The Art Muesuem Tried to Sell the Girls Their Art as Well as Exhibit It in Spanish
Overlooked No More: Remedios Varo, Castilian Painter of Magic, Mysticism and Science
In the 1950s, and '60s, she depicted women, artists and thinkers in intricate dreamlike canvases that now fetch high prices.
This commodity is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In the opening of Thomas Pynchon'due south postmodern novel "The Crying of Lot 49" (1965), tears stream down the face of his protagonist, Oedipa Maas, as she takes in a Surrealist painting of "a number of delicate girls with heart-shaped faces" who appear to be "prisoners in the acme room of a round belfry." The girls are embroidering a kind of tapestry that streams out of the windows.
The scene is fictional but the piece is non: It is "Embroidering the Earth's Mantle" (1961), by Remedios Varo, a Spanish painter who emigrated to Mexico Urban center during World War 2.
In elaborately detailed, frequently allegorical paintings, Varo depicted convent schoolgirls embarking on strange adventures; androgynous, ascetic figures absorbed in scientific, musical or artistic discovery; and alone women — some of whom resembled the slender, striking Varo herself — having a transcendent feel. Her style was reminiscent of Renaissance art in its exquisite precision, but her dreamlike paintings were otherworldly in tone.
Those works oft share a common theme: a quest to reach a higher land of consciousness.
In her biography, "Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo" (1988), the art historian Janet A. Kaplan suggested that much of Varo's ability had come up from her strength as a storyteller. "Her engaging characters and settings were designed to draw viewers into her curious narratives," she wrote.
Though Varo was successful in her lifetime, it is but now, nearly 60 years after her death, that the fame of this mysterious artist is reaching its zenith. In June 2020, Varo's 1956 painting "Harmony (Suggestive Self-Portrait)" sold at a Sotheby's auction for $6.2 million, the 2d highest price ever commanded by a female Latin American creative person, according to Sotheby'south. (A painting by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $viii one thousand thousand in 2016.)
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María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born on Dec. 16, 1908, in Anglès, a pocket-sized town in northeastern Spain. Her father, Rodrigo Varo y Zejalvo, a hydraulic engineer, taught her mechanical drawing and encouraged her interest in fine art and science. Her female parent, Ignacia Uranga y Bergareche, a devoted Roman Cosmic from the Basque region, named María for the Virgin of Remedies (the Virgin Mary), and for an older sister who died before Varo was born.
At eight, after her family had moved to Madrid, María was sent to a strict Cosmic school for girls, where she escaped into adventure books past Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. Rigid school routines — prayer sessions, confessions, group sewing and the like — made such an impression on her that they would inform the subject matter of some of her almost famous works ("Embroidering Earth'southward Mantle," the 2nd panel of a triptych, being just one).
Varo fabricated her first paintings at 12. A sketchbook of portraits of her family members showed her skill at capturing a likeness. At xv, she was accepted to enroll in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where both Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí had studied. She graduated in 1930.
Over the next decade she lived between Paris and Barcelona, where she moved in bohemian, avant-garde and Surrealist circles. By 1937 her work was appearing in Surrealist publications, then in international exhibitions in London, Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam and United mexican states Urban center.
After the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, she fled to the south of French republic with her partner at the time, the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, arriving in Marseilles, where other artists and intellectuals had convened. The couple somewhen traveled to Casablanca, in Morocco, and later boarded a crowded Portuguese ocean liner jump for Mexico, where they were accepted as political refugees.
Paradigm
The experience of having to flee was reflected in Varo'southward paintings of people in transit — sailing in precarious boats, wandering through forests, riding bicycles through boondocks or descending steps — all while wearing contemplative expressions.
"Like other artists who had to live and create under duress, I think her pictorial language is very rich and full of mythology and symbols," Emmanuel Di Donna, an art dealer who included Varo's piece of work in his 2019 prove "Surrealism in Mexico," said in a phone interview.
Varo would alive in Mexico for the rest of her life, with the exception of a year in Venezuela.
She made her all-time work — fanciful, haunting, personal and metaphorical — in the 1950s and early on '60s in Mexico Metropolis. There she formed a circle of exiled creative person friends, including the Hungarian Surrealist lensman Kati Horna, the Austrian Surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen and the British Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, with whom she found esprit and shared ideas.
"Varo and Carrington would meet each other almost every day, either in the middle of the twenty-four hour period to go to the market place or later in the evening for dinner, and they would discuss what they were working on," said Wendi Norris, who organized "Indelible Fables," a solo exhibition of Varo's work, at her San Francisco gallery in 2012. "I believe that a lot of their narratives were born out of these conversations that they had."
Norris said that the two had frequently worked through similar ideas — parsing the theories of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the mystic philosophers George Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky — but that they would manifest them in different means. While Carrington was gratuitous in her painting, Varo was exacting.
"Her precision — the single hair brushstrokes and the manner that she was thinning the paint to get a lustrous layered effect — is beyond masterful," Norris said by phone.
Varo was interested in proportion and scale, as her father had been, and she would draft preliminary sketches carefully. It sometimes took her months to complete a unmarried pocket-size painting.
"She was very deliberate," Norris said, "and, in a way, patient."
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Varo participated in consciousness-raising workshops based on the teachings of Gurdjieff, an feel that allowed her to tap into her deepest imagination, said Tere Arcq, an contained curator who assembled a 2008 centenary retrospective of Varo'southward piece of work for the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. Workshop participants might concentrate for six straight hours on an inanimate object, like a wooden chair, focusing on the life that had existed within the object, Arcq said. The wood in the chair, for case, had come from a tree, and the tree had once been alive.
Varo, by and then well into her 40s, had her quantum with a grouping exhibition in 1955, showing paintings that dealt with the subconscious, the mystical and the metaphysical; in many, the protagonist looked like Varo.
She was interested in tarot, astrology and alchemy, which she counterbalanced with a lifelong love of scientific discipline, especially geology, Arcq said in an interview. Varo'southward piece of work fused these interests.
"She was trying to detect the intersection between the mystical and the scientific," Arcq said.
In Varo'due south painting "Harmony" (1956), a person (it could exist a human or a adult female) sits at a desk in a cavernous room, threading objects like crystals, plants, geometric figures and newspaper scraps of mathematical formulas onto a musical staff that looks like an abacus or a loom. Figures resembling muses announced to be coming out of the walls. The person, Varo wrote in a note addressed to her family, "is trying to notice the invisible thread that unites all things."
By this fourth dimension she was living with Walter Gruen, an exiled Austrian owner of a popular classical music tape shop. He believed in Varo's talent and encouraged her to devote herself to painting wholeheartedly.
Varo had her first major solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1956. Information technology was a hit among critics and collectors also every bit the celebrated Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was quoted as saying that Varo was "among the most important women artists in the earth." Her 2d solo show, in 1962, was besides successful.
Varo died of a heart assault on Oct. eight, 1963. She was 54. Gruen became a tireless champion of her work and legacy, and a 1971 posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico drew crowds.
The value of Varo'due south work has soared in contempo years, in no small function because of its rarity, quality and striking imagery.
"It has a magical upshot," Norris said. "There is a radiance and a light to her work, much like you meet in a groovy Renaissance painting."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/obituaries/remedios-varo-overlooked.html