Into the Mystic - Surrealist painter Remedios Varo

Art in America, April, 2001 by Sue Taylor

After apprenticing in Paris, where she was admitted to the Surrealists' innermost circle, Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo fled the Nazi Occupation for Mexico. There she created her own brand of Surrealism, bringing to it a passion for alchemy, mysticism and the occult.

When Remedios Varo died suddenly in Mexico City in 1963, Andre Breton joined the international art world in lamenting her demise. "Surrealism claims totally," he announced from Paris, "the work of the enchantress too soon gone."(1) At 54, Varo had only recently enjoyed her second one-person exhibition after years of economic hardship, wartime dislocations and exile from her native Spain. Her jewel-like paintings, steeped in fantasy, humor, and secret and scientific wisdom, mostly date from the last decade of her career. If their debt to Surrealism seems obvious, Varo owed as much to Mexico, for it was there that she found conditions sufficiently stable to create her art. Thus Luis-Martin Lozano, curator of the Varo retrospective organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts last spring, may be justified in calling her "An Artist from Mexico" in the title of his catalogue essay. But neither Mexican muralism nor pre-Columbian art had any impact on Varo's decidedly European style. And in Chicago, where the exhibition traveled to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum after its debut in Washington, D.C., viewers may have been struck more by her paintings' resonance with the magic realism of Chicago eccentrics like Gertrude Abercrombie and Julia Thecla than by any manifestations of Mexicanidad.

Varo escaped to Mexico from Nazi-occupied France in 1941 with Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, whom she married the following year. She was not befriended, as one might have expected, by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but by fellow refugees; like them, she struggled to put the war behind her and piece together a modest existence. She painted furniture, designed costumes, made toys and dioramas, and found employment as a commercial illustrator for Bayer Pharmaceuticals. During a trip to Venezuela, she produced scientific drawings for that country's Ministry of Public Health. To function as an artist, however, she needed the equivalent of what Virginia Woolf had prescribed for the woman writer--a steady income and a room of her own. This Varo was finally provided, after the disolution of her marriage and Peret's return to France, by her major supporter, Austrian emigre and businessman Walter Gruen. Marriage to Gruen in 1952 relieved her of the necessity of pursuing odd jobs and allowed her to realize fully her creative potential.(2) Until then, her art had been experimental, uneven, sporadic.

It had also been subject to the intimidating brilliance of the first generation of Surrealist men. Freed from their proscriptions, Yaro came into her own. In his essay, Lozano marshals everyone from Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst to Marcel Jean, Yves Tanguy and, less convincingly, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux as "visual point[s] of reference" for Varo's early efforts.(3) What's truly fascinating, however, is how she assimilated and, in her mature work, diverted Surrealist techniques to her own ends. From Wolfgang Paalen she learned fumage--the technique of passing an image over a flame to form suggestive, smoky swirls--and from Oscar Dominguez, decalcomania--pressing a sheet of paper over a painted surface and lifting it off to create spongy patterns rich with imagistic possibilities. Varo used the former process to indicate a misty atmosphere in the dark landscape The Souls of the Mountains in 1938 and the latter for the Rorschach-style Cat Man in 1943. But in the '50s, she rejected the chance effects inherent in these procedures for absolute artistic control, using decalcomania selectively in hallucinatory compositions to "illustrate" mossy trees, grass or, in the delightful Sympathy (1955), a puddle of milk. For Varo, blowing and blotting thinned paint on canvas or Masonite was a way to achieve calculated textural effects rather than a road to psychic automatism.

Her exile enforced a dramatic break with the past, and she conveys its emotional effects in Rupture (1955), where a solitary figure in a hooded robe descends the steps of a stark villa. She walks resolutely away, conscious of being spied upon by a ghostly face at every window. Though haunted, she's free. The theme receives a witty treatment in Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (1960). Here the protagonist, swathed in green veils, exits her analyst's office, marked by a plaque inscribed "Dr. F.J.A." for Freud, Jung and Adler. Traversing the archaic courtyard, the woman holds out a disembodied head by its long white beard to drop it into the little well at her feet. As she sheds this object, a green mask falls from her face. The bearded head may be symbolic of all patriarchal controls, from the internalized father of the artist's superego to the reality of her disapproving Catholic family and the authority of official Surrealism to which she was once in thrall.