The unconventional wisdom of Eileen Agar

Plus: What's next for the French art market?

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Claudia Tobin on Eileen Agar's adventures in Surrealism

'My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting.' There are plenty of 'fresh shocks' in Eileen Agar's autobiography A Look at My Life (1988), which has been republished (with colour illustrations) after too many years of being out of print. Written three years before Agar died at the age of 91, it is an engaging book, full of witty anecdotes and perceptive insights. Born in 1899 in Argentina to British and American parents, Agar had a childhood of immense privilege. The family resettled in London in 1911 and, when she was old enough, evenings were spent dancing and avoiding attempts by her 'lioness of a mother' to match her to a Belgian prince or roaming marquis. She soon abandoned the existence to which her glamorous but conventional mother was attached.

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Will Wiles on what makes London's most modern building so thrilling

London's BT Tower is a strange phenomenon: a landmark with no location. To be clear, it does have a location, in Fitzrovia on the northern fringe of the West End. It even has an address, on Cleveland Street. But it always seems to be observed at a distance, never from directly beneath. The Fernsehturm in Berlin, completed in 1969, four years after the London tower opened, has a monumental place at the centre of the rebuilt Alexanderplatz. London's more modest totem to the invisible spectra is only half the height of its Berlin cousin, just enough to peek over north London's line of hills. It hardly has a base at all. It floats above the city like a Fata Morgana.

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Jane Morris on what lies ahead for the French art market

A century ago France was the undisputed centre of the art world, not just the market. In the 1950s it lost ground to New York and later London, Hong Kong and Shanghai. But in recent years some of the old sparkle has returned. In the past five years major galleries including David Zwirner, White Cube and Hauser & Wirth have opened in Paris. Gagosian opened a third space in rue de Castiglione near the historic Place Vendôme in 2021 while Sotheby's is moving to the prestigious rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré next year. Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence has come from Art Basel. In 2022 it nabbed the mid-October slot in the Grand Palais that had belonged to the Francocentric FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain) to launch a new art fair.

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Edward Behrens on the collecting of the man who founded Mothercare

Selim Zilkha was born in Baghdad in 1927, but was there for only 40 days. He lived in Lebanon, Egypt and the United States, where he went to high school and served in the US Army during the Second World War. In 1960 he arrived in London and, as the city began to swing, so did his fortune. He was part of the Claremont Club set and counted James Goldsmith and John Aspinall as friends. It was with Goldsmith that he bought 50 branches of nursery furniture chain W.J. Harris and transformed it into a legend of the British high street, Mothercare. At its height, the chain boasted some 400 stores around the UK and sold everything a mother could need for her children – furniture, toys, babycare products, you name it. At the very least this suggests a discerning eye and the ability to spot an opportunity and turn it into a sustained success.

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Samuel Reilly on the towering legacy of the critic David Sylvester

Perhaps the single defining feature of the life and thought of David Sylvester, who was born 100 years ago this week, is that for him the stakes of art criticism were raised to a level scarcely imaginable today. His interview with Bacon, broadcast on the BBC in 1966, is one between friends who had become close over the previous 15 years – but it is nothing short of gladiatorial. John Berger is often described as Sylvester's great rival of the 1950s, but the word is too polite – for Sylvester, he was an enemy. Aghast at Berger's failure to grasp the significance of Bacon and Giacometti, Sylvester chastised him with the words: 'Someone with the stance of a prophet has to be on the right side when the battle is at its height.'

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In the current issue…

Pierre Curie tries to plumb the depths of a painting by Dosso Dossi

Dosso's landscapes are always magnificent; this one is luminous and vividly rendered, particularly the greens – his paintings often feature those precisely painted round leaves. It's like a dream: when you look at it, you wonder if the background is even meant to be real. In this respect it's quite different from the work of Leonardo, who tried to paint mountains in the background with verisimilitude, using sfumato to capture the varying thickness of the atmosphere. This is not Dosso's way – Mythological Allegory is almost like a painting you might find in a manuscript, with very strong colours and a sense of unreality. Compositionally, it's not as sophisticated as paintings found in Florence and other Italian cities around this time. There is a winning naivety to the whole thing: what comes across is a deep, personal attachment to nature.

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