The Magic of Remedios Varo
This summer the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum hosts a traveling retrospective, curated in Mexico, of captivating, subversive work by an important 20th-century woman artist, “The Magic of Remedios Varo.” Each of the 77 detailed, meticulous paintings and drawings on display offers a window on the Catalan-born Varo’s complicated vision of an occult world. Her works are an arcane catalog of stairways, hallways, towers, and moats. Walls dissolve into ruffles; a woman spoon-feeds the moon. There are odd conveyances: gazebos on wheels and little boats like soupspoons with buttons and paddle wheels.
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Varo, born in 1908, discovered surrealism in art school in Madrid, where she refined her impressive technical skills. After graduating in 1931 she traveled–often unwillingly because of the wars–back and forth between Barcelona and Paris learning about surrealism, playing the famous surrealist games, and becoming romantically entangled with many men, eventually gaining access to surrealism’s inner circle through an affair with French poet Benjamin Peret. In 1941 Varo, Peret, and other controversial artists like Breton fled Europe for Mexico. (There’s a compelling photograph of these three and other surrealists in Marseilles in Janet A. Kaplan’s biography Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys: they’re auctioning their artwork to one another outside a hotel, making sure everyone has food and shelter while they wait for passage.)
Varo was not a feminist as we would define feminism today. But she and other surrealist women artists–and there were many, since it was a movement particularly open to women–did explore socially imposed divisions of gender, not to gain independence from men but to participate in a radical revision of perception and experience. Artist Leonora Carrington–who came to America with Max Ernst (escaping the Vichy government) and worked with Varo in Mexico–Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Kay Sage not only painted but wrote poetry and fiction documenting their investigations into the feminine unconscious during the 40s and 50s.
Varo’s cosmos sometimes seems dark, precise, limited, and arcane. But many paintings both embody her themes and motifs well and are open enough to allow even the uninitiated viewer access. Naturaleza muerta resuscitando (“Still Life Reviving”), from 1963, is a very strong image. A round table in the middle of a round room (a Varo favorite) holds a single candle. Eight elliptical white plates and various fruits arrayed in concentric circles are whirling in a vortex above the table. A pomegranate and some other fruits have burst open, and two halves of an orange come together; tiny plants sprout where seeds have dropped on the floor. The tablecloth (Varo uses cloth and drapery in many images, notably in a painting where a group of ethereal ladies are sewing the earth’s mantle) is moving in a clockwise spiral and floating up at the edges. Animating the cloth, Varo challenges dualistic ideas about animate beings and inanimate objects. And by aligning the spiraling fruit like the solar system or an atomic diagram, she connects it with her other paintings that refer to astronomy and physics: Creation of the Birds, Phenomenon of Weightlessness, Weaving of Space and Time.
