Art Appreciation: Who's the Muse? Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun and Isabel Rawsthorne

The concept of the muse is centuries old: originating in ancient Greece, it has endured as a powerful symbol, predominantly of female identity in art and literature. On this course we examine questions around the origin of the muse particularly in the visual arts of the early to mid-20th century, with special focus on three artists: the French photographer, sculptor and writer Claude Cahun; British Surrealist painter and sculptor, Eileen Agar; and British painter, Isabel Rawsthorne. Through an in-depth exploration of one artist’s work each week, we discuss how and why the female muse has been perpetuated by (often male) artists across the visual arts. In recent years, the work of each of these three artists has seen a revival in British and European art, as practitioners of dynamic works across painting, photography and sculpture. Cahun and Agar escaped comfortable backgrounds to pursue independent paths amid the avant-garde of the 1920s and ‘30s; while Rawsthorne was long regarded solely as the beautiful silent muse of modern artists Jacob Epstein, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. We discover how Cahun, Agar and Rawsthorne upturned social and cultural conventions of their day to produce some of the most startling artworks of modern art.