be talking on Eileen Agar, Surrealism and Tenerife's mountain landscape.

In this talk, Dr Anna Reid will look at the political aesthetics of works made by the Argentine British artist and surrealist Eileen Agar (1899-1991) in the 1950s in the mountainous landscape of the Canary Islands (northern Tenerife).

Agar’s archive contains a striking range of photographs, paintings and visual materials related to this post-war period when she travelled recurrently to Puerto de la Cruz, a municipality long shaped by British interests and where the massive silhouette of Mount Teide dominates the view to the South.

The botanical diversity of this volcanic island was of vital interest to colonial science in the nineteenth century. The naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Marianne North were both guests at the British Sitio Litre plantation in Puerto de la Cruz before Agar.

Agar travelled to Tenerife by steamer ships via routes long established by British plantation owners and marketed to British tourists from the 1930s onwards via travel writing and photographs where a snow-capped Teide is a focal point.

This talk asks how and to what extent the surrealist aesthetics of Agar’s charged and dreamlike representations of Mount Teide and its surroundings transcend the colonial and exoticist visual culture and landscape of ‘British’ northern Tenerife.

Eileen Agar, Photograph of Mollie Gordon hiding in cacti 1952–6. © Eileen Agar. Photo: Tate. Image released under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED.

About the speaker

Dr. Anna Reid is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art, based in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

Anna is an environmental humanities scholar and art historian with a research focus on 19th and 20th century local and global British landscape contexts. The relationship between Surrealism and Ecology in global British contexts is the focus of her current work including contributions to Surrealism and Ecology (2026) published by Vernon Press, and Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes (2025) published by Thames & Hudson.

In recent years, Anna has undertaken fellowships with Cambridge Visual Culture investigating surrealism in the collections at Kettles Yard, ArtHx (Princeton University) investigating the Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism and The Paul Mellon Centre (Yale University).

More information

This talk is organised by Rebecca Jarman (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) and the Lives of Mountains group.

All welcome, no need to book.

Image

Photo courtesy of Anna Reid.