Into the Mystic - Surrealist painter Remedios Varo

Art in America, April, 2001 by Sue Taylor

Varo's real father, an engineer, had encouraged his daughter in art. He trained her in mechanical drawing, instilling in her a love of draftsmanly precision, and sent her to art school when this was an unusual privilege for young women. In Madrid, Varo studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and the School of Fine Arts, and she enrolled at the Academy of San Fernando at age 15. This rigorous preparation helps explain her meticulous style; equally important were the influences encountered in the Prado Museum, especially Northern and Italian primitives and Spanish masters. Many of Varo's borrowings from history are unabashedly direct--outsize birds and fantastic vessels from Bosch, bat-winged flying creatures from Goya--but elsewhere more generally applied influences can be seen. The oddly attenuated, gothic proportions of her figures, for example, derive from Varo's admiration for El Greco.(4)

Among her contemporaries, it was artist Leonora Carrington, an English immigrant in Mexico, with whom she shared the most. Like Varo, who at 22 had married fellow art student Gerardo Lizarraga to escape the dictates of her family, Carrington eluded the control of her well-to-do parents by running off in 1937 with Ernst. Her relationship with him and with Surrealism proper ended with Ernst's wartime internment as a German national, and her own nervous breakdown, in 1939. Safe in Mexico by 1942, Carrington quickly became Varo's soul mate. The two saw each other daily for years, and their friendship is celebrated in Carrington's novel, The Hearing Trumpet (1977), in the characters of Marion Leatherby and Carmella Velasquez. In this exhibition, Varo's painting Mimesis (1960), where a seated woman takes on the characteristics of her upholstered chair and the furniture comes bizarrely to life, is a reprise of Carrington's self-portrait of 1936-37, The Inn of the Dawn Horse.(5)

Important to Carrington and Varo, as to other Surrealists, were occult traditions that offered alternative paths to knowledge--of the self and the world. References to the 16th-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus appear in both their oeuvres, as do cooking metaphors that stand for the magical transformation of matter. Varo often presents solitary scientists or scholars in studio or laboratory environments; surrogates for the artist in search of enlightenment, they study nature, conduct mysterious experiments, receive astonishing visions. In Creation of the Birds (1957), the artist is a personification of sacred wisdom, complete with owl-like features and feathery costume, who draws birds at her drafting table and brings them to life with starlight collected through a triangular glass. In Communicating Vessels (1932), pigments spurt from an alembic vessel onto the artist-creator's palette, while in the corner, two vases exchange their contents, as if to illustrate Breton's insistence on the interaction of waking life and dreams. The artist-creator wields a brush connected to a miniature guitar worn like a pendant around her neck, signaling the role of musical harmony in the hermetic systems Varo explored.