“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes…”

-Virginia Woolf  ¹

Remedial laughs, but her laughter echoes in another world.

-Octavio Paz ²

 

In June of 2000 the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago opened the first US retrospective of the work by Remedios Varos at the same time Disney released its animated film Fantasia 2000. Having seen both, I did not make a conscious connection between the Varo exhibit and the Fantasia Firebird animated sequence until sometime later. A strange fantastic figure in the film known as the “Spring Sprite” had an uncanny resemblance to female figures in Varo’s paintings, designed with a heart shaped face, long hair and a cloak which surrealistically lengthened and contracted itself as though it was a living membrane. The animation concept artists Paul and Gaetan Brizzi had clearly been struck by the power of Varo’s uncanny magical world of dreamlike strangeness enough to bring it to life through animation. The Art Institute of Chicago’s recent Varo exhibit Science Fictions is a sign not only of the growing art world interest in her work, but of a broader public and cultural engagement that comes close to having an auteur-like status.

 

        Varo’s style makes it easy to dive directly into her self-invented myths and allegories, even as her storylines can lead to bizarre mental puzzles and contradictions. The twenty paintings and numerous drawings on display delve into all facets of her artistic skill, influences and esoteric obsessions. This includes the fastidious and technical draftsmanship that she learned from her engineer father to a fascination with alchemy, hermetic magic, superstition, the teachings of the Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff, cosmology, science, and the considerable influence of fellow surrealist Leonora Carrington. Many of these elements are visible in the painting Useless Science or The Alchemist (1953). A seated woman wears a checkered robe that magically drapes down to become the tile on the floor. She turns a wheel attached to an elaborate pully mechanism housed in medieval-style tower structure just behind her. A funnel protruding from the structure collects droplets of condensed vapor, which an internal mechanism, energized by the pullies, refines into a mysterious substance stored in bottles. In another work Creation of the Birds (1957) a scientific apparatus of glass pipes and egg-shaped containers distill substance out of the atmosphere into primary paint colors. A befeathered owl woman seated at a desk renders birds with these paints, magically bringing them to life using starlight passed through a prism-shaped magnifying glass. In still another painting Harmony (1956) An androgynous figure sits at a table in a renaissance-style room with a vaulted ceiling. Ghostly goddess-like spirits appear through breaches in the wall with one aiding the figure by attaching a shell to a metalwork construction resembling bars of musical notation. Hanging on this contraption are slips of paper with mathematical formulas, a flower, a leaf, and a mandrake root, similar to mystical contents spilling out of a chest that sits nearly. Who exactly was the artist behind the creation of this fanciful and mysterious world? What were the life experiences that moved her to create these works?

 

        Remedios Varo was born in 1908 to Spanish parents in the Catalan region of Spain, into a culture that was ruled by Catholic church doctrine. Her father, a hydraulic engineer, play the significant role in her artistic life by giving her rigorous training in mechanical drawing and taking her on trips to the Prado Museum in Madrid. There, she experienced the works of three great masters, El Greco, Francisco Goya, and Hieronymus Bosch, whose influences became deeply imprinted on her. Varo’s father’s overpowering personality frightened her, impelling her to keep an emotionally safe distance to protect herself. Her distrust of controlling and fearsome forces was heightened when she was sent to a Catholic convent school run by strict nuns. Spanish poet, Raphael Alberta described his own childhood under similar circumstances as a “reactionary and savage Catholicism that darkened the blueness of the sky from the days of our childhood, covering us with layers and layers of gray ashes.”3 Varo reacted against the forced routines of prayer, meals, classes, confession, group sewing classes, penances, and the constant surveillance by nuns who made sure conformity and obedience were maintained. Her famous triptych Toward the Tower, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, and The Escape (1961) narrate the same story in allegorical form, portraying a group of young blond-haired women, under strict escort, riding wheeled bicycle contraptions on their way to the tower. On arrival they are commanded by an ominous hooded male figure to embroider an intricate landscape whose tapestry spills from the tower walls, forming the countryside surrounding it. The final scene shows one member of the group, a proxy for Varo, fleeing with her lover in a boat to safety—analogous to her own life circumstances of fleeing with her lover from Franco’s Spain and Nazi control of France during WWII.

 

        Refusing to return to convent schooling, Varo was fortunate to have sympathetic parents that supported her gaining a full academic art training in Madrid. Upon graduation, Varo picked up on Surrealist ideas and influences that were flowing out of Paris, particularly the imaginative use of the unconscious. The Surrealist invention of the chance patterns created by sponging on, blotting, and blowing paint, known as decalcomania, became a standard technique in Varo’s work, creating the random oozy organic patterns that clarified into strange biomorphic masses, veils, robes, atmospheres, and moody forests that her work is famous for.

        The ever-increasing violence of the Spanish Civil War forced Varo to flee to Paris with her new lover, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Peret. It was there that she joined the Surrealist group led by Andre Breton. Her idolization of the group’s dominant male figures, which included Peret as Breton’s right-hand man, was as fascinating as it was intimidating to Varo. “I who could not quickly lose my provincial quality, was trembling, frightened, dazzled.”4 The Surrealists saw women as a projection of their own doctrinaire view of the femme-enfant or the “woman-child”—a naïve innocent uncorrupted by reason. This was often accompanied by the trope of the female body as sexualized mannequin so ubiquitous in the Surrealist art of this period. For the women in the group this was alienating, a contradiction to the tenants of greater liberation which the Surrealist movement claimed.

         Varo’s temporary arrest by the Paris Police in 1940 for being a refugee from Spain, coupled with the impending Nazi invasion of the city, forced Varo and Peret to flee south to Marseille. They were eventually saved by the American journalist Varian Fry. They emigrated to Mexico due to its generous policy of offering free asylum to all Spanish refugees. There, she was able to reunite with fellow Surrealist Leonora Carrington whom she had met in the Paris and who had a tremendous impact on her artistic maturation.

 

        Starting over from scratch in Mexico was a fierce battle for Varo, one in which she had to put her art ambitions on hold just to have food and shelter. It was finally alleviated by her marriage in the mid 1950’s to Walter Gruen. He had an unshakable belief in Varo’s talent and became the financial and emotional support that none of her former husbands and lovers had been, allowing her the freedom to finally devote herself entirely to her work. Varo allegorized his support in the painting Caravan (1955). A vehicular contraption guided by a cloaked male driver pulls a luminous golden house behind him. Inside a woman attentively plays a piano, surrounded by magically expanding doorways, windows, passages, and even a colonnade. She is finally free to roam the endless rooms of her imagination, now protected from the moody forest and haunting night sky surrounding the house.

         Her newly launched metaphysical fairytales left behind the more violent and painful imagery evident in her European Surrealist phase, while retaining metaphors for loneliness and melancholy from the traumas she had experienced. Her fear of powerlessness began early in life—from the imprisoning control of Spanish Catholicism and tradition through the cataclysms of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Her art became a self-invented safe space in which to live out the fantasy of being in control of one’s environment and life, while rather gently and sometimes humorously implying such refuge and safety is paradoxically inimical to fate. Vagabond (1957) is an allegory which aptly expresses her version of an itinerate wanderer. A medieval male character wears an elaborate self-protective cloak that also serves as a home and a wheeled conveyance, controlling and encaging him as much as serving him on his winding journey.

        The compelling “magic realism” in Varo’s world is based on her rigorous draftsmanship and meticulous painting technique. It is what grounds her world in a sense of metaphysical concreteness while also enhancing its atmospheric sense of mystery. All her figures have consistently thin tall bodies with elongated limbs and attenuated hands and fingers that are reminiscent of medieval Christian icons. All wear expressively creased, folded, and rumpled robes similar to those by El Greco. Her figures’ faces mimic her own features, reflecting her intense self-absorption. The medieval architectural settings in her work reflect influences from Hieronymus Bosch and the miniaturized renditions of Romanesque and Gothic architectural settings from 15^th and 16^th century Flemish painting.

 

        The violence in Varo’s work is internalized, not overt, but remains subliminally present, which is why she was known by her friends as a deeply anxious woman who harbored many fears. “I am hopelessly superstitious so much so that when I go out even to a nearby place, return as quickly as possible to shut myself up in the house as if someone were following me.”5 It explains her obsession with mysticism and superstition as a means of keeping the anxiety and fear at bay. As her friend Juliana Gonzalez remembers “like each and all of her creations, she was disturbed by the same happenings, and wonders that she painted.”6 This circumstance drew her into having closer relationships with animals than people, particularly cats. Her Painting Sympathy (1955) is one of the very few where her characters make direct eye contact. A female character seated at a table affectionately looks into almond shaped eyes of an orange cat which is connected to abstract cosmic forces taking place in the room by strings of light. A spilled glass of liquid pouring off the table represents forces of chaos the creature unleashes, in some ways symbolizing a wish for the wild freedom of the cat, which she does not afford herself.

        Numerous works in the show narrate journeys, not only of escape, but also discovery. Her ships, wheeled contraptions, and flying machines are off on interior psychological journeys. Discovery (1956) depicts a sailing ship with a tower for a mast drifting through a forest of sinister trees towards a glowing orb. Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco (1959) shows a single explorer in a bowler hatted boat contraption at the moment she discovers a magical goblet flowing with water that runs into the river.

 

        In a number of paintings not exhibited in Science Fictions, woman characters are often absorbed in tasks of magical labor spinning, sewing, weaving and pulling threads, implying entanglement by the tradition of laborious women’s work. There remains the haunting sense that Varo is constrained by memory, creating scenarios which surveil and critique herself for disobeying traditional female conformity. At the same time, she presents biting critique of domesticity in the painting Mimesis (1960) where a woman sits so rigidly still in a chair for so long that she starts to resemble the chair itself, actually fading into the patterns of its upholstery. Even the furniture has more freedom that she does, with legs becoming sinewy limbs that dramatically interact with one and other.

        Her work requires no special foreknowledge of artistic doctrine, whether modern or postmodern, for audiences to directly engage and appreciate. It enjoys the same acclaim today that it received at the time of her Mexican debut in 1955, but on a larger scale. The audience packed rooms of Science Fictions contrast sharply with the almost completely unattended contemporary art exhibit one floor directly below. While exhibitions of post-impressionists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin continue to remain popular and accessible, much art of the 20^th century, including High Modernist Abstraction and Postmodern art, often leave some viewers feeling disaffected or bored.

        Varo’s laboriously rendered narratives fill the vacuum that contemporary and modern art has left behind by creating worlds and characters of compelling psychological depth. This is why I would relate her achievement to those of contemporary auteur animators, artists whose individual style and complete control over all aspects of production give their work its uniquely recognizable and distinctive stamp. The success of Varo’s mesmeric fantasies rely on their psychological conductivity—how they transmute emotional depth through their self-invented parables which are motivated, at their core, by shadows of what is unconsciously inexpressible.

 

        Given the shallow dehumanization of much contemporary art, it is not surprising that curators are scouring the past to unearth the forgotten careers of marginalized women and people of color. The mature work of Varo’s career represented in Science Fictions succeeds in filling the void left by the structureless entropy of the present art world with works of skill and depth. It presents an alternative model for the self-directed artist to trust their emotions, instincts, and unconscious over the dogmas of conceptual, theoretical, and commercialized art models. Most important of all, it strives to establish a rich auteur-based relationship with its audience by portraying a world of compelling emotional and subjective intensity that cannot be expressed in its fullness except though the actual power of creative imagination.

        Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollack Krasner Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information visit dianethodos.com.

 

 

1. 1.  From A Room of One’s Own, an essay by Virginia Woolf first published in 1929

1. 1. From the Octavio Paz poem Remedios Varo’s Appearances and Disappearances

1. 1. Raphael Alberti The Lost Grove translated by Gabriel Berns (Berkley University of California Press, 1959), p. 35.

1. 1. Varo, interview in Marie, “Remedios Varo: Magia y disiplina fascinantes del subconciente, “ Magazine  Novedades, Nov. 13, 1960, p.11

1. 1. Ibid p.11

1. 1. Juliana Gonzales, “Transmundo de Remidios Varo” in Octavio Paz Remedios Varo, p. 165