Unexpected Journeys: The Life and Art of Remedios Varo 0896597970, 9780896597976

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Unexpected Journeys The Art and Life ofRemedios Varo

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sympathetic

mother and

daughter. There is also a charming portrait of a pet rabbit (plate 24), caught in an alert pose, eyes bright, nose atwitch, done by Remedios in the same year. This drawing reflects the sympathy for animals that she was to feel throughout her life.

Most

striking of this series is Remedios's early self-portrait (plate 23),

19, Top: Dona Maria Josela

Cejalvo,

August 17, 1925. encil on paper: Private collection.

20. Bottom, left: Dona Josefa

Maria Cejalvo,

September oY, VMESY.

encil on paper: Private collection.

21, Bottom, right:

Dona Maria Josefa Cejalvo, May 17, 1925.

Pencil on paper. Private collection.

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dated May 16, 1923. Here she has caught the quality of her own personality. She has honestly rendered herself as a pretty young girl, with clear eyes and strong profile (similar to her mother’s), whose thick, wavy hair can barely be

tamed into braids. An expression of eager intelligence signals her attentive engagement with the world, an eagerness emphasized by the self-confident flourish with which she signed and dated her work. Trying out a variety of signature styles, she signed each of the works in the sketchbook differently. But all show the bold script of an early adolescent confidently anticipating a triumphant artistic career.

It was a confidence that her family would come to encourage, impressed by her facility with oils as demonstrated by another portrait of her grandmother (plate 26). More formally posed than the earlier drawings, this portrait captures the rapid aging of her beloved grandmother, a figure of central importance in her life. Only three years after the drawings, the face has sagged, the eyelids droop heavily, the jowls have slackened — all changes that Remedios carefully noted. But the warm, sympathetic eyes and the serious yet compassionate face are the same, depicted with loving attention. Such skill deserved proper training. “At the age of twelve I painted my first painting, of my grandmother 26

22. Top, left: Ignacia Varo Uranga, /925,

Pencd on paper: Private collection. 235. Top, right:

Self-Portrait, May 6, 1925. Yencul on paper: Private collection.

24. Bottom:

Rabbit, September 20, 1925.

Pencil on paper: Private collection.

[now lost ], which

met an understanding

response

from my father; he sent me

to the Escuela de Artesy Oficios [School of Arts and Crafts] and later I went to the Escuela de Bellas Artes [School of Fine Arts], both in Madrid.’?° Remedios was not sent to study art as a pleasant feminine attainment. Rather, her family saw the girl's innate talent and sent her, against tradition,

to the Academia de San Fernando, the most prestigious art school in Madrid, where she would be trained in a rigorous manner and prepared for a professional career.

It is an indication

of her talent and of her father’s liberality that

Remedios, a properly raised Spanish girl, was allowed the opportunity for such professional training, usually reserved for boys.

The test for admission, based on standards developed in the nineteenth century, was arduous, involving lengthy sessions of charcoal drawing and oil

painting of still lifes with the inevitable plaster casts, then a portfolio review, a personal interview, and the evaluation of a completed piece, a self-portrait, by a committee.”° Remedios passed easily, well prepared by the combination of her natural talent with drafting practice and her initial training at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios. In September 1924, at the age of fifteen, Varo enrolled as a full-time

27

25, Remedios

Varo

and Dora Maria Josefa Cesalvo.

26. Dona Maria

Josefa Cejalvo, 1926,

Oul on canvas, L473 X 12%

tn.

Private collection.

28

student at the Academia. It was the same year that her fellow student Salvador Dali returned from his one-year expulsion for “insubordination” (for allegedly leading a student protest over a new professorial appointment) and two years before he was permanently expelled. The Academia in those years was not

responsive to protest or question. It was a school celebrated for its perfectionist training, and Varo confronted a rigid academic curriculum — years of exacting study that emphasized

anatomy,

composition,

perspective,

color

theory, and

the study of architectural forms, as well as the drawing of figures, clothing, still life, and ornamentation; still-life and landscape painting; and “decorative”

painting. On top of this heavy load, Varo added a course in scientific drawing, an elective outside the established sequence for which she had to pay extra. It was a skill that she would later put to good advantage, when in Venezuela she earned her living for a time by drawing insects in a scientific laboratory. Among her teachers for painting was Manuel Benedito-Vives, a romantic realist in the tradition of Joaquin Sorolla, who put heavy emphasis on the technical aspects of the oil medium. As her later work indicates, Varo learned the traditional formulas for canvas preparation, pigment mixing, glazing, and varnishing that constitute the standard repertoire of the old masters. She also focused heavily on drawing, developing the technical skill for which she had shown a natural aptitude since childhood. The Academia’s goal was to make the student see with precision and to develop a fluency and agility tempered by control and discipline. Not a place

for experimentation, it left the student to resolve a personal style outside formal classes.

“I took advantage

of all that I learned,

in painting the things that

interested me on my own, which could be called, together with technique, the beginning of a personality.” That Varo was already developing personality in her work during her student years has been attested to by a fellow student, Josep Lluis Florit, who described early Varo drawings, now lost, as “in a Surrealist vein.’8 It was to Surrealism that Varo looked for more imaginative and personal imagery. In this she was responding to the spirit of innovation that infused Spanish intellectual and artistic life in the 1920s. Wrenching free from what the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, then an art student himself, had called ‘the sluggish and conformist rhythms which had dominated the art world in Madrid,” artists were awakening to vanguard influences, including the Surrealist movement coming from France via literature, film, and painting. It was a movement that talked of the omnipotence of the dream, that championed a love of the unexplainable,

and that questioned

boundaries

between

fantasy

and reality. It had one nucleus at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, a university student residence for men, akin to an advanced institute, where some Academia students lived. Founded in 1910 to help Spain break out of the nineteenth-century isolation that had stifled its intellectual growth, the Residencia took as its goal the stimulation of Spanish culture through an exchange of information and ideas. By creating an international community among its residents, it sought to promote contact with modern movements from other parts of the Continent. Taking as its motto “to live with our minds in Europe and our hearts in

29

Spain,’ it attracted the best European intellectuals, its residents including the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the English science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, the French architect Le Corbusier, and the composers Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel. By the mid-1920s, having grown from a small villa to a large campus, it set the tone

for the intellectual life of Madrid, playing host to an extraordinary conjunction of avant-garde talent, including artists and writers who were to prove among Spain's great twentieth-century innovators. The theater of Federico Garcia Lorca, the films of Luis Bufuel, the writing of Rafael Alberti, the paintings of Salvador Dali, all of whom worked together at the Residencia in the mid1920s, reflect the Surrealist energy generated there. During the years that Varo was a student at the Academia, Surrealist poetry, lectures on Surrealism, and exhibitions of Surrealist painting increasingly pervaded Madrid.*! As Alberti put it, “The thing was in the air.” In the year

1928 alone, Madrid saw its first screening of The Andalusian Dog, product of a collaboration between Bufuel and Dali; publication of Concerning the Angels, a collection

of poetry

by Alberti;

and

one

of Lorca’s

many

public lectures,

“Sketch of the New Painter,” in which he honored Surrealism as a movement

of “fresh spirit,” declaring: “The Surrealists begin to emerge, devoting themselves to the deepest throbbings of the soul. Now painting liberated by the disciplined abstractions of cubism... enters a mystic, uncontrolled period of supreme beauty. ... One begins to express the inexpressible. The sea fits within an orange. It was within this atmosphere that Varo, who had secretly been nurturing surreal tendencies since childhood, dutifully attended the Academia while dreaming and plotting her escape. At first, building on her Spanish heritage, she was attracted to the surreal in its most broadly generic form, attracted to the eccentric, the fantastic, the world of dreams and of altered realities, especially to the surreal qualities of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, whose work

she repeatedly visited at the Prado.

the movement

developing

in France

that would

Ultimately, however, come

to have

it was

a profound

impact on her life both personally and artistically. A photograph of the period (plate 27) gives a sense of Varo in these years. A girl of about eighteen, in her third year at the Academia, she is lithe, attractive, fashionably dressed and coiffed. Energized and alert, as though

ready to move, she looks eagerly toward the camera. Her dashing companion pauses with palette in one hand and brush in the other to smile engagingly as he glances away from his canvas. This is Madrid in the late 1920s — and the vital young friends radiate the enthusiasm of their commitment to the arts. This surge of creative commitment also influenced Varo's decision, in 1930, to marry another friend from the Academia, Gerardo Lizarraga. A Basque, like her mother, Lizarraga had been born in 1905 in Pamplona. Tall and lanky, with a long narrow nose and deep-set eyes in an expressive face that could alternate quickly between brooding and mischief, Lizarraga is remembered as a sweet, honest, and high-spirited man with a wonderful sense of humor.™ A prize-winning student during his years at the Academia, he developed a wide variety of skills, later producing portraits, commercial illusTs

27. Remedios

Varo

and untoentified man,

c. 1927,

trations, political posters, and popular murals.

He also made

several films,

including a surreal horror film entitled The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks, for which he created a number of strange sets similar in spirit to those of the Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligart.®> Politically an anarchist, Lizarraga would be among the first to volunteer to defend the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. As if to acknowledge their shared Basque heritage, Varo and Lizarraga were married in 1930 in San Sebastian, the seaside locale of those family summers that had been so central to her youth. A small family event, the wedding was held in a chapel in the church of San Vicente, which is an imposing Gothic cathedral that rises in the heart of the old city, at the foot of Monte Urgull. Marriage was an important step for Varo in asserting her independence. In the Spain of the late 1920s there were still tight social codes restricting

women's lives. As an unmarried young woman of twenty-one, Varo was expected to live with her parents. Although they had allowed her to study at the Academia, she was still fully subject to their control. For Varo, who had always resented the strictures of authority, marriage offered the appealing freedom of living away from home, out from under the scrutiny of watching

and judging eyes. And, in choosing Lizarraga, a politically committed artist, Varo was establishing the kind of life that she wanted to lead — to be part of d/

the bohemian world of artists who believed in social progress. Although the marriage was to disintegrate slowly over the ensuing five or six years, it was based on a friendship that endured throughout their lives. As was characteristic

of Varo, she kept in close contact with Lizarraga, and they are seen together in photographs in Spain, in France, and in Mexico to the very end of her life. Even years after her death, Lizarraga was still part of the web of loyal

friendships that Varo had woven around herself, and he was to live in her former apartment in Mexico from her death in 1963 until his own in 1982. An early snapshot documents the couple together (plate 28), Lizarraga

and Varo on the left, dressed up in the typically Spanish fashion to spend a Sunday in the park with friends. It was 1930 and, despite the bucolic atmosphere,

Spanish life was on the brink of profound political and social change. Less than a year later, on April 14, 1931, bells rang and cannons boomed throughout

Madrid to announce the extraordinary birth of la nifa bonita. A bloodless coup

quickly replaced thirty years of monarchy and eight years of military dictatorship with “the pretty girl,” the Second Republic of Spain, committed to democratic reform. Although progressive, Varo had never been active in politics; but as

an artist who cherished individual freedom she enthusiastically joined in the nationwide celebration.

The country had been rocked by widespread public unrest for several years, and in early 1931 secret plans were revealed in anonymous statements that threatened revolution:

A passionate demand for Justice surges upwards from the bowels of the Nation. Placing their hopes in a Republic, the people are already in the streets. We would have wished to communicate the people's desires through the due process of Law. But this path has been barred to us. When we have demanded Justice, we have been denied Liberty. When we have demanded Liberty, we have been offered a rump parliament like those of the past, based on fraudulent elections, convoked by a dictatorship, the instrument of a King who has already broken the Constitution. We do not covet the culminating drama of a revolution. But the misery of the people of Spain moves us greatly. Revolution will always be a crime or an act of insanity when Law and Justice exist. But it is always just when Tyranny prevails.*° In response to the overwhelming sentiment against his regime and fearing the growing potential for revolution, the military dictator General Primo de Rivera (allegedly called “My Mussolini” by the king) had resigned. An anti-

monarchical landslide in municipal elections had prompted King Alfonso XUI to flee; and euphoric Spain was left, amid cannons and bells, to create a new government. “A joy like that of nature in spring — such was the mood of Spain in those glorious first days of the Republic.” The royal flag of red and gold was replaced by a tricolor of red, yellow, and purple; the national anthem was altered; and many streets were rechristened with Republican-sounding names. There were more substantive changes as well: agrarian reforms; the secularization of education so that convent schools like the one that Varo had endured would no longer hold virtual monopoly over the feeding, clothing, and teaching of 5)

the young;

an

end

to the censorship

that

had

prohibited

authors

and

artists

from producing liberal work; and the legalization of abortion, divorce, and remarriage. There was also an immediate personal result for Varo, when all Spanish women were granted the right to vote. It was a very heady time. We did it all without shedding any blood! The dictatorship fell, the King fled, and the new regime came to power, all in a matter of hours,

because the people wanted it! And without our shedding a single drop of blood! The professors at the university repeated these or similar words, the students echoed them, the shopkeepers said much the same thing,

so did the doctors, the lawyers, the socialists, the workers; even many who had formerly been royalists were carried away by the enthusiasm of this beautiful intellectual dream.* The dream was quickly put to the test, however, by reactionaries determined

to make life impossible for the Republic. Barely four weeks after la nifa bonita’s birth, the first signs of violence erupted in Madrid. Reaction from the right

compounded by factionalism within the left prompted random violence at first and later an organized program

of terrorist attacks:

bombing of selected

Republican homes; shooting in the streets and cafés. By May there was trouble 28. Gerardo Lizarraga ano Remedios Varo (Left) with

untoentified friends, 1950.

in calle Alcala, the very street that housed the Academia where Varo was finishing her studies. It was her first close look at violence —a violence that

would swell for five years until it burst into the bloodiest war in Spain's history. Partly to escape the growing political unrest and partly in pursuit of

adventure, as soon as Varo had earned her degree she and Lizarraga left for AYyear-long stay in Paris.

55

EZ EE Ec

2 loward Surrealism Paris and Barcelona

‘yy. FASCINATED BY THE SURREALIST IDEAS that had been filtering ® into Spain, Varo went to Paris to find the avant-garde at its source, #4 to experience the famous city for herself. The Spanish innovators “< Dalf, Bufuel, Lorca, and Alberti, like Pablo Picasso and Joan Mir6 before them, had all left Spain in search of the artistic energy that Paris was seen to offer. The same hunger for innovation drew Varo there as well. Perhaps uncertain about how to proceed, and yearning to learn something different from what the Academia had been teaching, she immediately signed up for courses at La Grande Chaumiére, the free art school renowned throughout Paris. However, as quickly as she signed up, she dropped out. As she later explained to the Mexican art critic Margarita Nelken, she soon realized that she did not want to place herself, once again, within the confines of the classroom.! Young and eager, she was just beginning to feel the growth of her own wings and she wanted no institution to limit their span. New to Paris, she was intoxicated by the charged atmosphere, by the heightened sense of boundless creativity that filled the air. Working at odd jobs, she and Lizarraga

“led the life of poor bohemians, confident and carefree.’? As Varo later admitted, they even threw their dirty dishes into a corner, letting them gather into a mountainous pile until her mother came to visit and washed them.* Varo had not come

29. Unidentified man, Remedios Varo, ano Esteban Francés.

to Paris to become

a housewife.

She had come

to be part of the

city’s artistic atmosphere, and she eagerly joined groups in cafés where endless conversation became her “hearth and trampoline.’ It was a tantalizing interlude, this graduation year abroad, and in 1932 the young couple returned to Spain invigorated, eager for excitement and change. Still savoring their taste of Parisian life, they did not return to Madrid, choosing instead the more avant-garde atmosphere of Barcelona. This was an understandable move, for if any Spanish city could be likened to Paris, it was certainly Barcelona, the place that Spain considered its only “European” city. It was liberal, optimistic, and very anticlerical in outlook and had become, by the early 1930s, much more of an intellectual and artistic center than Madrid. Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, Barcelona had fostered close contact with Paris for years, and its regional language, Catalan, was closer to Provengal French than to any Spanish dialect. Thus, in moving to Barcelona, Varo took another step in her orientation toward things French. The city also offered her distance, both geographical and psychological, from the watchful eyes of her family and a chance to 53)

experiment with her life as well as her art. Within a short time she embarked on a liaison with Esteban Francés (plate 30), a Catalan artist six years her junior, and together they made contact with the burgeoning Surrealist community in Barcelona and with French Surrealists as well. Interested in the experimental and the surreal, Francés had come to Barcelona to join the avant-garde. He found an eager colleague in Varo and, although she continued to live with Lizarraga, Francés became her lover. In this, Varo made her first break with the strict moral code under which she had been raised and established a pattern she was to maintain for the rest of her life: multiple relationships, all open, nothing hidden, which developed into friendships that lasted long after any romantic connection had ended. Like Lizarraga, Francés was part of Varo's life in Spain, France, and Mexico. Although open sexuality and the flouting of conventional morals were a virtual credo in the bohemian set, Varo was rare in her ability to conduct affairs that matured into friendships with little jealousy and few recriminations. With Francés, as with Lizarraga and with other lovers to come, her friendships, once established, endured across great spans of distance and time, remaining intact despite the wrenching upheavals of this chaotic period of history.

30. Esteban Francés.

Pencil on paper. Private collection.

A photograph from the Barcelona years (plate 29) shows Varo arm in

arm with Francés and a friend. Smiling broadly, she looks bright and happy, and her companions seem suave and debonair. All smartly dressed in sophisticated clothing, they project an air of being young people on the move. Francés, small and dark, with boyish good looks and sultry eyes, has a cigarette tucked in his fingers and a coat draped over his arm. He has turned slightly toward Varo, protectively clutching her hand in his own, as if to make clear for the camera which two of the three are the couple. Sharing

a studio

in the Plaza

de Lesseps,

in an

area

of Barcelona

frequented by young artists, Varo and Francés thrived in the highly charged atmosphere — buoyed by the early Republic's extraordinary effusion of hope. They

soon

set

to work

producing

paintings,

drawings,

and

collages

that

expressed a commitment to Surrealist ideas. The work she began to create, her first since leaving the Academia, indicates that Varo had already developed a sophisticated understanding of Surrealist imagery and intent. Her beautifully drawn Composition of 1935 (plate 31) includes a softened

bonelike tree, a limp elongated figure, and insect-human hybrids — a composite of images flowing seamlessly one into the next with no narrative structure

51, Composition, 1959.

Pencil on paper, [l/s X 777s in. Rv

Private collection.

beyond what the juxtaposition of elements suggests. It is an accomplished work that reflects Varo's early familiarity with the emerging masters of French and Spanish Surrealism. As one critic later put it when this work was exhibited

in a 1975 homage to Surrealism in Catalonia, “in the work of Ramei [a misspelling of Remei, the Catalan version of her name] Varo . . . we re-encounter the sensibility of line and form of the best drawings of Salvador Dali.” Varo

and

Francés

also

played

the group

games

that the

Surrealists

so

enjoyed, their favorite being the cadavre exquws (exquisite corpse), a Surrealist

adaptation of an old parlor game.° A game unconscious

associations,

of chance juxtapositions and

it involved artists’ working collaboratively to build

a composite image. In its original design as a word game, each player would write

a word

or a phrase on

a sheet of paper,

fold the paper

to conceal

part

of it, and pass it on for the next player's contribution. The results obtained in an

initial Surrealist

round,

“Le cadavre

exquis boira le vin nouveau”

(the

exquisite corpse will drink the young wine), became the source for the name

of the game. It was further modified to include drawing, and the goal became the creation of a figure, with each player contributing body parts in turn. It was this more visual form that engaged Varo and Francés. A unique series of works (plates 32-37), all done during the month of July in 1935, documents how the couple and their friends devoted themselves

to the game. That Barcelona summer

has become part of Surrealist lore,

described at length by Surrealism’s own historian, the French artist and writer

Marcel Jean, who was a principal player in the group: “I met Remedios and Esteban Francés when I visited Oscar Dominguez, their friend and mine, while he was in Barcelona in July 1935. Remedios’ husband, Gerardo Lizarraga,

52, Oscar

Dominguez, Esteban Francés, and Remedtos Varo.

Exquisite Corpse, 1955. Collage on paper, LOY; X 77s in.

Edouard Roditt, Parts. 535. Remedtwos

Varo,

Oscar Dominguez, and Marcel Jean.

Exquisite Corpse,

1955. Collage on paper, 10" X 67/4 in. Marcel Jean, Parts.

Dae

54. Top, left: Esteban Francés, Remedtos Varo, Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Jean.

Exquisite Corpse, 1955. Cut and pasted papers

on buff paper, 107% X 8/2 in. Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New

York.

55. Top, right: Marcel Jean, Esteban Francés, ano Oscar Dominguez. Exquisite Corpse, 1955, Collage on paper, IDs X 8/4 tn. Marcel Jean, Parws.

36. Bottom, left: Marcel Jean, Oscar Dominguez, and Ejteban Francés.

Exquisite Corpse, 19%. Collage on paper, 8/2 X 6 in. Marcel Jean, Pars.

37. Bottom, right:

Esteban Francés, Oscar Dominguez,

ano Marcel Jean.

Exquisite Corpse, 1955, Collage on paper,

10!) X 6/4 in. Marcel Jean, Pars.

and herself were commercial artists (advertising) [they worked for J. Walter

Thompson, the publicity agent], she hardly painted then, drew a little and we spent some time making together ‘cadavres-exquis.’ ”” Although Jean remembers collaborating with Lizarraga, it was Varo, Francés, and the Spanish artist Oscar Dominguez who indulged in the game with him as “relief against ennui.” As Jean was later to describe it: — which went to sleep What was there to do in that super-active city during the siesta hours? But it woke up again in the evening and we strolled along the Ramblas where crowds filled the cafe terraces until late at night, clapping hands to call the waiters so that we imagined that they were cheering us as we passed by. Down the slopes of the Citadel, on the Paralelo, innumerable parties were dancing the sardana, that charming group dance that only Catalans can perform properly. What was there to do for four not very affluent Surrealists, after they had explored the Barrio Chino and devoutly visited Gaudi’s Parc Giiell and his unfinished ‘‘art nouveau” basilica, the Sagrada Familia? One main relief against ennui had always been, among Surrealists, to draw what we called “cadavres exquis” —a variation of the wellknown game of “consequences” — and in Barcelona we soon resorted to that famous diversion, introducing, however, a different technique: to the surprises of blind collaboration we added the charms of “collage.” The successive contributions which were to build up the final image were not drawn by hand but we borrowed them, ready-made and in bright colors, from illustrated advertisements in out-dated magazines. We cut out figures of personages, objects, animals, etc., and pasted the cuttings on a sheet of paper; then, according to the rules of the game, each participant masked his own “collage” and handed over the sheet to the next contributor. And we noticed that, on the gay unexpected images we obtained, colors assembled at random often did match and enhanced, it seemed to us, the relations that revealed themselves between the individual elements of our collective picture. The process was rather exciting and we made ‘“‘cadavres” out of corpses of bygone publicity until our supply of old magazines was reduced to shreds. Each of us shared a certain number of these “exquisite” compositions which brought new poetical discoveries to the already infinitely varied repertory of the game.® Seven different examples on pages of notebook paper ripped from spiral bindings show collaged fragments of floating bodies and dismembered human limbs (mostly women’s) in dated costumes, cut from glossy magazine advertisements. They have been rearranged on each page in chance juxtapositions with varieties of objects, all organized more or less vertically to suggest the standing human form. Taken together, these works can be read as a series, although the constellation of players shifted slightly from piece to piece: three were done with Varo, four without her.? A rare example of such sustained collaborative play, they express an exuberant and inventive group dynamic, 40

58. The Anatomy Lesson, 1955.

Collage on paper. Marcel Jean, Parts.

recording the spontaneous associations and metaphorical possibilities that the Surrealists found so exciting. For Varo, participation in the game served to reinforce her burgeoning attachment to the French Surrealist movement. Soon she and Francés were sending to Marcel Jean (now back in France) works they had made that they wanted him to circulate to others in Paris.!° A fascinating series, they too were

built on the game of cadavre exquis, combining collaged elements cut from printed illustrations with hand drawing and painting, but each was the product of only one person. In The Anatomy Lesson (plate 38), the only known work from this series to bear Varo's signature, heads of bearded and mustachioed men placed atop torsos marked by anatomical diagrams are juxtaposed with vertebral X rays, a photo of an unidentifiable visceral mass, and multiple eyes

framed by an amorphic stenciled shape. Combined into an arresting composition, these fragments take on a power that is both startling and funny. In The Crossing (plate 39), a smiling donkey, an empty seated dress, and a mast topped by the hollow cast of a classical head float in a small rowboat

adrift on a choppy sea. All are bound by a larger shape that in comic-book terms is a thought-bubble, which issues from the mouth of a brightly colored bird. Although this painting is unsigned, the choppy sea and drifting boat, as well as the animated dress, suggest Varo's hand, as they were to become recurring elements in a number of her later works. A third piece from this series, Catalog of Shadows (plate 40), is made up of a grid of collaged photographs of fine furniture seemingly taken from a display catalog. Again unsigned, this 4

work anticipates the interest in furniture design that would reappear in Varo's later work, in which specific styles of a chair or table or brazier were often copied from encyclopedia illustrations to insure accuracy of detail. In The Masked Pianist (plate 41), the last of these works thought to have been done by Varo, the eyes return. Here they are surrounded by a collaged mask with hairlike tentacles that covers and transforms the face of the pianist in this otherwise dour ensemble of aging musicians who have gathered around a piano to pose for a formal photograph. Again there are references to Varo's later work, in which masks would become costumes that similarly serve to highlight the eyes while muffling the mouth. Each of these works is a sophisticated composition carefully calculated to combine juxtaposed elements into a striking visual whole. In sending these works to Jean, Varo and Francés were looking for feedback. They wanted to show that they, too, were practicing Surrealists, even though they lived in Barcelona. In a series of letters to Jean, written in French, they chronicled their artistic activities, with special emphasis on events related to Surrealism. In one letter they wrote about their visit with Paul Eluard, the French Surrealist poet, who had come to Barcelona to give a poetry reading and lecture.!! Bearing an introduction from Jean, Varo and Francés had gone to meet Eluard, establishing a warm enough connection that in later letters they not 59. Remedios Varo(?). The Crossing, 1955, Tempera on paper: Marcel Jean, Paris.

&

40. Remedios Varo(?). Catalog of Shadows, 1955.

Collage on paper. Marcel Jean, Parts.

41. Remedios Varo(?) The Masked Pianist, 1955. Collage on paper. Marcel Jean, Parts.

only sent Eluard their regards but also wanted Jean to be sure to clarify for him their loyalty to true Surrealism. “Say hello to Eluard and repeat everything to him... above all our absolutely Surrealist position.”’” They also wrote to Jean about being invited to participate in a group — Friends of the exhibition sponsored by ADLAN (Amics de Les Arts Nous New Art), a small but influential organization founded in Barcelona in the

first year of the Republic for the express purpose of encouraging vanguard movements in literature and the arts and promoting creative exchange in Spain.'® The show was organized by a small group calling themselves the “Logicophobists,” an alliance of artists and writers (staunchly antilogical, as the name they chose makes clear) who proclaimed the union of art with metaphysics in the lofty programmatic text that accompanied their first, and only, exhibition. Held in May 1936 at the Glorieta Catalonia, a small avantgarde bookstore-gallery in Barcelona, the show included three works by Varo: Sewing Lessons, Accident of the Woman — Violence, and The Liberated Leg of the Giant Amoebas (all now lost), which prompted a local critic to describe her as “a

painter with a witty hypersensibility.’' Varo and Francés mentioned this exhibition in several of their letters to Jean, obviously excited by this chance to show their work but feigning a certain nonchalance, as if they feared that in the eyes of their sophisticated French friend the exhibition would not measure up to Surrealist standards. Varo wrote in May 1936: “Dear Marcel . . . There is now in Barcelona a group exhibition of painting and sculpture with elements as close to surrealism as you can find. They asked Esteban and me to take part and we are showing some paintings with them, given that for the moment there are not enough absolutely surrealist members here to make a group. But we want you to know that since it is not an absolutely surrealist group we are on the uidelines and entirely independent of them.”'® From the distance of Barcelona, Varo and Francés

clearly looked to Jean as their arbiter of things Surrealist, assuring him, as the letter went on, ‘we accept all your discipline and are willing to sign your manifestoes, we want to keep in contact with you and to keep up with your activities.” Although Varo sought to distance herself from the Logicophobists in her letters to Jean, she was among the small group who met with a local critic, Jordi Jou, in a Barcelona café to explain in impassioned if esoteric terms the ideals of Logicophobism — a meeting that Jou reported as lasting late into the night.'® And Varo was soon to report with undisguised pleasure that the Logicophobist exhibition, later cited as the “last surrealist ember in Spain before the Civil War,”'” had “stirred up some lively protests and great interest and curiosity.” But she was quick to add her dismay that among the group “there are only three or four who we believe are interesting and worthwhile” because “most of them do not follow ‘Surrealism’ absolutely, especially in that which concerns the social part.” She then assured Jean that “we are doing everything possible to make something fully ‘surrealist.’ ”'® But these energetic plans and all vanguard activity were soon to be crushed by the Civil War, which ended the hopes of the Republic and paralyzed Spanish culture. There had been one additional exquisite corpse (plate 42) made that 1935 AS]

summer that, although also the collective work of Varo, Francés, and Jean, is quite different from the rest. Hand-drawn

rather than collaged, it is prominently

signed (the others have no signatures) and bears a title penciled across the

top. It is also the most narrative of the exquisite corpses, evoking a more specific and internally consistent mood than any of the others. It reads as a

figure standing on a table surrounded by an ooze of loosely organic shapes. Although begun, like the others, as a series of juxtapositions dictated by chance, this drawing evolved into a unified composition with a figure that dominates the other elements. This figure, drawn by one person, is a female with multiple breasts, a prosthesis in place of legs, a crutch replacing one

arm, and a hole cut clear through the chest —a complete, if maimed, entity with a tone distinctly its own. It is as though the other players went on with the game

as a game,

one adding a table with coquettishly lashed eyes and a

silly cartoonlike mouth, the other supplying the ooze; but the artist who drew the figure was not quite in a playful mood. And it seems that someone reworked

the drawing, perhaps inspired by the power of that figure, adding detail and shading, even a horizon line and a penciled frame, to set it into a scene. The

resulting work is intriguing because it seems to anticipate the violence shortly to come. The political tension that had been building in Madrid when Varo and Lizarraga left for Paris was now spreading and escalating. Barcelona in that

summer of 1935 was more than the dancers and late night cafés remembered by Marcel Jean. It was a volatile city with sporadic street fighting, political murders, and a rhythm of growing violence foreshadowing the chaos to come. Not only does that figure standing on the table act as a mute

forecast of the

horrors ahead, but someone went back to the drawing, as if to formalize the piece by listing the players and adding a title: Quiere conocer las causas de (One

wants to know the reasons why). Why the escalating violence? Why the increasing danger? Why hadn't the Republic brought stability and peace to Spain? It hadn’t and it wouldn't. Within a year the Civil War erupted and all

hopes of a peaceful, progressive Republican regime were permanently destroyed. It was to be a terrible war, the most violent in Spain's history, with blood running in the gutters. A time of confusion, it prompted strategies for survival that changed by the month. At first, with the anarchists in control, everyone

wore workers’ clothing in the streets — the crude hemp sandals, old caps, and rough shirts that served as prudent camouflage for the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Shops were collectivized, people addressed each other as comrade, and the Ramblas rang with revolutionary songs blaring from loudspeakers far into the night. Within less than a year, the veforitov, sons of “good families,” had put back on their jackets and ties, as if to signal that the revolutionary euphoria no longer held sway. But the constant, cold terror and extraordinary cruelties remained —churches ablaze, snipers around corners, murders of priests and nuns, and knocks on the door in the middle of the night as someone, perhaps from the Right, perhaps from the Left, invited victims denounced by friends or by strangers to ‘‘take a little walk.” In this civil war in which civilian massacre was far more common than death on the front line, violence and fear ruled the streets. No one was safe, G5

tC tet CONIC Atetent niatii CNATt ALON msisin NCCNANTCT tia mnsine —itnssaunoencinncn

42. Esteban Francés, Marcel Jean, Remedtos Varo. One Wants to Know the

Reasons Why, c. 1955.

Pencil on paper. Private collection.

no one immune, not Varo, not her family, who helplessly watched as their younger son, Luis, took up arms in Franco's army and soon lost his life. Ironically, Luis was killed not by a bullet but by the extreme conditions the soldiers endured while on the march. The intense heat, the exhaustion, and the scarce and poor food aggravated a typhoid infection that Luis had contracted from drinking contaminated water in Madrid. Although he died of the typhoid, Varo referred to him as a “‘Francoist hero — medals and all” and talked of the bitter shock that her brother, her beloved playmate, should side with the enemy

and die while still so young.!° Despite an atmosphere increasingly hostile to creative pursuits, Varo did produce a few paintings, including two works of 1936 that later appeared in Surrealist shows. The first, titled simply Painting (plate 43),?° is reminiscent of the maimed figure in the exquisite corpse of the preceding year, which had either stimulated these ideas or had been her work as well. Here, curious mannequinlike half-figures with hairless heads and staring eyes stand in rows, separated by walls with high spikes. One has large bared breasts; another wears a camisole; another has a torso replaced by intersecting rings; still another, an arm socket truncated as a box. Although the faces are all virtually the same, the figures have an animated sense of personality with their halfbodies seeming to stretch and reach in various poses and attitudes. Thin, rootlike filaments flow from one area to another, subtly linking the various 45. Painting, 1956.

47

figures with the spikes on the walls. Although the differing bodies, no two alike, are imaginative and the overall tone more playful than gruesome, the bodies that Varo has invented, without legs, without arms, distorted and dismembered, are emblematic of the time in which they were made. They allude, whether intentionally or unconsciously, to the victims, wounded and dazed, who could be seen on the streets of her city.

The other documented work ofthat year, Double Agent (plate 44),”! reflects

another aspect of the political climate in Spain. Here, Varo has painted a small closed room with a separate image on each wall. The back wall is covered with fleshy female breasts and a small bushy tree, while through a little window in one side wall extends a greatly elongated arm with a huge mittlike hand holding a ball. A strong, big-handed figure, part male, part female, stands pressed against the opposite wall as a giant bumblebee climbs up its back. A woman’s head rising from a slit in the floor peers warily into the room, and with it rise wriggling lines that suggest vapors or snakelike roots. From the hand with the ball extends another sinuous root snaking across the floor and vanishing into a small, dark opening low in the back wall. It is a close, confining room in which the figure with its nose pressed against the wall looks trapped. The avenues of potential escape — the little window in the side wall, the small opening at the back, the slit in the floor —are either inaccessible or distinctly unappealing. Yet they all seem to beckon in a singularly sinister way. The title, Double Agent, is sinister as well, as is that half-obscured head rising out of the floor. This figure, the first of the self-portrait characters who would people much of Varo's later work, raises a question fundamental to civil war — who is the double agent? Is it this figure or the one with its nose pressed against the wall? In that subterranean space that had proved such a good place for stashing childhood stories, Varo has surely given her self-portrait character an excellent vantage point from which to spy. But has she trapped the half-man, half-woman? Or has it trapped her? Or have they both been trapped by that larger creature reaching in from outside? Fears of entrapment and of the treachery of double agents become prudent in a civil war in which enemy and ally are indistinguishable. Again, these allusions to political turmoil are found in a work that is more the product of inventive fantasy than polemical purpose. They also coexist in a painting that is highly sexually charged. The hermaphroditic figure — half heavy-limbed male, half curvaceous female — who faces a blank wall with no means of escape; the ball with its spermlike tail slithering into the small dark opening in a wall covered by voluptuous breasts; the leafy forking tree “fortuitously” placed beneath the breasts to suggest a hairy pubic triangle; the head emerging from a slit accompanied by other wriggling tails — all are tightly packed into a small enclosure alive with sexual tension. Such eroticization of seemingly unrelated objects, juxtaposed in a distorted, ominous environment, is quite in keeping with the Surrealist style with which Varo had been experimenting. The style and the movement were to be of increasing importance to her, both for her artistic development and for her personal life. For, amid the breadlines, the snipers, the dangers from Right and Left, Varo met the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret (plate 46), who would “4

48

44. Double Agent, 1956.

Oil on copper; S14 X 6Y% in.

Tst0ore Ducasse Fine Arts,

later become her husband. They met through Oscar Dominguez, the other partner in that Barcelona summer of Surrealist games. Dominguez, an artist from the Canary Islands and founder of Gaceta de arte (a Tenerife journal devoted to Surrealist activity), served as a bridge for Surrealism between France

and his Spanish home. Traveling regularly to Paris, he first met the

Breton circle at the Café Place Blanche in Montmartre. Dominguez was an organizer of Surrealist exhibitions, including one that brought Breton and Péret to Tenerife in 1935.2? Knowing Varo as someone who understood the

spirit of the cadavre exquis, he recommended to Péret that while in Barcelona he look up this lively young artist who shared his Surrealist sympathies. Péret, born in France in 1899, came to Barcelona in August 1936 as one

19

45. Remedwos

oy

Varo.

y}

Hh l ]\Hh

/

\

of the early group of foreigners who volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic against destruction by Nationalist rebels. Among the French Surrealists, Péret had always been one of the most

politically active, having been jailed, then

expelled from Brazil five years earlier for Communist

political activity.”> He

was dedicated to the cause of revolution, believing in Leon Trotsky’s vision of the future, and to the cause of poetry, which he practiced to the same ends.

“The real poet cannot be recognized as such if he does not oppose the world in which he lives by total nonconformism.’4 50

46. Benjamin Péret.

Arriving in Barcelona less than a month after the war had begun, Péret and his fellow volunteers were greeted with enthusiasm by Spaniards singing

the “Internationale” and raising in salute the clenched fist of solidarity. Finding a city pierced by cries of “come down and see; there’s another dead priest in the street,’ a city in which the burning of churches was a regular occurrence, Péret wrote excitedly to Breton, “If you could see Barcelona as she is today, dotted with

barricades,

walls standing, you

decorated

would

with

be exultant

d/

burnt-out

churches, 9

like me.’2°

Such

only their four

exultation

is not

surprising from the man who had established his anticlerical credentials years

earlier by having a photograph of himself insulting a priest reproduced in La Revolution Surréaliste, the first official Surrealist magazine (plate 47).” Despite Péret's exuberant letter from Barcelona, his friends quietly suspected

that he never saw much combat. As Breton later put it, “The mental image of

the first days of the Spanish revolution gives us the sight of a, Benjamin Péret seated before a gateway of Barcelona,

holding a gun in one hand and, with

the other, caressing a cat on his knees.’** Rumors soon circulated in Paris that Péret had been executed by the Republicans for belonging to the POUM (Worker's Party of Marxist Unification), a Trotskyite group, one of several

leftist factions that vied for power during the war.” 47. Benyamin Peéret

insulting a priest, 1926.

The rumor proved untrue, but Péret did join POUM, writing to Breton in October, “I work here for the POUM on the radio where I make — don't laugh like that — Portuguese broadcasts.’”*” By March 1937 Péret was with the Anarchist Durruti division at Pifia de Ebro on the Aragon front, an area made famous in George Orwell's impassioned memoir, Homage to Catalonia. As Orwell, a volunteer on the same front in those same months, has described it, the kind of unit that Péret would have joined was little more than a ragtag collection of young boys and foreign volunteers, unfamiliar with Spain and

with war, who had been mobilized with little equipment and even less training in a situation of “boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger,’*' but little real combat. It was a boredom that Péret complained of in another letter to Breton: “The sector — which I did not choose — is perfectly quiet: we are separated from the fascists by the entire width of the swollen 2

Ebro, that is to say by a good kilometer of water. Therefore, not a cannon shot, not a bullet, nothing. It is too quiet to endure.” In fact, as Orwell reported, there was greater danger in Barcelona itself, where association with the POUM was becoming increasingly dangerous. In mid-June 1937 the POUM was declared illegal, and secret police began arresting anyone connected with the party, even boarding ships to seize suspected Trotskyites before they could leave the country. Not only was Péret in grave danger, but Varo, who had

quickly become his companion, risked political reprisal as well. They had met in October 1936, as Péret announced to Breton in another of the letters through which he eagerly maintained contact with the Surrealist group he so missed: “I am involved in a love story that holds me here until the young person can accompany me to Paris, so I can say nothing of my return.’*° The

love story

developed

quickly

in that first autumn

of the war.

Soon Péret was giving Varo copies of his books bearing passionate inscriptions: “To Remedios whose two breasts are my two hemispheres”; “To Remedios, my breath, my blood, my life.’ And his 1936 volume of love poetry, Je sublime,

published with a dedication “to Remedios Lizarraga,” was filled with tender images:

It's Rosa weather with a real Rosa sun and I'm going to drink Rosa with a Rosa meal until I fall into a Rosa sleep dressed in Rosa dreams and the Rosa dawn will wake me like a Rosa mushroom in which Rosa's image will be seen surrounded by a Rosa halo.* Varo now

found herself in love not with a friend from school, not with

another fledgling Spanish artist virtually unknown like herself, but with an

older man, a published poet, a French Surrealist, in fact one of André Breton’s closest friends, a revolutionary who had come to defend her country and a

romantic who had dedicated his love poems to her. It was such a heady affair that when Péret returned to Paris in 1937, Varo, still married to Lizarraga and still involved with Francés, decided to move there to join him. It was a move based on passion — the passion of a young woman for a romantic older figure, a poet central to Surrealism, and a Frenchman with whom she could

participate in the Parisian artistic milieu. It was also a move that offered Varo escape from her war-torn country and welcome relief from its terrors. The man, the return to Paris, the Surrealist movement, the relief from fear — all combined to make it a move that she eagerly undertook. But it was to have unanticipated ramifications that would exact a heavy psychological toll. With the Nationalist victory in Spain two years later, Generalissimo Franco closed

the Spanish borders to all with Republican ties. Thus, by moving to Paris with Péret, Varo had unwittingly sealed herself off from any future return to

her homeland. She was to dwell on the impact of this abrupt and painful break throughout the rest of her life, expressing deep remorse at having thus separated herself from her family.

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3 Among the Surrealists Paris and Marseilles § WHEN VARO ARRIVED IN PARIS in the spring of 1937, the streets were still safe, remote from bombs, machine guns, food lines, and fear. Having just left a country in which “Death to the intelligentsia” SS had bane a common slogan, she was eager to join the intellectual Re still so vital in France. She had followed Péret, the new love in her life leaving Lizarraga and Francés behind. While Lizarraga was to stay in onan until the end of the Civil War, Francés followed Varo in quick pursuit, and a keen competition between him and Péret ensued. Tales of conquests and reconquests emanated from the Montparnasse studio shared by the trio, to be endlessly embellished in good-natured retellings passed among their friends. “Péret was most obstinate but Francés had for him his good looks (neither had money). . . . All remained ‘good friends’ all the same.”!

Despite the friendly rivalry, it was as Péret’s companion that Remedios (the full name by which she was known in France) was brought into the heart

of the Surrealist group. Péret had been involved with the Surrealist movement from its inception in the 1920s. He remained particularly close to Breton, who called him “my dearest and oldest companion in the fight” and praised him

for being “of all the Surrealists, the one who had thrown himself without restraint into the poetic adventure.” Known among his colleagues as the most uncompromising ofthe Surrealists, Péret was seen as a man who was true to his principles regardless of the consequences. Although his poetry is filled with violent and scatological images, he is remembered as a most gentle man, aroused to violence only when confronted with injustice, particularly as perpetrated by the church and the police. According to his friends, Péret's personality was a curious combination of modesty, honesty, and kindness coupled with an ego that expressed itself in childish ways — like regularly taking the biggest and best piece for himself when sharing a meal with friends.* Staunchly loyal to the Surrealist movement, he has been called “the Grand Inquisitor’ because ofhis zeal in interrogating those suspected of “wrong attitudes” as part of the infamous excommunication process by which the Surrealists regularly purged their ranks. It is an irony of the man and of the movement that, believing in liberation and decrying the

strictures of institutionalized religion, Péret, Breton, and the others would 48. Benjamin Péret and Remedtos Varo

sitting in front of Villa Air-Bel, Marsetlles, c. 1941.

— inquisition and excomzealously employ those most Catholic of methods munication — in pursuit of Surrealist ideals. At Péret’s side, Varo found herselfin the inner circle of Surrealism, feeling somewhat awed:

‘My position was the timid and humble one of a listener; |

oy)

was

not old enough

nor

did

I have

the aplomb

to face up to them,

to a Paul

Eluard, a Benjamin Péret, or an André Breton. There I was with my mouth

gaping open within this group of brilliant and gifted people.”” Her response to the group was not due solely to her youth or timidity, however. The atmosphere created by Breton and the others was calculated to intimidate, especially at the cafés that Breton visited “as if they were his office.” As described by André Thirion:

Aperitif sessions ists. Assiduously Breton. . . . The Strangers, some

became almost permanent gatherings for the Surrealattended, they were a ceremony of allegiance to meetings were always a kind of test for new-comers. .. . curiosity seekers, some invited . . . would sit down at a

table and be subjected to an entrance

exam.

Breton was the final judge

of admission. He would lace his welcome with an ironic politeness, and his tone of voice was filled with many nuances. ... There were nearly always one or two more or less transient neophytes, dumb-struck with fear and admiration.°

Perhaps Varo was spared the rigors of the “entrance exam” by virtue of her connection to Péret, but such an atmosphere could not have left her feeling fully at ease. As she later recalled, ‘I, who could not quickly lose my provincial quality, was trembling, frightened, dazzled.” Varo was later to recount her fright not only in front of Breton, the group’s formidable leader, but also Péret, with whom greater comfort might have been expected. As friends remember it, she seemed to look up to Péret,

to idolize him in a way, and to present herself as shy and rather timid. As Jacqueline Lamba, Breton’s wife during this period, recalls, Varo seemed awed by her as well. Remembering Varo as “marvelous — lively, intelligent, creative,” she adds, “I liked Remedios a great deal; she could feel that I liked her, but there was little conversation between us. She seemed intimidated somehow.’®

It is also telling that Varo later remembered herself as very young in the late 1930s, when, in fact, she had her thirtieth birthday at the end of 1938. This memory may reflect her lack of self-confidence in the presence of the Surrealists whom she had admired so greatly from afar. But it also suggests that Varo had already begun reducing her age by five years, and that she had begun to incorporate the fabrication into her sense of herself. It was an invention that came to have its own reality — eventually finding its way onto her passport and her gravestone,

both of which list her birth date as 1913,

rather than the 1908 of her birth certificate. Although many people indulge in changing their age, Varo may have adopted this fabrication for survival among the Surrealists, who put a very high value on youthful beauty and innocence in women. Key to Surrealism, a movement that devoted considerable energy to theorizing about the role of Woman in the creative process, was the image of the femme-enfant, the naive

woman-child whose spontaneous innocence, uncorrupted by logic or reason, brings her into closer contact with the intuitive realm of the unconscious so crucial to Surrealism. Breton exalted Woman as the prime source of artistic 96

creativity,

saying,

“The

time will come

when

the ideas of woman

will be

asserted at the expense of those of man.”? However, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in her discussion of Breton in The Second Sex,'® such theories present woman as an object of male definition, as Other rather than Self,

leaving little place for the real women among the Surrealist group to develop independent creative identities. Thus, the women of Surrealism, as Gloria Orenstein has suggested, had to struggle against limitations placed on them by the very concepts of Surrealism itself.!!

Although Whitney Chadwick reports that the majority of women associated with

Surrealism

movement

have cited

as a sympathetic

Breton milieu,

and the others as supportive she goes

on

and the

to point out that the women

saw themselves as functioning outside Surrealist doctrine, which was generally formulated in their absence.” Especially difficult was the cruelly ironic image

of the femme-enfant, which, in equating woman's creativity with youth and

innocence, left little room for maturity or the aging process among the women artists in the group. As Lamba later put it, “The men were remarkably unaware of the contradictions inherent in their ideas.”’!5 The women surely all knew each other and in some cases developed friendships. Yet there seems to have been little sense of community among the Surrealist women in Paris comparable to that network of interchange and support

—

however

volatile —that

united

the

men

in the group.

Years

later

Varo was to build a deep friendship with one of the women, the English artist

Leonora Carrington, whom she first met in Paris and with whom she developed an extraordinary creative collaboration in Mexico. But there is no evidence that the Surrealist women

enjoyed any such supportive exchange in France

during the 1930s.

Nonetheless, a remarkably large number of women artists did associate themselves in one way or another with the Parisian Surrealist group, finding

the search for a merging of inner and outer realities an irresistible challenge. As Varo later put it: ‘Yes, I attended those meetings where they talked a lot and one learned various things; sometimes I| participated with works in their exhibitions. . . . I was together with them because I felt a certain affinity.’

From the surviving evidence, mostly found in periodicals of the time, Varo seems to have set to work quickly. In a period of two years (1937-39), which served as a kind of artistic apprenticeship, she experimented with a variety of

ideas and techniques. Borrowing widely, she created images that look like skillfully rendered representatives of the worlds of Salvador Dalf, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Wolfgang Paalen, and Victor Brauner, all of whom she numbered among her friends as well as her sources. One example of her work from this time, Desire (plate 49), was reproduced in the winter 1937 volume of Jfinotaure, a French Surrealist periodical. It is a

strange little painting in which five loosely shaped vessels that seem to drip like candles are poised atop a series of spiky mountains. From oblong openings in these

vessels

various

growths

spring

up;

some

seem

vegetal,

others

more

like powder or flames. A tiny staircase hanging in midair connects three of the vessels. As in the earlier Painting (plate 43), these forms are set against a

nonspecific dark background VA

and are painted with a sharp, clear focus.

49. Desire.

Similar, too, are the spiky points emphasized

by strong shadows.

There

is

further similarity with Painting in the use of variations within a repeated 50. Wolfgang Paalen. On the Ladder of Desire, /956.

structure and in the nonnarrative but suggestive quality of the images. Because Desire

is undated,

it is not

clear whether

it was

painted

before

Varo

left

Barcelona or after she arrived in Paris, though its similarities to the 1936 Painting suggest the earlier date. As the first of Varo’s work to be included in

a French Surrealist publication, Desire marks her public debut as part of the Surrealist group. There is a curious similarity between this work and one by the Viennese artist Wolfgang Paalen, who had come to Paris in 1936 and was associated with the Surrealist circle. Although Paalen was primarily a painter, he created objects in the Surrealist tradition as well. In one of these, On the Ladder of Desire (plate 50), done after his arrival in Paris, he made a spiraling staircase with a flame shape at its top. The odd similarity of Varo's work to this, with its spiky shapes topped by flames and its curious stairway connecting one flame point to another, together with the similarity of title, suggest influence between

these

artists.

With

the date

of the Varo

painting

unknown,

the

direction of that influence remains open. The two did begin a friendship during this period that continued in Mexico, where Varo worked for Paalen

restoring pre-Columbian artifacts. Among other works done by Varo at this time, each in a different style,

is the painting Anticipation (plate 51).!° Here we see a headless winged female

figure who holds up binoculars as though to replace her missing eyes. Seated, she raises one leg, the lower portion of which

has been replaced by al huge

crutchlike prosthesis in the shape of a key. With this key, the figure opens the

door ofa large armoire from which pours out milklike liquid; the armoire also contains a huge planet and clouds dripping rain. All of this is set before a crumbling wall behind which a comet rises from the horizon toward the sky. This mixture of terrestrial and celestial, of furniture and landscape, of natural and artificial is characteristic of work by many Surrealists of the time. While the crutch and the headless body are reminiscent of the truncated

8

51. Anticipation,

and dismembered

1937.

woman

52. Souvenir of

limbs is also a device used repeatedly by Varo's countryman Salvador Dali. The armoire that opens to reveal clouds and rain is reminiscent of devices

the Valkyrie, 1958.

used

figures in Varo’s Painting (plate 43) and of the wounded

in the Barcelona exquisite corpse (plate 42), the crutch in place of

by Magritte,

whose

strange

juxtapositions

had

helped

to define

the

Surrealist idea of affinity between unrelated objects. And the quality of fantastic but readable narrative likens this work to Varo's Double Agent (plate 44), itself

similar in spirit to works by Max Ernst with its dense enclosure of space, illogical jumps in scale, and simultaneity of seemingly unrelated incidents. Anticipation and Double Agent are Varo's strongest and most dynamic early works, evoking disturbing associations in disquieting scenes that suggest treachery and violence.

Some narrative similarities to these works can be seen in another painting that Varo did in 1938. In Souvenir of the Valkyrie (plate 52),'° an empty corset

lies on its side, abandoned in a stark landscape surrounded by a curving wall of clouds or smoke. Drops of liquid drip from the wall as a leafy growth entwines itself within the body of the corset. Behind the wall the head of a woman rises, as in the earlier Double Agent, with only her eyes and the top of

her head visible. The title alludes to the woman warriors of Norse mythology and more directly to Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie of Richard Wagner's Nibelungen Ring, whose punishment for disobeying the goddess Fricka was to be made a

mortal woman and to be “left sleeping on the mountains with a wall of fire around her which only a hero could penetrate.”'” In Varo's version, a rare example of her making direct reference to a literary episode, the Valkyrie has disappeared, leaving her empty corset to serve the sentence in her place, an

escape perhaps witnessed by that surreptitious head. Although Varo's works of this period differ markedly in style, many include a female body that is a victim of physical violence. In a drawing of 1938, Av in a Dream (plate 53),'* the woman is being stretched along a sharply undulating surface as though on a torturer’s rack. Precariously balanced between

rows

of planking

suspended

09

overa

barren

volcanic

landscape,

she

is

33. As ina

Dream, 196.

ee on paper.

: ades down a steep ladder, at the other feet. than r rathe s wheel nate in end by her greatly elongated legs, which termi people whose appendages are of work Varo's in This is the first example to often in her later work. replaced by wheels, an image that she returned

case pulled at one end by long hair that

matter but also with materials Varo experimented not only with subject (plate 54), she tried working with in these years. In The Souls of the Mountains

the accidental effects of fumage, a Surrealist technique that Paalen is credited with having invented while sitting in the Parisian café Deux Magots, a favorite Surrealist hangout. He is said to have come upon the idea while playing with a lighted candle. By passing the flame swiftly across a surface fresh with oil paint, he found that the smoke would trace unique marks in the wet surface. Working with the chance effects thus offered, Paalen created a series of fumages 60

54. The Souls of the Mountains, 1958. Oil on “triplay,”

292 X20 in. Private collection.

in which he would use a brush to bring out color images that were suggested to him in the smoke marks. In her painting Varo, too, elaborated with overpainting the tracks

left by smoky

tall cylindrical

fumes.

mountains,

some

For her, they became

of which

are

clouds

topped

with

swirling around

human

heads.

Looming out from their peaks, these souls within the mountains take the form of figures, one of which has been thought to be a profile portrait of Benjamin

61

Péret.'? Dating from 1938, this experiment with fumage may have been tried after Varo heard about or perhaps even witnessed Paalen’s discovery of the technique the previous year. In Vegetal Puppets of 1938 (plate 55), Varo experimented with another of the various techniques that the Surrealists were developing for forcing inspiration. Here she dripped wax onto an unpainted, unprimed wooden surface. Building on the accidental forms made by the drippings, she painted faces and suggested

bodies in bright colors to create a lively, highly textured composition of amorphous lines of paint and wax connecting figures that float in space. Such experimentation may also have led to her now-lost Painted Object, which was included in a 1937 exhibition, Surrealist Objects and Poems, held at the London

Gallery in England.” In all of these works Varo was trying a variety of styles, subjects, and techniques with the energy of an explorer mapping out new territory. Although certain images, such as the submerged head and the stringy vegetal

root,

are

repeated,

there

is little coherence

oh vi

eaaa o

SE Ree

55. Vegetal

Puppets, 19358. Wax and oil on “triplay, i

5579 X SD7s in.

Private collection.

to her work

from

this

period, and nothing that could be identified as a signature style. Largely experimental,

her work

was

welcomed

by the Surrealists,

who

immediately

recognized her as one of their own. Although she was never an official member of the Surrealist group, her work was included in their international exhibitions (in London, Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and New York) and reproduced in their major publications (J/inotaure, Dictionnaire abrégé de Surréaltsme, La Bréche, and Le Surréalisme méme, among others) from her first arrival in Paris in 1937 and for many years after her departure for Mexico.

The community of Surrealists that Varo found herself a part of has been described by Robert Goldwater as

international in character, ‘“bohemian” in a self-confident, intensive fashion . . . living av ofthey had no money worries. . . . [Yet they} existed on the margin of society. . . . As the latest issue of a long line of romantics, they accepted this situation as a condition of creativity and made of it a positive virtue. They carried with them a warmth of feeling, an intensity and concern for matters esthetic, a conviction of the rightness of their own judgments and an unconcern for any other. Artists of considerable reputation, they transmitted a sense of being at (or simply of being) the artistic center. . . . [This conviction ] of the importance of art even in the midst of cataclysm, for all that it was partly expressed through annoying poses, was sincere and contagious. It was a proper accompaniment of their Surrealism, with its reliance

upon the intuitive promptings of creation, and its trust in the subconscious impulse as the best artistic guide. . . .”!

It was surely these qualities that Varo felt an affinity with: conviction about the importance of art, reliance on the intuitive, and trust in the subconscious

impulse. She was also attracted to the bohemian life-style, with its blatant disregard for convention. However, to be bohemian with Péret also meant to exist in poverty. Rarely holding a regular job (perhaps eschewing this as a bourgeois compromise), Péret always lived on the edge. As he put it in a rare hint at self-revelation in one of his poems: _ if larks lined up at the kitchen doors to be roasted

if water refused to cut the wine and if I had five francs There would be something new under the sun.”2

Never able to capitalize on being a public figure, as Breton, Ernst, and Dalf did, Péret made a small and irregular income as a proofreader, and he is remembered from the early 1930s as ‘badly dressed, slovenly, [living] a hand-

to-mouth existence, begging a dinner here, fifty francs there. . . "> When Varo joined him, she joined his poverty as well. And however romantic “la vie bohéme’”’ might be, she had to work at many and varied jobs to stay alive. It is not easy to live on painting in Paris. I had many other specialties,

among which I was an announcer who translated at conferences for Latin Americans. Sometimes I did not have more food in an entire day than a small cup of coffee with milk. I call this “the heroic epoch.” I

65

believe a great number of artists have passed through it. Recently

[she is speaking in a 1960 interview] I returned from seeing a South American painter whom I knew at that time. But he did not seem very happy to remember the heroic epoch. I suppose that he wished to forget it. That bohemian life that is supposed to be necessary for the artist is very bitter.” For a more lucrative (and less ethical) means of earning a living, Varo is

said to have joined with Oscar Dominguez in producing paintings faked in the style of Giorgio de Chirico. As the Mexican

painter Gunther Gerszo

remembers it, “Once Remedios told me, ‘If you ever want to fake a de Chirico, don't forget to sprinkle some bicarbonate of soda when the painting is finished to give it a mat sheen.’ ””° As Gerszo understood it, they sold these works “out of sheer desperation” when they were acutely short of funds in Paris. Further

suggestion of Dominguez’s collaboration in such an enterprise is found in a cryptic passage written by Marcel Jean, his close friend at the time: “| Dominguez

was| directly inspired by the more superficial aspects of Chirico’s early work, and followed that artist's technique . . . but the influence of Chirico sometimes involved him in mimicry, and even in outright deception.’?° (Such deceit was

not limited to Dominguez and Varo. In his later years de Chirico himself painted many so-called false de Chiricos, reproducing multiple versions of his earlier paintings to which he assigned dates from decades past.”) With Varo's skill at rendering and her facility with the brush, de Chirico was an easy artist for her to imitate. His early works are so distinctive and so easily recognizable — with

their

characteristic

empty

plazzas,

colonnaded

buildings, long shadows, and sharp focus—that an unpracticed eye might readily accept a well-painted forgery if it included enough of the expected details. In fact, these very aspects ofde Chirico’s style had a marked influence on Varo, as they were later absorbed and transformed into the signature style of her mature Mexican work. But if Varo and Dominguez faked de Chiricos in Paris, they were looking not for stylistic influence but for enough money for food, an ongoing challenge in those “gay but hungry years.’?* If apseudode Chirico sold more easily than a real Varo or Dominguez, so be it. The specter of an entire day's sustenance limited to coffee proved a powerful stimulant for clever, if desperate, solutions. Despite the difficulties, Varo loved this life in Paris. She felt connected to the electric energy of the time and to the extraordinary group of talented and challenging people with whom she was surrounded, who still remember her as “a spectacular young woman,” as “exceptional in her spirit, her heart, a delight.’””? As Péret's companion, Varo found herself close to the inner circle that orbited around Breton; but she also created a circle of friends for whom she became the hub. This group included not only Péret, Francés, and Dominguez (who had a studio close to the one the trio shared in Montparnasse, from which he watched and reported on the developments of the ménage 4 trois),°° but also Victor Brauner (plate 56),

a Romanian artist with whom Varo was

to live for a time. Brauner had come from his native Bucharest to Paris in 1933. Introduced to the Surrealists through Yves Tanguy, he held his first Parisian exhibition in 1934, for which Breton wrote the catalog introduction,*! es

4

# sna

76. Victor Brauner:

wane

and was included in the 1935 Surrealist exhibition in Tenerife that Dominguez helped to organize. When Varo met him in 1938, he was exploring magic, alchemy, and psychic phenomena in work that became another source of inspiration for the energetic young woman.

Indeed, a work by Varo that, although undated, is surely from 1938 or early 1939 shows her painting in a style strikingly similar to Brauner’s. Known

only from a reproduction in a French Surrealist periodical of the late 1950s, On the Roof of the World (plate 57) shows

Varo creating a fantasy landscape

with jutting rocks, distant castle, and moonlit sky peopled by Brauner-like hybrid figures.** Lounging as though bathing along the shore, these hairless creatures with foreheads sloping into long, bridgeless noses, frontal eyes set into Egyptian-style profiles, and elongated arms with exaggerated fingers are beings drawn quite directly from Brauner'’s world (plate 58). Even the arched spiral of the tail is characteristic of Brauner’s signature style.

On the Roof of the World is one of a number of examples from these years of Varo's experimenting first with one style, then another, using ideas absorbed from her friends. The derivative imagery and lack of stylistic focus of these works must be understood as steps in a deliberate learning strategy. Coming from Spain with academic skills and a thirst for the avant-garde, she used this images,

time in France to experiment with the variety of styles, techniques, 0)

57. On the Roof of the World,

c. 1958-59.

58. Victor Brauner. The Sender, /977.

and ideas that the Surrealists could offer. She could not anticipate that the violent interruptions soon to come meant that it would be fifteen years before she could synthesize influences such as Brauner’s to create a style that was

uniquely her own. But the relationship of Varo and Brauner was more than one of artistic influence. Although she continued to live with Péret, Varo and Brauner (whose broad features, expansive forehead, and receding hairline gave him an aspect strangely similar to Péret’s) became lovers. Varo was an attractive woman,

and her energy, intelligence, and humor proved magnetic to men. “You would 66

just talk to her and you were at her feet.’ Reinforced by Surrealist ideology, which exalted erotic passion and “sublime love” and saw sexual independence as a requisite to artistic expression, she was uninhibited in her exploration of sexual freedom.

Yet, as Jimmy Ernst has affirmed in describing his father’s sexual exploits, among the Surrealists “most of the male prerogatives of home life, including a different code of morality for men and women, remained pretty

much in place.’”** This double standard seems not to have fettered Varo's actions, but it was to have disastrous consequences for Brauner, in an incident famous in Surrealist lore but never before associated with Varo. It happened on August 27, 1938, in the studio of Oscar Dominguez

on

the boulevard Montparnasse. As Varo later told the story, the group, including

Francés, Dominguez, Brauner, and herself, had been drinking, when someone (Francés?) criticized Varo for her several concurrent affairs. Dominguez, ever the Spaniard

ready to protect

a womans

honor,

rose to her defense.

An

ugly

fight began between Francés and Dominguez, prompting friends to leap in to separate the pair. While Brauner restrained Francés, Dominguez managed to

free one arm from the unnamed person holding him back. Trembling with rage, he grabbed a nearby glass and frantically hurled it toward Francés. But it accidentally struck Brauner, who collapsed to the floor, dazed and covered with blood, only to learn from his horrified friends that the glass had torn out his eye.*° This dramatic event is made even more extraordinary because Brauner's

early work suggests that subconsciously he may have willed it to happen, as Pierre Mabille, a physician who frequented Breton’s circle, suggested in his psychoanalytic analysis of the accident.*° For many years premonitions of such

a loss had recurred in Brauner’s paintings. Among the many one-eyed creatures that appear in his preaccident work are a 1931 self-portrait that shows him blinded in one eye (plate 59) and his 1932 Mediterranean Landscape, in which a figure with the letter D attached to a shaft that is puncturing his eye (plate 60) eerily foreshadows Dominguez as his assailant-to-be.

It was

an accident that Brauner called “the most painful and most

important fact of my life... essential to my development.” It changed the focus of his work, turning him toward creation of a series of chimeras and

somnambulists who seem to be searching for an “inner vision.” Among these is a painting that Brauner gave to Varo (plate 61), a work she kept all her life. Dating from 1939, this untitled piece is one of the female figures in a trancelike

state from his chimera series. Varo included this among the few possessions that she carried with her into exile, and evidence of its influence is found in her later Mexican work, where the entranced female, fantasy castle, and deep

architectural space set into a human chest all reappear. Varo's connection with the Surrealist movement was of enormous importance

to her as an artist. At a crucial moment in her development, when she was seeking a focus for her painstakingly acquired technique, Surrealism encouraged her tendency toward the imaginative and oriented her toward an attitude of questioning, experimentation, and irony. But her connection to the heart of

the movement was cut short when world politics again changed her life in ways she could not control. In September 1939 France and England took up 67.

59. Top, left:

Victor Brauner.

Self-Portrait, LYE

60. Top, right: Victor Brauner. Mediterranean Landscape,

1952.

61. Victor Brauner:

a

Untitled, 1959.

‘

24 X 20 in.

Ms \

i

arms against Germany, and Varo found herself facing the terror of war once

again. Paris had first girded for war a year earlier, when Hitler’s takeover of Austria and annexation of the Sudetenland had started Parisians digging trenches, practicing air raid precautions, and distributing gas masks; food cupboards

were

stocked

by those who

remembered

the devastating shortages

of the previous war. By July 1939 the French government was requesting that everyone leave Paris who could. As the Louvre and other state museums were closed,

their treasures

shipped to the provinces,

the evacuation

of the city

began. As Dorothea Tanning later remembered it: “July 1939, Paris, France. Gay Paris?

A city paralyzed by anxiety, almost empty,

breathing painfully

before the imminence of war. There is a permanent lump in my throat as I wander the beautiful streets.’

For those who tried to stay, including Varo and her friends, life went on in a kind of abnormal normality. During the first eight months, the so-called

phony war, the city saw little real action and was lulled into a dangerous nonchalance as Hitler's troops practiced elsewhere. But for foreign nationals, like Varo, existence had become more precarious. As Hitler invaded first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, Paris filled with foreign refugees.

Now forced to carry identity cards, all foreigners risked deportation to their native countries for any infraction of the rules. For Varo, deportation would

have meant return to a Spain under Franco's dictatorship, where summary executions of Republican sympathizers were common. But even in the Parisian

streets Varo could not help but notice the graffiti chalked on walls and sidewalks: “Down

with the Jews,

Foreigners get out.” Paris was becoming dangerous

for her. And her association with Péret, an outspoken Communist, only made things worse. By February 1940 Péret was recalled to military service. By May he had been arrested for political activism and incarcerated in a military prison in Rennes, a city west of Paris in the province of Brittany.

An evocative document from this period, in which Péret describes a vision he had while in the Rennes prison, offers insight into his relationship

with Varo. He describes images that appeared to him on the painted panes of his cell windows, among them the figure of a

. charming sprite who tossed butterflies over her head with a light, graceful gesture. .. . The sprite immediately brought to mind the thought of my companion. I had not had any news of her and her fate worried me much more than my own. I knew she was menaced both

by internment in a French camp and by expulsion — which would have meant a concentration camp. I could not forget the expression of terrified distress which I had seen on her face when I had left her, eight or

ten days before in Paris. She was standing on the platform of the Gare Montparnasse when I, handcuffed and surrounded by an imposing escort

of policemen,

had

boarded

the train for Rennes.

thoughts — which I might liken to black butterflies

All these sad

— were being cast

away by the sprite. True, the butterflies on the pane were light

colored — but my companion had always suffered from a nervous fear of insects, even of butterflies. I had often joked with her about this, saying: “In tropical countries there are often actual clouds of butter69

flies. What would become ofyou if we were ever to go to Mexico?” My companion's presence in the exotic landscape proved how much I wanted her to be free, out of reach of the dastardly police. Certainly, it would be better for her to ward off light-colored butterflies than the “black butterflies” which must be attacking her day and night. Finally, if we had succeeded in leaving for Mexico, we would be free, and what would even a cloud of butterflies matter!”

This tender vision of Varo as a “charming sprite” afraid of insects and attacked

by butterflies*’ offers an amusing context

for her work, years later,

drawing insects for an epidemiological study in Venezuela. This vignette, a rare example of autobiographical writing by the personally reticent Péret, affords a glimpse ofthe gentle warmth of the couple's relationship that survived despite the poverty, competing love affairs, and political turmoil.

The threat of the French police and the reality of their brutal treatment of Spanish refugees were brought closer to home for Varo through an extraordinary series of coincidences that began with a trip to the movies. She had gone to the cinema with a fellow exile, a Hungarian photographer and photojournalist named Emerico (Chiqui) Weisz (who would later become the husband of her closest friend in Mexico). The movie they chose to see was

preceded, coincidentally, by a short documentary that Weisz had helped to make on French concentration camps. As they watched in the darkened theater, Varo suddenly saw that one of the camp's internees was Gerardo Lizarraga, still legally her husband, with whom she had lost all contact. As an anarchist who had fought in Spain until the Republican collapse, Lizarraga had had to flee when Franco came to power. Escaping across the border into France, he found himself one of a great number of Spanish refugees who were interned in French concentration camps. Moved between camps in Agde, Argelés-sur-Mer, and Clermont-Ferrand, along the southern French coast, Lizarraga recorded the period in a large series of drawings that he made as a means of mental escape whenever he could find pencil and paper. Among images of guillotines, electric chairs, and the ever-present barbed wire (plate 62), as well caricatures of camp officials and elaborate erotic fantasies, is a particularly surreal drawing that Gerardo later described as a depiction of Varo (plate 63). As he wrote in a later note of explanation about his work: ‘‘As is natural from time to time, I thought of my wife. Officially we were not yet divorced but between us yes. In spite of everything, we were and continued to be good friends until her death.’’*! If Varo had not gone to the movies with Chiqui Weisz that day, Lizarraga might have been among the many who were surrendered into Nazi hands and extermination in Germany. But Lizarraga proved luckier. It had been pure chance that had led Weisz to film Lizarraga’s camp, pure chance that he had filmed Lizarraga himself (a man he did not know), and pure chance that Varo had happened to see the film. Once she had located him, Varo and her friends tirelessly worked and bribed until they achieved Lizarraga’s release.*? This event, an example of the haphazard fates that can determine life or death in wartime, also indicates the powerful network of friendships that Varo built “10

62. Gerardo

Luzarraga. Mother Earth Fenced with Barbed Wire, c. 1940. Pencil on paper. Xabier Lizarraga, Mexico City. 63. Gerardo

Lizarraga. Untitled, c. 1940. Pencil on paper:

Xabier Lizarraga, Mexiwo City.

around herself, friendships that endured despite wars, separation, and the passage of time. However, even her network of friends could not save Varo from ‘“‘the reach of the dastardly police” that Péret had so rightly feared. Sometime in the winter of 1940, she, too, was arrested, merely for being Péret’s companion. Little is known about her internment. Unlike Péret's account of his incarceration or Lizarraga’s drawings of the camps, Varo left no record of her experience. She never told where she was taken, never indicated how long she was detained (although

friends

speculate that it was

several

months),

never

described

the

conditions under which she was held. The only information about her internment, which most of the people in her life never even knew about, comes from a Parisian friend, Georgette Dupin, who took Varo into her home for several weeks after her release. Although even she does not know the details of Varo's internment, Dupin vividly recalls that its devastating effect had left Varo terribly traumatized and shaken. As Dupin put it, for someone with Varo's highly charged sensitivity, the incarceration must have been agonizingly difficult to bear.*® Yet Varo did bear it and bore even more as, not long after her release, the Nazis invaded Paris. It was as though she had been moved from one kind of hell to another — and friends still continue to hint that the cost to her psyche was great.

On June 1/4, 1940, at 5:30 A.M., the Nazis entered Paris, and the lull of the “phony war” was replaced by the horror of occupation. Within weeks France was partitioned into occupied and unoccupied zones, the “independent” French government was established in Vichy, and the Franco-German armistice was signed. Included in this treaty was the infamous Article 19, which required 71

the French government to “surrender on demand” any fugitive wanted by the Third Reich. Anyone, because of religion or antifascist views, could be placed

on the Nazis’ proscribed list. This put Varo, so recently held by the French, in even greater jeopardy. Although she had planned to remain in Paris until she could learn where Péret had been interned and when (or if) he would be

released, with the Germans hoisting the swastika flag atop the Eiffel Tower, she dared not wait any longer. Taking what little she could carry, Varo joined the millions who fled Paris in the face of the Nazi invasion. It was a June remembered as among the loveliest in years, bright, sunny,

cloudless, and not too warm, as Varo became one of the horde of more than eight million refugees: ‘men, women

and children [who] took off in utter

panic toward the unoccupied zone in the south, packing a few belongings on the roofs of their small cars or on the racks of motorcycles or bicycles or in baby carts, peddlers’ carts, wheelbarrows, or in any wheeled contrivance they could lay a hasty hand on, for many were on foot.’ For Varo, the anxious departure was eased somewhat by another of the surprising events with which these years were filled, one that offers further example of the power of her friendships. As she later told the story, she was spared the arduous walk across France by her old friend Oscar Dominguez, who had found a place for himselfin a car going south. In some kind of private expiation of the guilt he still harbored over the disfigurement of Brauner that his volatile temper had caused, he offered Varo the precious seat instead. He would hear nothing of her refusals and continued to insist until she finally accepted the ride.*° Friends remember hearing that Varo traveled “in the car

of some eccentric Americans who loaded their little car with fossils instead of provisions; in spite of the bombers and black smoke that weighed over the city and its outskirts, they stopped in front of each cathedral to admire it and were touched at encountering, almost unreal, an almond tree in flower.’“°

They stopped not only to look at churches but surely to take cover as well, as the German Luftwaffe, in their campaign to increase the chaos and to prevent French troops from coming up from the south, began strafing the roads clogged with fleeing people. “[They were] utterly disorganized, eight million of them milling about on the highways and byways below Paris, without shelter, begging to buy food and water or pillaging for it, desperate to survive, to keep out of the clutch of the onrushing Germans...

stopping only when

the logjams prevented further progress or when enemy planes machine-gunned them as they dived for the ditches to try to save their miserable lives. . . .’7 After the long and harrowing journey to the unoccupied zone, Varo went to Canet-Plage, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast, near Perpignan in the eastern Pyrenees, a refuge arranged by another Surrealist, the artist Jacques Hérold. Staying first with Hérold and a number of others who had also fled south from Paris, Varo eventually paired off with Victor Brauner who, as a Romanian Jewish exile, had gone there to hide from the authorities." Soon the couple moved out to live alone together, helping the local fishermen haul in their nets in trade for a daily supply of fish. Despite the political tensions and constant threats of surveillance, their time together was apparently quite tender. Their intimacy is evoked by a letter that Brauner sent to Varo a short time later: /2

My very dear Remedios, . . . Your walk is like a subtle wind and like that of birds or butterflies high in the sky. . . . Your hair is the roots of invisible stars. . . . Is your hair liquid or rather liquid flame which licks the air that surrounds the objects that I wish to be... . The color of the odor of your skin [is] perfumed by a distant Oriental flavor. . . . Your body in movement has the sound of the light wind they call a Zephyr or the lightness of a little cascade full of trout. Receive, my dear Remedios, the humble homage of your Victor reclining to contemplate his whole life.*° Brauner also gave Varo a gentle watercolor of a walking woman that he made the following year (plate 64). Probably her portrait, it is inscribed, “To

my very dear Remedios with the memory of an indelible period of my life. Your admiring friend, Victor Brauner, Marseille, Oct. 1941." Varo kept this and his letter with her throughout her life.

64. Victor Brauner. Untitled, /94/.

Watercolor on paper: Prwate collection.

Brauner’s letter, sent from Canet-Plage and dated August 21, 1940, indicates that Varo had already left their seaside rendezvous by late August. From

Canet-Plage she went to Marseilles, where she became one of the large group of artists who sought refuge in the city while trying to arrange escape. She was joined there several months later by Péret, who had secured his release

from prison in late July by paying a bribe to the Germans. Once released, he had lived clandestinely in Paris for several months (friends remember seeing him in the city at the end of October 1940°') until he was able to cross into

the unoccupied zone by traveling interminable nights and days hidden beneath

straw in horse-drawn wagons. Marseilles was a city bursting with refugees. Food and living accommodations were becoming increasingly scarce, and police roundups (the rafles

made famous in the film Casablanca) were an ever-present threat. Although

Marseilles was in the French-controlled unoccupied zone, the German Gestapo was a continuing presence. In this atmosphere visas, passports, and steamship tickets were documents for survival, and they became the refugees’ overwhelming preoccupation. Varo and Péret found a tenuous refuge centered in the Villa Air-Bel, a

large house outside the city that was being used by a group called the Emergency Rescue Committee. The goal of the committee, organized in New York three days after the Nazi occupation of Paris, was to save as many of Europe's leading intellectuals and artists as possible by expediting their escape from France — a rescue mission that resulted in an unprecedented intellectual migration from Europe to the Americas. For lists of imperiled individuals who warranted priority concern, the committee turned to experts in various fields, including Thomas

Mann

(who at that time was

living in Princeton,

New

Jersey) for

German intellectuals and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (then director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), for artists of all nationalities. The lists were

entrusted to Varian Fry, a thirty-two-year-old Harvard-trained classicist who went to Marseilles in August 1940. Setting up makeshift offices for the committee (known in France by the name of its cover operation, Centre Américain de Secours), he worked first in his Hotel Splendide bathroom and later in an abandoned handbag factory, processing the papers of thousands of desperate refugees who came to him for help. Like the first bird note of a gloomy morning, a rumor ran around the cafés. It was said that an American had arrived with the funds [Fry went to Marseilles with three thousand dollars in cash taped to his leg] and the will to help. It was another distraction in a city in which rumor

abounded, a city in which black-market operators sold hysterical men berths on ships which did not exist to ports which, in any case, would have denied them entry. But the rumor persisted and grew. It was said that this American had a list. . . .®

Fry was to stay in Marseilles until September 1941, working for those on the list and for many others as well, until he was forcibly escorted across the Spanish border by the Sareté Nationale. Within that one year Fry and his small, devoted staff had succeeded in aiding more than a thousand carefully 74

65. Left to right:

Victor Serge, Benjamin

Péret,

Remedtos

Varo, and

André Breton

in front of Villa

Atr-Bel,

Marseilles, c. 1940-41.

screened clients.°* As Victor Serge, a Russian Marxist journalist and friend of Péret who was also saved through these eflorts, described the extraordinary collection of people who turned to the committee for help: “In our ranks are enough

doctors,

psychologists,

engineers,

educationists,

poets,

painters, writers,

musicians, economists, and public men to vitalize a whole great country. Our wretchedness contains as much talent and expertise as Paris could summon in the days of her prime; and nothing of it is visible, only hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources . . . the remnants of crushed intellects.”"*y

As government restrictions grew ever more stringent and the number of sailings decreased, endless paperwork and carefully built contacts

were required to arrange passage, often illegally, for these refugees, including numbers

of the Surrealists (Varo and Péret among

them), whose

lives were

increasingly threatened. Waiting for arrangements to be made, many ofthe Surrealists lived either in the Villa Air-Bel itself —a large, strangely ornate chateau with inlaid floors and marble baths, which they shared with the staff of the Rescue Committee — or in other, far more modest accommodations that were found nearby.” Although

Péret and Varo were not among the villa’s regular residents, living instead in a small rented room not far away, a photograph of the period shows them chatting in front of Air-Bel, with Breton and Victor Serge, who both lived there with their families (plate 65).°° Hoping to “outwit as best we could the

79

| we oo"

67. Left to right:

Wifredo Lam, Jacques Heérold,

André Breton, and

Oscar Dominguez in front of Villa Aur-Bel,

Marseilles, c. 1941.

76

on a

£ oo ow one —

66. Oscar Dominguez, Marseilles, c. 1941.

68. André Breton,

anguish of the hour,”*” Breton would take out his collection of old magazines,

Varian Fry,

colored paper, pastel chalks, scissors, and paste, and everyone would make montages, draw, or cut out paper dolls. It was, in Fry’s phrase, ‘‘the entire

Jacques Hérold, Benjamin Péret, and

Remedtos Varo at Surrealists’

auction, Villa Aur-Bel,

Marseilles, c. 1941.

Deux

Magots

crowd,

as mad

as ever,” and with

their colorful,

if difficult,

personalities, he had to admit that they were among his favorite clients.**

As photographs

of the period record, most of Varo's circle found their

way there, including Brauner, who eventually lived in the villa, and Dominguez,

who had managed to make his way south. In one photograph that Varo kept in her collection (plate 67), Breton stands in front of the villa talking with Dominguez, as Jacques Hérold and the Cuban-Chinese painter Wifredo Lam clowningly share an overcoat. tl

In another (plate 68), Brauner smilingly looks

70. Opposite, left: Jacques Hérolo as a toreador,

69. Remedtwos Varo as a toreador, Marseilles, c. 1941.

Marseilles, c. 1941.

71. Opposite, right: Beryanun Péret as a torea dor,

Marseilles, c. 1941.

over the shoulder of the scorekeeper as the group, Varo and Péret among them,

gathers on the villa’s grounds for one of the auctions by which they transformed

charity among friends into another Surrealist game. With a generosity remarkable in the face of the deprivations they all faced, the group devised a way to raise money for the neediest among them through a kind of benefit art auction. The artist in need at the moment would put up whatever work he or she had managed to bring along, and the others would bid for its purchase. Since they all were so poor, each bidder was required to pay only the sum of his or her own raises. The painting would go to the final bidder and the money that was pooled went to the artist. They also managed to earn a little money by making a candy called Croque-Fruits, a sweet paste made of almonds, dates, nuts, and whatever fruits were coming into Marseilles from Tangier. Distributed for sale to local patwsertes and movie houses, where candy was otherwise completely unavailable, Croque-Fruits were hand-made in a kind of cooperative venture by the artists

and intellectuals grouped around Air-Bel, together with others who found themselves waiting in Marseilles, destitute and hungry. Masterminded by Sylvain Itkine, who devised the cooperative as a way for those stranded to earn some money and get a little food, it was a brilliant idea that helped many to survive, including Varo, Péret, and their friends. Itkine himself was not so lucky; a Jew, he was later tortured and murdered by the Germans, a loss that no one from that era can mention without intense emotion.®? Determined to keep the spirit of the group alive despite the mounting 8

fears, the Surrealists reestablished their café life, meeting nightly at Au Braleur

de Loup, a now-legendary spot in the old port of Marseilles. They also dressed up in costume,

Varo wears

as documented

a torero costume,

in a fascinating set of photographs.

her hand clutched

In one,

dramatically to her chest

(plate 69); in another, Jacques Hérold has struck a similar pose and is wearing

exactly the same costume (plate 70), which fits him far better than Varo. A third photograph in the series (plate 71), now with Péret dressed as the toreador, found its way into an underground Surrealist review published during the war.® Having borrowed the costume from a toreador friend who was a Republican refugee in France, the trio took turns posing in the outfit at a photo shop along the dock on one of their outings via tram from Air-Bel to the café. It was such games, played with a vengeance during the many

months in Marseilles, that kept them going. As Breton remarked, “So great is the power of defiance, of scorn and also of hope... that the actors in this scene had perhaps never found themselves so childlike, never sang, played or laughed so wholeheartedly.’°! They devised a card game, known as the “jeu de Marseille,” organized by Jacqueline Lamba, for which Brauner,

Dominguez,

Hérold, and others redesigned a deck of playing cards, substituting “Love,” “Dream,”

“Revolution,” and “Knowledge”

diamonds,

and clubs.°?

for the traditional hearts, spades,

They also turned repeatedly to their old favorite, the cadavre exquis. In

one exquisite corpse from this time (plate 72), which became part of Varo's collection,

the collaborative

drawing

(Eg

took

the form

of a head,

its various

72. Artuts unknown.

features contributed by each of the players in turn. An indelicate inscription

The Last Romantic

added to the drawing politicizes the work and typifies the irreverent mood of

ee

the group: “le dernier Romantique a été enculé par le Maréchal Pétain”’ (the

Ae

We on exquisite corpse.

last Romantic has been buggered by Marshal Pétain). Although drawn during an evening of Surrealist games, as a private, defiant joke, such a trifle could prompt an absurdly extreme response from the local Vichy authorities, who were becoming more ruthless in their zealous collaboration with the Nazis. Péret was later to describe “the hell of Marshal Pétain,” the eighty-fouryear-old commander

in charge of the Vichy regime:

When you know that in the unoccupied zone the police are eight times more

numerous

than before the war, that there are more concentration

camps than departments, that the prisons overflow with detainees, who die, literally of hunger, that famine reigns for “0 of the population, SO

that saying aloud that the marshal is an old [word indecipherable ] (or that being heard by one of the numerous police spies circulating everywhere) could result in several years in prison, you have an idea of

what the zone called “free” is like.

In fact, another in the series of exquisite corpses done that evening, which also bore an inscription insulting to Marshal Pétain, was later seized as “revolutionary propaganda” and caused the group's arrest. During a search of Air-Bel conducted under the pretext of a security precaution before one of Pétain's visits to Marseilles, the Vichy police seized from Breton’s room a Surrealist drawing with the rhyming inscription “le terrible crétin de Pétain” (the terrible cretin Pétain). Ignoring Breton’s gamely offered excuse that this

was not a reference to the marshal but rather a misspelling of the French word for whore (putain), the police accused Breton, Fry, Serge, and some others of subversive activity and had them all arrested. They were held for several days on board a ship docked in the Marseilles harbor until Pétain, safe from their subversion, had left the area. With each month in Marseilles their situation grew worse until, in Serge’s words, “Our very existence hung from slender threads which could break at any moment.’® As notes in the Rescue Committee's files on Péret explained: “He is in immediate danger as his democratic ideas are opposed to the Vichy

government, and he faces persecution. He and his family [here referring to Varo, although they did not marry until 1942, after the death of Péret’s first wife] are in danger of starvation, as the problem of the food supply in their region is acute.’ As it became imperative for them to leave France, Varo and Péret tried

to arrange for passage to Mexico. Breton and his family had already gone to the United States, but Péret had been denied entry there because of his political record. Renewing an earlier interest of his, they looked toward Mexico for refuge.” It seemed a good choice for many reasons. They had been duly impressed with Breton’s glowing reports of his visit there. Spanish was the language with which Varo was most comfortable. And, perhaps most important, in June 1940 the Mexican government had offered its protection to all Spanish refugees and to any members of the International Brigade who found themselves in France. The Emergency Rescue Committee worked for six dogged months in 1941 to help Varo and Péret escape. After biographical data from Alfred Barr, Jr., and others established their qualifications as intellectuals worthy of attention,

the committee embarked on a long “battle of the visas” (as Serge termed it), which generated forty-eight pages of correspondence documenting a surprising

amount of staff attention devoted to their individual case. Eventually the necessary paperwork was in order and the various visas secured, but money for the passage still had to be raised. “ ‘Wanted by the GESTAPO, Saved by America’ headlined a 1941 Emergency Rescue Committee fund-raising pamphlet which asked for contributions of $350 — the price of the life of one escapee.” In the following months

the committee

made

repeated appeals for con-

tributions toward the fare to friends and others with influence in the United 81

States, among them Breton, Elsie Houston (Péret’s estranged wife), André Masson, Peggy Guggenheim, and Helena Rubinstein. These appeals, begun as polite letters from the New York office in April, reached a crescendo in late September as the cables from France grew more frantic. One exchange from early autumn sets the tone: “September 30, 1941, Marseilles to New York: HAVE YOU CONTACTED

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM,

BRETON FOR PASSAGES PERET

AND REMEDIOS NO TIME MUST BE LOST STOP.’ And on October 15, 1941, came the extraordinary reply, “MRS. GUGGENHEIM MIGHT HELP CUM PERET.

HE’S VERY SURREALIST STOP.””! With his credentials thus established, the money was ultimately found, and passage was secured on the Portuguese ocean liner Serpa Pinto, scheduled to depart Casablanca in late November. But they still had to find transport from France to the North African coast. One story has Varo and Péret arranging to travel via fishing boat by giving money to a black-market operator through an intermediary, a questionable young man who had approached them as they wandered around the docks. Although he left them stranded, running off with their precious cash, the thief may have saved their lives. For, as the newspapers soon would report, the black-market operator to whom the money was to have been delivered turned out to be a psychopathic killer who had murdered

the previous refugees he

had offered to help —a charge verified by the mute testimony of twelve bodies found buried in his backyard.” Varo liked to tell that story, but how she and Péret did get to Casablanca remains undocumented. They may have been among the refugees that the Emergency Rescue Committee disguised as demobilized French soldiers or merchant seamen to slip them onto French cargo vessels bound for North African ports.”> However they got there, once they were in Casablanca, Varo developed new strategies to ensure their survival. To recoup at least some of the money lost to the thief in Marseilles, she came up with a scheme based on the experiences of her early North African travels with her family. Remembering that Moslems used white shrouds to bury their dead, Varo, ever resourceful, went to a local mosque and arranged to sell the few white bed sheets she had managed to pack to get money for food.”

Finally, well over a year after their arrival in Marseilles, Breton received word in New York that the couple had made their escape at last: “Dear Mr. Breton: We are happy to inform you that we have received a cable from Marseille informing us that Paret [sic] and Varo left Casablanca on the Serpa

Pinto on November 20th.” The Serpa Pinto had been able to make repeated trips across the danger-

filled Atlantic because it flew the flag of Portugal, one of the few countries to maintain neutral status throughout World War II. Although built as a comfortable ocean liner, it was carrying three times its capacity load, which meant that Varo and Péret, not warranting the special privileges accorded to women with

children and to the infirm, spent most of their trip in the ship’s airless hold.” It was an arduous crossing —the Atlantic Ocean in early winter is difficult

even without threat of attack. And though the Portuguese flag was supposed to ensure safe passage, no one knew if the Axis powers would continue to comply with the international protocols of neutrality.

82

73. Remedios Varo and

Benjamin Péret.

It must have been an enormous relief, after innumerable false starts, finally to leave the desperate situation in Europe, knowing that a new country, Varo's third, stood ready to welcome them, quietly and at peace. These feelings of relief and anticipation were well captured by another émigré, Margarita Nelken, who, after describing the difficulties of the ocean crossing, dismissed

them as insignificant. “The important thing was to arrive in Mexico and to devote one’s heart and aspirations to Mexican artistic life.’ 77

Di

85

4 Artist in Exile Mexico and Venezuela

‘IT CAME TO MEXICO searching for the peace that I had not found,

neither in Spain — that of the revolution — nor in Europe — that of he terrible war —for me it was impossible to paint amidst such , anguish.”' Varo arrived in Mexico City at the end of 1941, hoping

to find a Hoven where she could work. Yet the early period was not easy, and it would be years before she had the freedom to devote herself to her art. “Remedios Varo Uranga de Lizarraga . . . accepted as a political exile for one year, renewable. .. .”? She was part of an unprecedented migration of Spanish refugees welcomed

into Mexico under the leadership of President

Lazaro Cardenas, who were offered not only asylum but a place in Mexican

society and automatic citizenship. At a time when other countries were hastily enacting increasingly restrictive laws to limit immigration, it is to Mexico's credit that it opened its doors to the more than fifteen thousand Spanish

refugees who turned to it for help. To accept the influx of so many Europeans was an extraordinary act of generosity for a postrevolutionary culture still determinedly celebrating its Indian roots. The fact that a majority of the émigrés were Spanish makes the gesture yet more amazing from a country where suspicion toward Spaniards dates back to Cortés. Although the less-educated Spanish refugees with fewer resources got no

74. Remedwe Mexto.

Varo,

farther than southern France, it was the Spanish intelligentsia and professional class who emigrated to Mexico—a fact that may have helped to stimulate CArdenas’s hospitality. Because, in addition to humanely providing rescue for the people of a sister culture and signaling solidarity with the Spanish Republican cause, Cardenas’s invitation also served as a significant stimulus to Mexico's economic and cultural development. Spaniards filled the schools, developed university departments (even founding the Colegio de México, a new university staffed primarily by refugees), and brought a new intellectual energy to the arts, to literature, and to the sciences that was to have lasting influence on Mexican cultural life. Settling primarily in Mexico City, they were free to seek employment, with remarkably few restrictions. Official declarations stamped repeatedly throughout Varo's immigration papers (plate 75) authorized her “to pursue remunerative or lucrative activities except for those in cabarets, cantinas, restaurants, etc., without displacing any Mexican workers.’ 13 Like most Europeans who sought asylum abroad, Varo initially thought of Mexico as a temporary shelter, expecting to return to France after the war was over. Thus she and Péret quickly gravitated not to the community of 85

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75. Remedios Varo immigration papers, 1942.

Mexican artists but toward a small circle of émigrés like themselves. Among them were many old friends from Europe who had also made their way to Mexico and were starting to rebuild their lives, including Gerardo Lizarraga; Esteban Francés, who stayed in Mexico for only a few years before settling in New York; Gunther Gerszo, a Mexican-born, European-educated painter and scenic designer; Kati Horna, a Hungarian photographer, and her husband, José, a Spanish sculptor whom Varo had known at the Academia in Madrid;

Emerico (Chiqui) Weisz, the Hungarian photojournalist who had filmed Lizarraga in a concentration camp; and Leonora Carrington, an English painter who was soon to marry Weisz and who quickly became Varo's closest friend. This group, most of whom were photographed by Kati as guests at Leonora and Chiqui's wedding (plate 76), remained a tight circle of friends throughout

Varo's life. Sharing not just their foreignness but also the experience of war, the group knew the importance of loyalty and the need for reliable friendships. They created a remarkably close community of support in which Varo played a central role. Her house was always open to those who needed shelter; whatever money she could gather she willingly offered to friends. As one of the beneficiaries of her kindness later put it, “These were not just nice ideas — her head and her heart were united in an extraordinary way.’ Although Mexico officially welcomed this influx of Europeans, there was always some distance between the émigrés and the native Mexican art community. It is certainly true that the émigrés held themselves somewhat aloof as they

attempted to re-create their European life-style in the foreign atmosphere of 56

76. Left to right:

Gerardo Lizarraga,

Chiqui Weisz, José Horna, Leonora Carrington,

Remedtos Varo, Gunther Gerszo, Benjamin Péret, and Miriam Wolf at wedding party of Carrington and

Wewz, 1946.

Mexico City,

Mexico. Socializing mainly with each other, they lived a determinedly European life. Forty years later, Kati Horna still walks great distances through the most

hair-raising Mexican traffic to get to a special Viennese pastry shop when she wants

to bring sweets to a friend.

It is also true that the artists of Mexico were somewhat hesitant about this new European invasion, especially the celebrated couple Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who held sway as the reigning arbiters of the Mexican artistic community. The fierce Mexicanidad of Rivera, Kahlo, and their circle, based on a revolutionary commitment to Mexico's roots in the indigenous Indian culture,

involved

rejection

of foreign

“colonializing”

influences,

prompting

them to keep Varo and her European friends at some distance, at least as a public stance. Péret, Francés, and Carrington are said to have been among the visitors to Kahlo’s studio during the early 1940s,° and she and Rivera had hosted Breton in their home in the late 1930s. Yet in 1943 Rivera was still fulminating against ‘false artists” whom he accused of perpetuating the semicolonial condition of Mexican culture by imitating European modes.° Even as late as 1945 Rivera lauded Kahlo’s habit of wearing Mexican costumes by excoriating those with a taste for other styles as “mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wish to belong, i.e., the great American and French bureaucracy.” Kahlo, who had been the guest of Breton in Paris and had participated in the Surrealist life of artists’ cafés and games while arrangements were being made for her 1939 Parisian exhibition, was more pointed (and more colorful) in her vitriolic denunciation of the Surrealists she had met in France. “They 87

77. Remedios Varo, Mexico, c. 1945.

make me vomit. They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore... . I’d rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.’’® Well into the 1940s the relationship between the groups remained strained. Péret distrusted Rivera because he believed him to have been implicated in

an early assassination attempt on Trotsky, and Rivera reportedly “coaxed” Péret with a drawn pistol to dance the Mexican zapateado.° So, Varo and her friends remained essentially apart, creating a community of their own. “Full of beans about their life in Paris,’'® they gathered for regular Saturday evening soirees at the home of Gunther Gerszo to keep alive the energy of exchange and community they had known. As described by Dorothy Hood, an American artist living in Mexico who was part of the group for some years, ‘Their guiding habit was to have no habits,” and their operating principle was to have a good time. ‘Generally [they were people] burst out of their homeland. The structure of their lives therefore was totally their own.”!! The group included Luis Bufuel, César Moro (a Peruvian Surrealist poet),

Wolfgang Paalen and his wife, the French poet and painter Alice Rahon — all of whom spent considerable time in Mexico during and after the war. They had all been associated with the Surrealist movement in Europe and were still SS

loyal to its spirit. Surrealist games, practical jokes, elaborate costume parties,

raucous story-telling into the night — these were the ‘‘very innocent” pleasures that were shared by companions that Gerszo remembers as “very free, intelligent, and sensitive.”’!” One of Varo's favorite amusements was to write letters to strangers presenting mock-serious challenges or suggestions for adventure. One example, in which she proposed what she termed a “‘psycho-humorous experiment,” is found in an undated handwritten letter that she penned into her sketchbook.

Dear Stranger, I am totally unaware if you are a solitary man or a father of a family, if you are a timid introvert or a bright extrovert, but one way or another perhaps you are bored and wish to fling yourself

intrepidly into the middle of a group of unknown persons with the hope of seeing something that interests or amuses you; also the feeling of curiosity and even some anxiety might be an attraction; that is why I propose that you come on New Year's Eve to house number of the street : I have chosen your name almost by chance in the phone book; I say

almost because I was looking on the page where one finds those of your

78. Remedwos Varo ano Gunther

Gerszo,

Mexico City.

89

profession, I believe (perhaps mistakenly) that among those there is a greater possibility of finding someone with a full spirit and sense of humor. I must clarify that I am not the woman of the house and that she is totally unaware of this act which she would probably judge as crazy. I am simply invited to attend as are a limited number of others. .. . [You must] firmly pretend that you have met [her] before, that you are a friend of Edward and that being alone and depressed, you wish to go to her house to pass the year’s end. . . . I am almost sure that you will not come; it would require enormous aplomb to do it and very few people have that. Also, you might believe that this is a trick played by one ofyour friends, or that this letter is clever propaganda to bring people to a questionable spot . . . none of this, the house is a most respectable middle-class residence. I and all the others are gentle middle-class people who, despite our years, feel an irresistible impulse to make adolescent mischief. I am going to copy this letter and also send it to another stranger, perhaps one of the two of you will come; if you both come it would be something extraordinary and unprecedented. .. . On second thought I think that I am more crazy than my goat. Do not have the illusion that the room will be crossed by an aurora borealis nor by the ectoplasm of your grandmother, not even a rain of hams will fall . . . as I give you these assurances I hope that you yourself are not a gangster or a drunk; we are almost abstemious and semivegetarian.'%

If the stranger had taken up Varo's challenge, a 1944 painting entitled The Days of Gabino Barreda Street suggests what he might have confronted (plate 79). That “almost abstemious, semivegetarian” group of “gentle middle-class people,” as depicted by Gerszo in a Surrealist style adopted to fit the occasion, includes Leonora Carrington as a female torso enveloped in clinging vines; Benjamin Péret as a disembodied figure seated on a table, his head floating in the clouds; Esteban Francés playing a guitar and surrounded by naked women; Gerszo himself as a head peering out of a small box; and Varo as a mysterious feline figure reclining on the floor, wearing a cat’s-eye mask and draped in heavy fabric from which several cats peek out." Gerszo was memorializing the first house that Varo and Péret rented, a ramshackle apartment on the calle Gabino Barreda in the Colonia San Rafael, not far from the Revolution Monument in the heart of old Mexico City —a friendly area in which local residents, some workers, some poor intellectuals, gathered frequently for neighborhood fiestas. It is remembered as a ‘‘delicious apartment, not fancy but marvelous,’!° filled with the many cats that were Varo's constant companions and numerous

birds in cages that dotted an open

patio. Decorated with drawings by Picasso, Tanguy, and Ernst casually pinned to the walls with needles (works that Varo and Péret had managed to bring out of France), the house was filled with the talismans and special objects with which Varo liked to surround herself — special stones, shells, quartz crystals, and odd pieces of wood —all carefully placed to maximize the magic of each piece. For Varo, the magic was real. As one admiring friend recalled, 90

79. Gunther Gerszo.

The Days of Gabino Barreda Street, 19/4.

Oul on canvas,

16 X 2173 in. Private collection.

80. Remedtos

Mexico City.

Varo,

~—a shell, a stone, a bead —and tell you that “Varo would give you something it was magical and warn you not to lose it.'!° It was a welcoming place where friends dropping by might find Péret huddled

in a corner, one of the circle of men

that Gerszo derisively referred

to as “the five Trotskyites of Mexico having a meeting.” Or they might find Varo and Carrington concocting some fantastic food creation such as the mound of pearl tapioca flavored with fish broth and colored with squid ink that was greeted with rave reviews when they served it to unsuspecting friends as a rare and expensive caviar.'® Although it proved to be a friendly base for their first several years in Mexico, the house on Gabino Barreda was a seedy whitewashed tenement to which entry was gained by climbing through a window. It had the most primitive plumbing and holes in the floors (‘“We used them as ashtrays, but

you had to know where to step’!’), out of which would occasionally craw] rats that thrived despite the poison Péret put out, because Varo secretly fed them with cheese, not wanting them to die.?° The house was bordered on one side by an unpaved vacant lot where trash from a nearby hospital was thrown, including the human hand sticking

out from its newspaper wrapping that Péret saw there one day, which prompted him to burst into the house to announce that Surrealism lived in Mexico.?! It

was an image that Varo later slipped into an extraordinary short story: Compact groups of indescribable concierges on the backs of gigantic goats are running swiftly toward the west, from the east a cloud of fiery swallows arrives and inevitably crashes into them, but the

unknown vagabond comes zigzagging in, precipitously licking calves’ legs and swallowing the swallow as is, green, but not very sensible

postmen, flatten themselves against the walls to leave the way free and because of so much agitation, pieces of old, crumpled newspaper rise inflamed in the air and burst with pyrotechnic mastery. The mallows and defecations, a forgotten hand and those mysterious things that

float, that get tangled in one’s ankle at night are growing old from worries because they have a premonition of the arrival of the cement. Ave Marfa Purisima, my daughter! Let's run, there comes the exhibitionist wrapped up in a cloak with a wide hem, hem or wheel?

Ah yes! wheel, wheel of fortune, of bicycles and tricycles, hood children run over everything throwing some stones the wall that fall into the patio and burst, spreading their them up quickly Marfa, I don’t want more monoliths and

the neighborover the top of seeds, sweep please throw

a little disinfectant behind the door and the wall, there are really too many flies. All of this and much more is boiling in the vacant lot beside the house. It is the bed of a future street but the cement and all the rest are still very far away.”

Crashing, floating, running, bursting, spreading, boiling —the action of this wildly nonnarrative story speaks to the release of creative energy that such writing offered Varo. And the vacant lot waiting for its cement, the 92

forgotten hand, and the zigzagging vagabond speak of Gabino Barreda itself, where new émigrés periodically arrived, lost and looking for help; where the trash beside the house yielded that macabre severed hand; and where Varo

was busy writing, almost breathlessly, a remarkable series of short stories. Some, as here, are in a distinctly Surrealist style that suggests the techniques of automatic writing — yielding a variety of vivid images, many of which she would later include in her paintings. In the early years of the 1940s, however, Varo did little painting. Busy with commercial work, she focused her attention more on writing, the other creative outlet that she had pursued since childhood. In a broad, sweeping hand that lopes across the page with great confidence, oblivious to punctuation,

forgetful of grammar, blithe about spelling, she penned whole stories into her notebooks without a single correction or change. Her sketchbooks, too, are filled with such writing, some in Spanish, some in French, some slipping from

one to the other. They include fragments of dreams, fantastic tales, notes for future paintings, and casts of characters for elaborate plays, some with guest

lists appended. Although Varo used writing mainly for fun and as a forum for trying out ideas (“At times I write as if making a sketch”),?> some

of her

unpublished stories rank with the best of Surrealist fiction — witty, energetic,

and filled with powerfully suggestive images. Central to this explosion of energy and ideas was the extraordinary friendship that Varo developed with Leonora Carrington, an intense connection founded upon Varo's feeling that they shared a unique sensibility. Meeting almost daily for years, they shared their dreams, their nightmares, their obsessions, and their deepest secrets — ‘secrets that Remedios would talk about with no one but Leonora.” They had first met during the late 1930s in France, where the English expatriate Carrington had lived with Max Ernst. When

Ernst was interned as a German alien in 1940, Carrington had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in Santander, Spain —a period she searingly recorded in an autobiographical story, ‘Down Below.’° She was finally able to escape from Europe through the help of Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat who offered her a marriage of convenience, which enabled her to get a visa. She went first to New York and then, in 1942, to Mexico, where she and Leduc moved into a house on calle Rosas Moreno, close to Varo and Péret. Building on the strange powers of inspiration that each felt so intensely, on a shared belief in the mystical and the powers of magic, the two women developed a deep rapport, finding themselves able to communicate in a way that fed their lives and their work. Carrington, recently released from a Spanish asylum, and Varo, not long out of French detention, built a strong emotional and spiritual connection based on a deep sense of mutual trust, a sense that the pain and despair each had known would be understood by the other. Varo thought herself an eccentric that others couldn't understand and looked to Carrington as a soul mate who would need no explanations, an ally who would not try to explain away her anxieties with facile logic or undermine her visions with common sense. Carrington shared this feeling of finally having found a confidante in an otherwise hostile world, a sentiment she expressed through one of the characters in her novel The Hearing Trumpet: “| often feel like Joan 95

81. Leonora Carrington in her studio working on

Temptation of St. Anthony.

of Arc, so dreadfully misunderstood.

. . . I feel I am being burned at the stake

just because I am different from everybody else because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me and it becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being like myself.’””° They talked of philosophy, shared their anxieties, and even filtered into

each other's dreams, as in this fragment that Varo recorded in which Carrington appears as a cat: “I am washing a blonde kitten in the sink of some hotel, but that’s not right it looks more like Leonora wearing a loose overcoat that needs

washing, I sprinkle it with a little soapy water and I go on washing the kitten but I’m somewhat perplexed and worried because I am not sure who I am bathing.””” Two beautiful women with an extraordinary flair for living, they created

a powerful presence

together. Carrington,

the willowy, flamboyant

English beauty, and Varo, the smaller and more quiet of the two, who is

94

remembered from this period as ‘‘a very slight woman with an elfin face, very white skin, a mane of red hair and enormous sparkling eyes.’”* It was a relationship that they treasured and spoofed in wonderful stories involving

friendships between two women whom they modeled after each other. In Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet they appear as Marion Leatherby, a

ninety-two-year-old English feminist held captive in a medieval Spanish castle turned into a nursing home for old ladies, and her red-headed Spanish friend, Carmella Velasquez (a woman known for writing letters to people she has never met), who is busy concocting plots to help Marion escape.” In an unpublished story by Varo the friends become Ellen Ramsbottom, an English woman interested in ‘‘somniotelepathic phenomena,” and the Spanish Felina Caprino Mandragora (Feline Goatlike Mandrake), who is a goat when sleeping and a woman with “vague little horns” when awake. Varo's story traces their

adventures as they go camping to get some rest and ‘some days of meditation to put order into the tumult of their fears, doubts, and emotions.” Each complains of distractions that keep her from meditating: Ellen is annoyed by coconut juice and the presence of numerous iguanas, Felina is undone by turtles’ eggs and the sight of too many armadillos. They are also partners in adventure as they stealthily eavesdrop on a conversation about contraband corsets and gloves.* Varo and Carrington shared an intensity of imaginative power that each found in no one else. With a penchant for experiment and a taste for the ludicrous, they conducted pseudoscientific investigations, using the kitchen as their laboratory. Carrying the joke far beyond the tapioca caviar they had foisted on their friends, they concocted recipes that promised an impressive range of magical results. One series carefully written in Varo’s hand offers “recipes and advice for scaring away inopportune dreams, insomnia, and deserts of quicksand under the bed.’”*! Among them is one recipe specially designed to stimulate a dream of being the king of England —an elaborate concoction that involves the use of a sable brush to paint egg white all over the dreamer’s body. Another calls for a witch’s brew of ingredients with which to stimulate erotic dreams, a list that includes: ‘‘a kilo of strong roots, three white hens, a head of garlic, four kilos of honey, a mirror, two calf livers, a brick, two clothespins, a corset with stays, two false mustaches, and hats to taste.” In the tradition of the finest French haute cuisine, the latter recipe details painstaking preparations of the various ingredients. But in truly surreal spirit it offers urgent instructions for preparing the cook as well: Put on the corset and make it quite tight. Sit down in front of the mirror, relax your nervous tension, smile and try on the mustaches and hats according to your taste (three-cornered, Napoleonic, cardinal’s hat, imitation with lace, Basque beret, etc.). .. . Run and pour the broth (which should be very reduced) quickly into a cup. Quickly come back with it to in front of the mirror, smile, take a sip of broth, try on one of the mustaches, take another sip, try on a hat, drink, try on everything, taking sips in between and do it all as quickly as you Gane

oD

82. Leonora

Carrington. Tiburon, 1940). India ink and

gouache on paper, 9/4 X 1277/3 in. Private collection.

As much as Varo and Carrington loved a good joke (“They would just get together and laugh’), there was a serious side to this work as well. Using images of cooking as a metaphor for hermetic pursuits, they established an association between women's traditional roles and magical acts of transformation. They had both long been interested in the occult, stimulated by the Surrealist belief in “occultation of the Marvelous” and by wide reading in witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, Tarot, and magic. They found Mexico a fertile atmosphere where magic was part of daily reality: traveling herb salesmen would set up on street corners with displays of seeds, insects, chameleons, special candles, seashells, and neatly wrapped parcels with such mysterious labels as ‘Sexual Weakness” — all used for the practice of witchcraft by the cwranderas (healers),

brujas (witches), and espiritualistas (spiritualists), who outnumbered doctors and nurses. Mexico proved a vibrant influence on Varo and Carrington, for

whom the power of spells and omens was already very real. Thus the message that Carrington wrote (in French) on one of a series of drawings — designed to be viewed from multiple directions and filled with short texts, often written in mirror writing — that she gave to Varo during their first years together in Mexico (plate 82): “Remedios, I told you that Iam making you a spell against [the evil eye]. There it is. Last night I had a fever of 38°, auto-suggestion

perhaps — I do not feel well enough to go out —Come to see me if you can? Can both of you come to drink your tequila? . . . Leonora.’ Fulfilling Varo's “irresistible impulse to make adolescent mischief,” she and Carrington concocted all kinds of games, experiments, stories, and plays

96

83. Eateban Francés,

that

Remedtos

collaborated on a rollicking scatological spoof on the classic fairy-tale theme — competition for the hand of the princess —in the form of an elaborate threeact play, complete with stage directions and alternative endings, which included roles for many of their friends. Despite the Surrealist spirit with which the group devoted itself to such games, these early years in Mexico were far from easy. Varo and Péret had arrived with no money and no jobs. Although they received some financial assistance from funds brought to Mexico by the Spanish Republican Government

Varo, and

Gerardo Lizarraga

building a dorama for the British

antifascist

propaganda office, Mexico City

c. 1942-45.

spill out

of

Varo's

notebooks.

Unabashedly

fond

in exile, they had to make do with very little. 37 Hayden

of fairy tales,

they

Herrera has placed

Péret teaching French at the Mexican Ministry of Public Education's School of Painting and Sculpture (known as La Esmeralda), and Bufuel has reported that Péret came to him for work in making films (‘IT tried to help him, but I

myself was in dire straits at the time’); but it was primarily through Varo's determined efforts that the family stayed alive.* “She had to make the money to keep her family going, Péret and the cats.’*? Mustering all the skills at her disposal, she worked at any job that she could find. Through

Gerszo's

recommendations,

Varo

got work

with

the

British

antifascist propaganda office, making dioramas and small stage sets to illustrate

Allied war victories; these were placed in display windows to rally the Mexican

public to the Allied cause in Europe. As a photograph from her collection documents

(plate 83), she shared the job with Lizarraga and Francés, who

were also living a hand-to-mouth

existence.

$4. Handpainted furniture.

Turning back to skills she had developed in Paris and Spain, Varo also worked for Clardecor, one of Mexico City’s most fashionable decorators, hand painting designs onto furniture and musical instruments (plate 84). She hand painted objects for friends as well, such as the wooden mirrored box painted with stylized animals and inscribed with the initials V./7. that was made for

Nora Horna, the daughter of Kati and José (plates 85, 86). In fact, José and

Remedios

often worked

woodworker

together making toys for children:

and puppet-maker,

crafted

José, a skilled

the toys and Remedios

painted them

with fanciful decorations. Using her talent for sewing, developed since childhood, Varo also designed

costumes for theatrical productions, with hats and other head coverings becoming

her specialty. She and Carrington designed costumes and “extraordinary hats’“° for a production of Jean Giraudoux’s Madwoman of Chaillot and fashioned headdresses for the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderén de la Barca’s Gran Teatro del mundo. There are repeated pencil drawings for the latter in several of her sketchbooks (plates 87, 88).*!

In addition, she and Francés worked for Marc Chagall, a fellow refugee from Air-Bel in Marseilles, on his costume designs for Léonid Massine’s ballet Aleko, which was premiered in Mexico City in September 1942 (in lieu of the

preferred Paris premiere made impossible by the war).*? Although there is no record of further contact between Varo and Francés after he left Mexico for

the United States in 1944, they both continued to work in a similar style, Francés in the costumes he developed for George Balanchine's ballet company 98

835, 86. Handpainted

box, interior and exterior,

L948,

Paint on mirror (interior) and wood,

ISA X 137s in. (closed). Private collection.

=

oo

37, , 38.

Headdresses

for Pedro

Calderén de la Barcas Gran Teatro del mundo, /958.

Pencil on paper: Private collection.

(plate 90)*5 and Varo in the costumes with which she clothed the characters

in a number of her later paintings (plate 91). One painting in particular, done in 1957, shows the breadth of imagination

that Varo invested in costume design. In Zailleur pour dames (Womens Tatlor,

plate 89), its French title suggesting the world of haute couture, she pictured a fashion showroom in which a tailor has his models parade his latest creations before a potential client. As Varo explained the inventive features of the costumes she designed:

.. one style is very practical for travelling, the back being in the shape of a boat. Upon reaching a body of water one falls over backwards. Behind the head is a rudder which one guides by pulling ribbons which 89. Women’s Tailor, 1957.

Oul on Masonite, SO

X F778 in.

Private collection.

100

go to the breast and from which hangs a compass. All of this also serves as decoration. On firm ground it rolls along and the lapels serve as miniature sails, as well as the walking stick in which there is a sail rolled up that unfolds. The seated model is for going to those cocktail parties where you cannot

move

and one does not know

where

to set

down a glass let alone to sit down. The weave of the scarf is of a miraculous

cloth that hardens

at will and can

serve

as a seat.

The style

at the right is for a widow. It is of an effervescent cloth, like champagne, has a little pocket for carrying a vial of poison and ends in a very becoming reptile’s tail. The tailor’s face is drawn in the shape of

scissors [and] his shadow is so rebellious that he has to pin it to the

ceiling. The client who is contemplating the models unfolds into two more people because she doesn't know which of the three styles to choose, and the somewhat transparent repetitions of her to either side

represent the state of doubt in which she finds herself.**

Varo had such a consuming interest in costumes and sewing that her sewing machine was accorded a position of honor at the 1983 retrospective of

her work in Mexico City. She had made her own clothes since childhood, saying that tailors had no idea of a woman's anatomy, and as her cousins remember excitedly, she even designed her own shoes. It was a skill shared by her grandmother, as seen in a snapshot that reflects the passage oftradition

through generations of women

in Varo's family: the grandmother of those

loving early portraits bends over the sewing machine while her granddaughter draws nearby (plate 25). Though sewing was a traditional skill for women of

her grandmother's generation, for Varo, who rejected such conventions, the interest in sewing that she maintained must be seen as another outlet for her ever-restless creative energy.

Varo also designed outfits for the many costume parties that the Surrealist band-in-exile eagerly initiated. One photograph shows her posing gaily wearing 90. Esteban Francés. Costume for

George Balanchine} production of Beauty and the Beast, 1948. 9/. Aurora, 1962. Mixed media

on cardboard, 20/9 X 16/2 in.

Private collection.

101

9? Remedwes

95. Oppouite, left:

Varo,

Remedtos Varo,

Mextwco City.

Mexico City.

94. Opposite, right: Master of Tabull.

»

The Virgin Mary. Fresco from Sant Climent at Tahull, Lérida. Museo de Arte de Cataluna, Barcelona.

a long embroidered skirt and holding an arm load of the huge, brilliantly colored paper flowers commonly found in Mexican decoration (plate 92). Another photograph of her, in an elegant Spanish lace-trimmed gown, has been cleverly collaged to combine her face with Péret’'s under the enormous brim of an elaborate plumed hat (plate 95).

This doctored photograph, in which noses and lips are carefully aligned to create a Janus-faced composite, is similar to a complex headdress that Varo concocted for herself out of papier-maché, lace, and rope stitching (plate 93). It is designed so that her face, peering out from a triangular hood, is flanked by two papier-maché masks. Whereas the stiffened, wimplelike hood is strikingly similar to those in the Romanesque Catalan frescoes that she knew from her youth in Spain (plate 94), the double-faced photo collage and tripartite mask suggest the multifaced pre-Columbian figures from Tlatilco (plate 96), which

10?

Hay

Nii

95. Remedwos

96. Pre-Columbian

Varo,

figure

with collaged face of Benjamin Péret,

from Tlatileo, Mexwwo.

Mexico City.

105

she was beginning to collect — an early example of Varo's combining Spanish and Mexican sources. Tlatilco (its Indian name appropriately meaning “where things are hidden’)

was a burial site rich with pre-Columbian artifacts that was discovered in the 1940s at a modern brickyard on the outskirts of Mexico City. One of anumber of artists, including Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Wolfgang Paalen, and Miguel

Covarrubias, who were early to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic value of pre-Columbian objects, Varo participated in regular excursions to buy the still

inexpensive clay figurines, pots, and cylinder seals that the brickyard workers were

regularly uncovering

as they dug the clay to make

their bricks.

She

became an avid collector and later spoke with wistful regret of a magnificent jade hummingbird that had been snatched up by: Diego Rivera before she could negotiate its purchase.*° She did develop an extensive personal collection of pre-Columbian ceramics, and as another of her many ways to earn a living, she perfected skills as a ceramics restorer while working for Paalen, who was a big collector. Varo's most sustained income in these years came from illustrating promotional literature for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer. Although as commercial work they may not reflect her personal vision, the small gouaches that she painted for Bayer from 1942 to 1949 have aspects that link them to the development of her personal style, both thematically and stylistically. To advertise sleeping pills Varo depicted eyes looming in the doorways of an endless series of rooms and crystalline-winged insects attracted to the light of a brightly burning candle (plate 97). She was illustrating advertising copy that evocatively described the malady of insomnia: “Sensing that someone has been observing them, they open tired eyelids, searching the nocturnal shadows! Undefined anxiety fills the solitude of dark, dry rooms, devoid of warmth. ... Insomnia,

tather

of anxiety,

creator

of worries. .! ! An

artist

who paints with purple tones, rings of fatigue under the eyes.’*° While fulfilling the description supplied to her by the company, Varo interpreted the image in ways that related to her personal work. The small, square window in a tightly confined space recalls the setting for her earlier Double Agent (plate 44). The doorways leading from room to room and the insects anticipate images that she would explore in many of her mature paintings. Another of her works for Casa Bayer was made to accompany the following text: ‘“As if sharp nails are being driven into the flesh . . . into the joints, into the bones, into the nerves. . !!! These are the sensations that one can suffer. Rheumatism ... lumbago . . . sciatica. . | !’47 To illustrate this she painted a

tightly bound figure, wrapped neck to ankle, who is struggling to be released as long needles pierce his body (plate 98). He runs through a boulder-strewn field in which pointed objects menace his feet. Again, Varo illustrated a given text while introducing elements that appear in her personal work. The landscape of spiky dangers bears similarities to the walls and mountains of her earlier works Painting (plate 43) and Desire (plate 49). And the beautiful castle looming in the distance here, with its conical towers and crenellated wall, is reminiscent of the Alcazar of Segovia — perfect for a fairy tale — which is the quintessential castle-fortress of the Spain of Varo's childhood. It is an image that she would return to in a number of later works. 104

i Mh H]

Wh

:

| Pete bey

iy

ihi hee

97. Insomnia, ad campaign for Bayer pharmaceutical company, 1942-47. Gouache on bristol board. Private collection.

105

98. Rheumatism,

oe

Lumbago, Sciatica, ad

campaign for Bayer pharmaceutical

company, 1942-47. Gouache on bristol

board, 974%3X 7'/2 in. Private collection.

Varo also looked to work being done in Mexico as a source for imagery in her commercial work. Her depiction of pain as a body bound and pierced by nails is strikingly similar to the imagery developed by Frida Kahlo in her 1944 self-portrait Broken Column

(plate 99). Here Kahlo portrayed her body

as split open, bound together by the straps of an orthopedic brace and pierced by tiny iron nails —an intensely visceral depiction of the continual pain suffered

from an accident that had crushed her pelvis and fractured her spine. Although the Varo gouache is undated, it was done during the mid-1940s, in the same period that Kahlo painted this portrait. Kahlo, overshadowed

by Rivera in

terms of public artistic reputation, did not have her first (and only) solo Mexican exhibition until 1953, barely a year before her death. Yet Varo surely 106

99. Frida Kahlo.

Broken Column, 1944, Oul on

Masonite,

LAX 127; tn. Dolores Olmedo,

Mexico City.

iy

Frida Kable.4%

knew Kahlo and her work. Kahlo was a cult figure in Mexico, partly because of the extraordinary force of her personality and public presence and partly because of her marriage to Rivera, demigod of the Mexican art world. Their home (now the Frida Kahlo Museum) was a mecca for Mexico's artistic and intellectual community. Given that Péret, Francés, and Carrington were among

the extended family of “crazy people” who visited Kahlo’s studio in the 1940s,*8 it is safe to assume that Varo was there as well. Again, in this early work in

Mexico, Varo combined memories from the Spain of her past with images from current Mexican sources.

Varo also did amusing gouaches for a Bayer calendar depicting seasonal changes. For the coming of winter she painted a bird-human creature that sits

107

100. Coming of Winter, calendar

page for Bayer pharmaceutical company, 1945-47. Gouache on fine

bristol board, 127% X G4 in.

Private collection. 101. Coming of Spring, calendar

page for Bayer pharmaceutical

company, 1945-47. Gouache on fine bristol board,

UX 8 tn. Prwvate collection.

on a crystalline cloud and dumps snow onto a village below (plate 100). On the calendar page depicting spring’s arrival, rain falls from clouds that emerge from a mountain like smoke escaping from a volcano (plate 101). Set into the sides of the mountain are two pairs of wooden shutters, one opened to release the clouds, the other opened to reveal an arm holding a sun-moon disk. Furniture opens to reveal elements of nature (seen also in her earlier Anticipation, plate 51), and changes in weather are anthropomorphized as though caused by the willful act of an individual. Exploration of such human influence on the forces of nature and the use of human-animal hybrids recur in much of her later work. Although aspects of Varo's commercial work are related to developments in her personal style, she signed all the paintings done for Bayer with her mother’s family name, Uranga. By reserving that signature for this unique context, Varo made clear her desire to separate work done in the commercial sphere from her identity in the art world. Varo's personal work from this period, limited by the demands of earning a living, shows her still investigating a wide variety of ideas. In the 1943 painting Zhe Scorpwns (plate 102), using a style influenced by Cubism, she abstracted and geometricized the images of two scorpions — one small in the

foreground, the other large — that share a stage with a ghostly human figure. With a range of hues not seen in her other works, Varo explored the breakdown of three-dimensional form into triangular planes of color. The scorpion in the center seems to be dancing on the points of its triangles, reaching its pincers toward the wraithlike figure that bends and contorts (in a pose similar to that of her Bayer rheumatism sufferer) to avoid its grasp. At once humorous and

108

102. The Scorpions,

menacing, this work is beautifully painted with a rich, warm, carefully modulated 1945,

Oil. Ruth Davidoff,

Mextwo City.

palette of glowing golds, oranges,

and blue-greens.

Executed

in a broad,

painterly manner unusual for Varo, it suggests that her style could have evolved into chromatic abstraction.

However, even here, the narrative element predom-

inates. The ambiguous space of shifting color planes acts primarily as a stage

on which the scorpion drama is enacted. It is this narrative direction that Varo's work would follow, leaving Te Scorpions a rare excursion into geometric color abstraction. A later work, The Tower of 1947 (plate 103), although still experimental, marks a significant transition between the work Varo had been doing in Paris and the work of her mature style. A huge, crumbling, crenellated tower sits in the middle of an endless sea. Overgrown and flooded, the tower holds a

109

110

1035. The Tower, 1947. Gouache on paper, 644 X IF; in. Private collection.

small boat with a large paddle wheel that is connected to a windmill.

From

the center of the windmill extends a long, slender arm supporting a tiny female figure who looks out toward descends On

and transforms

the other

side

the horizon.

From

one wall of the tower a ladder

into a winding road that reaches out across

of the tower

another

road

extends,

traveled

the sea.

by a strange,

three-wheeled vehicle. The precariously perched girl, flanked by fleeing counterparts, is made more vulnerable by her diminutive size. The strangely ominous roads lend a note of suspense that is reinforced by Varo's use of the characteristic Surrealist vocabulary of disparate scale, distorted perspective, and foreboding but unexplained narrative. Varo was working with thematic elements that she had used before and would often use again: the crenellated tower; the vegetal, rootlike extensions that here become floating roads; and, most important, the

fanciful vehicles set out on dreamlike journeys that were to appear in so many of her paintings.

In The Tower one can already sense the meaning of these elements. The tiny, isolated girl, peering apprehensively across a vast ocean toward a shore she cannot see, surely alludes to Varo herself. That her only avenues of escape are tiny winding roads and bizarre vehicles seems an apt metaphor for Varo's recent departure from France. As the crumbling tower can be seen to represent a Europe with its buildings and ideals in ruins, so the distant horizon becomes the foreign land, unseen and unknown, that offered her hope. One can see Varo, balanced on the edge of war-torn Europe, feverishly inventing vehicles, 104. Remedwos

Varo

and Benjamin Péret

at Las Estacas, Mexico, 1946.

however ill-equipped and unlikely, that could offer a means of escape. Developing a miniaturist and detailed technique, she created an image that embodied her own refugee experience. This is the first example of Varo's creating fantasy

imagery that suggests references to her life and her first use, beyond the Bayer ads, of a unified, readable narrative. As such, it marks her break with the

Surrealist mode of chance juxtaposition and her first use of elements, both technical

and

thematic,

that would

become

central

to her mature

work.

The year of this painting, 1947, was to prove pivotal in a number of ways. Varo expanded her work toward a more personal, more powerful imagery. And she made a definitive break with Péret, who returned to France. As friends tell it, the situation with Péret had been deteriorating for some time.*°

Varo had begun a relationship with a French pilot, Jean Nicolle, one of the refugees to whom they had offered shelter in their Gabino Barreda apartment (plate 105) . As Varo’s close friend from those years, Kati Horna, explained

it, ‘“Péret was so intellectual, so distracted, that although he was a kind and generous man, he did not participate actively. He was always lost in thought, his head in the clouds, thinking weighty thoughts.” Nicolle, on the other hand,

was a charismatic ladies’ man, so charming ‘with all his schemes and jokes and games” that he attracted Varo’s attention.” Moving from Gabino Barreda, Varo and Nicolle first shared space with the Hornas, whose house in the Colonia Roma, another old Mexico City neighborhood frequented by artists, was the new gathering spot for their group. A cramped little place that the Mexican art historian Ida Rodriguez Prampolini fondly refers to as “Old

Hungary

in Mexico,

YI5]

it was dominated by the dynamic presence of Kati, who filled the house with an extraordinary collection

105, Jean Nicolle.

Oil. Jean and Francine Nicolle,

Savigny-sur-Orge, France.

of the strange fetishlike objects that she loved to assemble and the wonderful wooden puppets and dolls that José so expertly constructed. Living first with them and then in an apartment that Lizarraga had formerly rented (the network of friends, lovers, and former husbands remained as supportive as ever), Varo and Nicolle built a volatile but loving relationship

that lasted for a number of years. Making his way into her writing, Nicolle became Don Jon (vic) von Aguilota (Big Eagle), “intrepid pilot of the strato-

sphere,” a character in her fairy-tale play. Described as ‘‘a tall pilot dressed in a tunic of feathers, a big compass in the middle of his chest and a helmet with the arms of a windmill, the mustache is grand and at each point of it sits

a hummingbird,’®? he much resembles the handsome mustachioed man with whom

Varo shares a chair in a photograph taken on the Gabino

Barreda

terrace (plate 106). As Kati put it, “They were young, Péret much older; Nicolle was handsome, lively, engaged with the world and very, very charming.” There had also been continuing friction between Varo and Péret over whether to leave Mexico and resume their life in France. For Péret, there was simply nowhere else to live — “for the French there is only Paris.” Although he found Mexican culture compelling and later published a collection of Latin American myths, legends, and folklore, Péret could not find his own poetic voice in a foreign language and he wanted to go home.*° After futile attempts to finance his passage back to France, he wrote despairingly to Breton in March 1947, “It’s true I've not written for a long time, but what's the use of 1A,

106. Remedios

Varo

with Jean Nicolle on terrace of

Gabino Barreda apartment,

Mexico

City, c. 1947.

writing to give always discouraging news: abominable material circumstances, no hope of prompt

return.’ And again in October,

‘I still can’t make

any

arrangements for return, for lack of money. As soon as this is possible, I'll let you know.”°” Finally, friends in Paris organized a benefit exhibition for him,

to which Picasso, Mir6, Ernst, Tanguy, Dominguez, and Breton contributed works.°® The exhibition generated enough money to pay for a single one-way passage, and by late 1947 Péret had returned to Paris. Varo,

however,

did

not

want

to leave.

Her

life in France

had

been

disrupted beyond repair, and she could not return to Spain carrying a Republican passport. Even when Franco loosened restrictions — first authorizing Republicans “not guilty of political crime” to return in 1947 and inviting all refugees to come back by the mid-1950s — Varo still did not return, even for a visit. The fact that

she

chose

not

to go

back,

even

to see

her

mother,

suggests

how

traumatic the Civil War had been for her and how desperately she needed to feel safe. ‘“I came to Mexico searching for peace. .. . In this country, I have found the tranquillity that I have always searched for.” She loved the warm climate of Mexico, the beautiful light, the relaxed and intimate quality of this

country where the people spoke her native language. Ultimately, Varo stayed because Mexico had become her home.

I am more from Mexico than from any other place. I know little of Spain; I was very young when I lived there. Then I lived the years of

TUS.

apprenticeship, of assimilation in Paris, then the war. . . . It is in Mexico that I felt welcomed and secure. . . . I do not like to travel at all. It is an experience that I do not like to repeat.°°

Despite her dislike of travel, in late 1947 Varo went to Venezuela with Nicolle and two friends to get some distance on the final break with Péret,

perhaps, and to visit with her family. Her brother, Rodrigo, had come to Venezuela to serve as chief of epidemiology for the Ministry of Public Health in Maracay, heading a campaign to control malaria and bubonic plague. He had brought his family, including Varo's mother, to Latin America with him. Although Varo was terrified of planes, she chose to fly to Venezuela while Nicolle and their friends Claude Ecochard (a French kinesthesiologist) and Michel Arnou (now a designer in Brazil) drove across Central America by jeep, a means of transport that scared her even more. One can only imagine the response of Varo's mother when Varo arrived with Jean

Nicolle, a flamboyant young

man

fourteen years her junior, with

whom she lived quite openly when he was not working on an agricultural expedition that took him out of the city. Dona Ignacia so disapproved of the

life that Varo was leading in Venezuela, so despaired for her daughter's soul — divorced from one man, separated from another, living with a third— that she kept begging Remedios, “Please, just go to mass with me.” Jean Nicolle still smiles at the memory that Varo did agree to go, to please her mother— but only once.°!

Through connections her brother had made, Varo got a job doing technical drawing with an epidemiological study for the Ministry of Public Health. Working in the malaria-control division, she studied disease-carrying parasitic insects under the microscope and made drawings for use by students. Demanding extreme accuracy in the rendering of minute detail, this work revealed to Varo a miniaturized world of rich pattern that profoundly influenced her mature work. Her experience with the ministry may also have been a source for the

elaborate scientific apparatus and laboratory experiments that fill her later paintings.

Varo's experience with parasitic insects was reflected in a Bayer advertisement that she produced

during her year in Venezuela

(plate 107). To

illustrate advertising copy that warned of the dangers of disease from foods contaminated by infected waters (““Typhoid, paratyphoid, dysentery — they hide in fruits and vegetables of such seductive appearance’ ), she painted a still life of succulent lettuce and tomatoes under attack by ludicrously evil

horned and fanged creatures wielding sharpened machetes and knives. Ironically, friends remember Varo as having an almost pathological fear of disease,®’ and Péret had described her as

a woman

“who suffered from a nervous fear of

insects.” Yet this Bayer ad and her later paintings, filled with insects and insect-human hybrids, suggest that she was able to exorcise these fears by confronting, controlling, and even laughing at them through her work.

Varo remained in Venezuela from the end of 1947 to the beginning of 1949, staying mainly in Caracas and nearby Maracay. She did take one trip

with Nicolle down into the Llanos plains of the Orinoco River, the isolated region of south-central Venezuela, where he was working with a team of [14

scientists organized by the French

Institute in Mexico to study the region's

potential for agricultural growth.” Together Varo and Nicolle explored areas of tropical vegetation filled with exotic sights and smells that were to stay with her for years. She later remembered sleeping in a hammock hung beneath mango trees that enveloped them in the odor of ripe and rotting fruit and spoke with wonder of seeing enormous snakes; two-meter-long string beans that had been the most successful crop from the agricultural experiments and that Varo later depicted in a portrait of Nicolle (plate 108); and a mountain of

bull's

heads

and

ants.°° Set between

skeletons

the Andes

picked

clean

mountain

by

the

region's

huge,

range and the Orinoco

voracious

River, this

107. Typhoid,

Paratyphoid, Dysentery, ad

campaign for Bayer pharmaceutical company,

c. 1948.

Gouache on fine

bristol board. Prwate collection.

was an extraordinary area, veined by numerous slow-running rivers that would overflow in the rainy season, flooding the forests that hugged their banks. This eerie image of flooded glades was

to prove

especially potent

for Varo,

who later adopted it as a magical setting for several paintings. A curious document from Varo’s time in Venezuela reveals a glimpse of her personal presence and of her self-image in those years. In a column from an unidentified Venezuelan newspaper that Varo clipped and saved, a vacationing reporter named Ramon Dfaz Sanchez described his fascination with a woman who attracted his attention from across a hotel restaurant. This unnamed woman,

whom

Varo

took

to be

herself,

was

presented

as

. a European woman [whose] international air suggests that she must be from some old-world country. .. . She is small and slim with

the strange head of an intellectual. Her sharp profile, highlighted by an aquiline nose and big eyes the color of caramel, give her, when seen

115

108. Jean Nicolle, 1949. Pencil on paper: Jean and

Francine Nicolle,

Savigny-sur-Orge, France.

299

from the front, the air of a deer. Examined in parts this face presents a collection of perhaps ugly features somewhat disproportioned, which together, however, form a whole not lacking grace and containing a certain nobility. The only particularly beautiful thing in this head, the one thing that could live an independent life by itself without help from the other parts of the facial anatomy, is the great head of tawny hair

that she gathers up high letting the ends stream down. No doubt this woman has made a conscientious study of her physical peculiarities. . . Her clothes . . . are of an impressive sobriety, but in just this lies their distinction. . . . [She is] sober and direct. All of her 116

magic lies in this. She does nothing to hide the relative ugliness of her nose, nor the thinness of her lips, nor her freckles. She is possessed of an interior light that illuminates all of that and that successfully

replaces the most expensive cosmetics. . . . [She is] free of extravagant frills...

and therefore

also from

that those... exert on women...

the mental

and even

physical slavery

. When she speaks with her compan-

ions at the table, she captures everyone's attention. . . . Unaware of her life, not knowing her habits, I am thus distant from her moral and emotional problems. . . . And yet there is something in her that makes me believe her capable of unusual acts in the sphere of the intellect.°° The article carries the dateline ‘“Maracay, December 1947,” just the period when Varo was staying in the Hotel Jardin in Maracay. Whether the reporter

had, in fact, seen her there or was describing someone else, she kept the clipping because she recognized herself in the description.” Varo had matured in these years. She was no longer the young woman who, as a ‘timid and humble listener,” looked to Breton and Péret with awe. This description, written when Varo was thirty-nine, suggests a woman in full

bloom — attractive, intense, and intelligent — who projected an air of sophistication. Although a 1946 photograph of Varo with Péret at the Mexican riverbank resort Las Estacas (plate 104) shows her to be more strikingly beautiful than the newspaper description suggests, the captivating presence, the international air, the tawny mane of hair, and the sharply aquiline profile surely call Varo to mind. And the fact that she saved the clipping offers insight into her perception of herself.

109. Remedios Varo, Mexico City.

5 Lhe Artist and Her Public IN 1949 VARO RETURNED TO MEXICO and began her period of # mature,

ma So

sustained work. As Mexico

had offered her a haven

from

the wars in Europe, so it now also offered her emotional and financial security, in the person of her last husband, Walter Gruen

(lies 111, 112). Gruen, an Austrian exile who had been incarcerated in both

German and French concentration camps, had come to Mexico in 1942. They had met in the early 1940s, but it was years later — after Péret's departure for France, the death in a drowning accident of Gruen’s first wife, Clari (a close friend of Remedios), and Varo's growing separation from Jean Nicolle following their return from Venezuela — that Varo and Gruen came together as a couple.

Gruen, who had been a medical student in Austria until Hitler put an end to his studies, had come to Mexico with absolutely nothing and first worked in a tire store to make a living. After a time he persuaded the owner that they could sell phonograph records as well as tires (arguing that both were petroleum by-products), and he began a small record store at the front of the shop. Eventually he was

able to buy the owner

out, and by the early

1950s he had established what has developed into one of Mexico City’s most prestigious music stores, Sala Margolfn (named

for the tire-store owner who

had given Gruen his start). Gruen, a gentle but forceful man — tall, slim, with receding hairline and large soulful eyes — believed in Varo fiercely and took it upon

1/0. Caravan, 1955. Oil on Masonite,

himself to act

as a buffer between her and the world. Although he is quick to explain that Varo never was willing to be wholly dependent financially and that she shared their household expenses as soon as her work began to sell, Gruen’s support was crucial to her artistic development, offering Varo her first opportunity to free herself from commercial work and to devote herself fully to her own artistic vision. As one friend later explained, “Walter built up space around her and allowed Remedios to paint.”! Within two years of her return from Venezuela, Varo had left Nicolle to live with Gruen. Yet everyone remained good friends, attending parties at which they played cards together, got drunk, and were kept laughing by Nicolle well into the night.? Accounting notes kept among her sketchbooks indicate that Varo and Gruen helped pay the medical bills after Nicolle was

severely injured in an airplane crash. The accident happened only days alter

S073 X 25/7 in.

Varo's first significant success, and she promptly sent the money she had just

Private collection.

earned, the first substantial amount of money she had ever received for her

119

111. Walter Gruen,

work, to arrange for Nicolle’s transport back to Mexico City from the accident

Mextco City.

site in Matamoros. She continued to pay for his needs, buying medicines and paying doctors’ fees for many years.° Remaining in the apartment on calle Alvaro Obregén that she had shared

112. Walter Gruen. Pencil on

paper. Prwate

with Nicolle, Varo settled in with Gruen.

collection.

class neighborhood across from the Sala Margolin, they occupied two apartments on either side of the landing, one with a third-floor studio with high ceilings and a door that opened onto a small terrace, where she often set up her easel to capture the powerful Mexican light. After all the years of dislocation it was in this studio that Varo was finally free to devote her time fully to her work. She developed a painstaking technique that required long hours in the studio. Often working on one piece for seven or eight hours a day for more than a month, she began to produce the meticulously crafted canvases for which she was soon to gain renown. By 1955 Varo was participating in her first Mexican exhibition, a group show at the Galeria Diana in which she exhibited four paintings.* Each of these works is marked by a new maturity of style and thematic development in which she explored the images, ideas, and techniques that she was to work with for the rest of her career.

In a modest building in a middle-

In Caravan (plate 110; originally titled Interior on the Move [Interior en marcha | and later known by its French title, Roulotte),° she continued in the personal vein already begun in The Tower (plate 103), building fantasy around

autobiography. In this image a house on wheels, with pulleys and propellers, is peddled by a mysterious cloaked man who steers the curious vehicle through a lushly wooded landscape. Inside the house — which is filled with doorways 113. Oppostte: Remedios Varo in doorway between terrace ano studw

on calle Alvaro

Obregon, Mexico City.

and windows, each oriented toward a different direction — sits a woman

at a

piano. As Varo described it, “This caravan represents a true and harmonious home, inside of which there are all perspectives, and happily it goes from here to there, the man guiding it, the woman tranquilly making music.’° This can be understood as a metaphor for Varo's new-found security. Here, the woman, a musician, is safely inside an interior that radiates warmth, freed to concentrate 120

om eee ae

AA i

He

Whe

Hi

Sai

pi) yi)

on her art by the man who is outside, bundled up against the elements, guiding

the progress of their home. The house travels “happily,” the woman works “tranquilly,” all expressions of the ease that Varo was now enjoying. This warmth of feeling carries into Varo's use of color as well. The caravan interior is painted in golden tones that glow from the center of the canvas. Using the technical skills she had developed through her academic and engi-

neering training, Varo precisely rendered the interior from a variety of perspectives so that hallways and stairwells create a maze of spaces changing direction as they recede.

She created sky effects in rich blue-green-grays

by blowing

thinned paint onto the canvas and letting it pool, then blotting these pools to produce a texture of dots and splotches that evokes a dense and watery mist. For the forest floor she used a related technique in which viscous paint was sandwiched

between

two

pieces

of paper

or Canvas

that were

then

pulled

apart, creating accidental textures that suggest a mossy landscape. The latter was an effect she had learned from the Surrealists, who called it decaleomania and credited her old friend Oscar Dominguez with inventing

it.” By this process of decalcomania and related techniques, such as allowing colors to run over a surface and then blowing the paint to disperse them, - Dominguez “set free beings that glow with a humming-bird’s fire and possess a texture as skillfully woven as its nest.’* It was just this quality of a skillfully woven nest that Varo would later achieve in her adaptation of the technique. The effect in her Caravan, intensified by using leaves and plants for the blotting, is of

alush surface, alive with rich detail. She would continue to use techniques

of blowing and blotting, first seen in her work exhibited in 1955, throughout

her career. Although Varo's description of Caravan seems to reflect the warmth and safety she was now enjoying in her life, the painting itself suggests something else. The muffled mouth and suspicious glance of the driver, the fierce con-

centration of the pianist, the isolation of this house and its inhabitants all suggest the lonely rootlessness that was at the core of Varo's personal experience.

The French and Spanish titles associate her traveling house with a Gypsy caravan (“roulotte”) and with a nomadic life, always on the move (“en marcha’).

This use of fantastic vehicles as emblems for her personal dislocation had been a theme of her earlier work as well. The isolation of this vehicle, alone in a deep and misty woods, is reinforced by the isolation ofthe figures themselves — she inside, he out, facing away from each other and totally absorbed in separate activities. This theme of human isolation is one that Varo continued to explore:

it is rare to find people in direct contact with one another in her work. Yet Varo was a woman for whom direct contact and deep, lasting friendships had always been essential. Perhaps the tone of isolation and dislocation that recurs in her paintings was the unavoidable aftermath of so many years of insecurity. Although Varo repeatedly showed people in isolation from one another, she presented a more sympathetic relationship between humans and animals. In another painting from her 1955 debut, Sympathy (plate 114; originally titled Madness of the Cat [La Rabia del gato}), she explored the relationship between women and cats. As Varo explained this painting: “This lady’s cat jumps onto the table, producing the sort of disorder that one must learn to

122

1/4. Sympathy, 1955. Oil. Private collection.

tolerate if one likes cats (as I do). Upon caressing it, so many sparks fly that

they form a very complicated electrical gadget. Some sparks and electricity

go to her head and rapidly make a permanent wave.” This painting, like Caravan, offers strongly contrasting emotional tones.

On one hand is the “simpatia” of the later Spanish title, the sympathetic bond between the woman and her cat, the eye contact, the touch, and the electrical force field set up by the emotional vibration between them. Varo had always surrounded herself with cats; her niece remembers with fondness the many strays that her aunt took in from the street.!° Intrigued by their elegant mystery, she saw them as personal allies. In her early years in Mexico, she even thought of her family as ‘““Péret and the cats.”'! Surely that is why, in the Gabino Barreda group portrait (plate 79), Gerszo had posed her in a feline position, surrounded by cats, and disguised with a cat's-eye mask. But the earlier title, J/adness of the Cat, suggests the other side, the anger,

ferocity, and madness

(alternative definitions of rabuz), as well as the rabies

be

that infects the cat and that it may now be transmitting to the woman.

The

cat has leapt upon the table and spilled a glass of milk all over the floor; when stroked, it emits potent sparks. This cat also seems to have an alter ego: another cat, only partially visible, lurks at the woman's feet, hiding in the folds of the tablecloth. The most mundane

domestic accident has been transformed

into an exchange laden with both sympathy and madness, communication and confrontation. This was a device Varo would return to — setting emotionally complex scenes into quotidian domestic environments. In another painting from that first Mexican show, Varo elaborated on her interest

in mechanical

inventions,

which

had

first been

stimulated

by her

father. The Useless Science or the Alchemist (plate 115; originally titled The Mechanical

Labyrinth) shows a woman seated before an alchemical alembic that is suspended above a fire and attached

to a complex

assortment

of gears

and pulleys, bells,

and flags. The machine seems designed to gather rainwater and distill it for bottling. However, the elaborate design of this “mechanical labyrinth” contrasts

absurdly with the simplicity of its final product, which drips, one drop at a time, into a series of small green bottles. To reinforce this incongruity, the entire complex contraption is powered by a single, belt-driven wheel that must be turned by hand. The young woman

who turns the wheel warms

herself by nonchalantly

wrapping a section of the checkered floor around her shoulders as if it were a shawl. With a tour de force display of rendering, Varo transformed the hard, flat, black-and-white tiles of the floor into the soft folds of the checkered cloak. She also worked with the looser chance effects of blotted and blown paint to produce a richly surfaced sky filled with soft, golden rain clouds that contrast with the crisply controlled lines of the equipment and the floor. In titling this painting The Useless Science or the Alchemist, Varo poked fun at the pretensions of science while commenting on the misunderstanding of

alchemy as a futile manipulation of machinery. Yet there is a care and beauty in the rendering of this painting and a dignity to its tone that suggest something

more serious than a lighthearted spoof. Alchemy had fascinated Varo since childhood, both as a literal process of laboratory experiment (the chemical transformation of base metals into gold) and as a metaphorical process of psychic transformation. She knew that the Rube Goldbergian excess of the gadgetry was far from the heart of alchemy and that to perceive that mythic process as merely mechanical manipulation was to miss its spiritual meaning. The alchemical essence here is represented not merely by the rainwater that the woman distills. It is also symbolized by the rigid floor become supple fabric with which she is cloaked and which can be understood as a metaphor for her internal process of transformation. In the last work

shown

in her Mexican

debut, Solar Music

(plate 116;

originally titled Music of Light), Varo turned to a union of self with nature as a source for creative energy. A beautiful woodland creature, wrapped in a grassy mantle made from the forest floor, draws her bow across the sunbeam’s rays, creating sounds that rise and arc. As these magic sounds touch strange nests in the trees —thin casings of crystal in which birds are enclosed — the casings break open, releasing the birds trapped within. The colors are all 124

earth browns, except where the light rays fall and transform the forest floor and grassy mantle to a soft spring green. And, as each bird is touched by sound and flies free from its broken encasement,

it, too, is transformed, taking

on a brillant red coloration. Conceiving whole scenes in her head, Varo began with meticulous drawings,

working from live models for details of pose and gesture and from illustrated encyclopedias and objects she collected for furniture and prop details. She transferred

her completed drawings using a technique adapted from the methods

of early Renaissance panel painters, pressing detail by detail through tracing

paper onto the stiff fiberboard that she had carefully prepared with a white gesso ground. Painting with thin glazes of oil and layers of varnish, she built up luminous color surfaces to which she added minute details, using a single-

hair brush for precision. She also blew and blotted paint and added further details and highlights by scratching into the surface to reveal the white of the gesso beneath. The resulting combination of exquisitely controlled details and loosely flowing surfaces became a hallmark of Varo's style. Solar Music is one of Varo's most accomplished works. The blotting effects are particularly rich, creating forest vegetation with a lush surface. Working

with the long grasslike lines characteristic of the blotting process, Varo elaborated leaves and flowers, tree limbs and birds’ wings. Especially sensitive is the face

of the nymph, which bears striking resemblance to the artist's own.

This resemblance aligned Varo with the power and magic of nature. Having so recently experienced the release of her own creative powers, she projected herself onto the persona of the woodland musician in awakening and coloring nature. Through the conjunction of natural light, musical vibration,

and the intervention ofthe artist's touch, transformation is eflected. Solar Music is similar to The Useless Science or the Alchemist in this concern with creative

process. In fact, these images can be seen as pendants of one another. Each addresses issues of creation and transformation, one in the laboratory, the other in nature. Each has a female protagonist who works seriously and alone. And in each the floor becomes a mantle that wraps around the artist like a magician’s cloak.

Varo's work was greeted with great enthusiasm by the critics. In an extensive review in Novedades, one of Mexico City’s leading newspapers, she was singled out for praise while the other artists exhibiting were not even mentioned by name.'? Lauded in Excelsior, the other major paper, for the dignity and clarity of her work and for a “spiritual and technical courage . . . so superior to what is ordinarily seen,” she was described as putting “her fervent meticulousness, worthy of aFlemish primitive, at the service of an imagination

bathed in the most exquisite poetry.’'’With only four works, Remedios Varo, a virtually unknown Spanish refugee, had taken the Mexican critics quite by

surprise. Applying her extraordinary technical skill to the task of metaphorical autobiography, she had emerged as if from nowhere, with a fully developed style unmistakably her own. It was a style that combined the rigors of European academic training

with a fantasy-filled imagination nurtured by Surrealism. Yet it had taken years for these influences to coalesce into her distinctive vision. For example,

12:

115. The Useless Science or the /955.

Alchemist,

Oil on Masonite,

VAX 2s

in.

Private collection.

/16. Solar Music,

1955. Oil on Mavsontte, 57/44 XA

in.

Private collection.

the technique of decalcomania, which Breton was already celebrating in 1936, is not found in any of Varo’s known works from her Paris stay that began in 1937. Yet all four of the paintings shown in her 1955 Mexican debut include

passages using that or closely related techniques: for the forest floor and sky in Caravan;

the spilled milk in Sympathy; the mist-filled atmosphere in The

Useless Sctence or the Alchemust; and the woodland landscape, grassy carpet, and trees of Solar Music.

27

Varo's way of adapting the blotting and other effects, which had been developed as automatist techniques, was to deny the very aspects of chance that their inventors had intended. Rather than elaborating on the imagery suggested by the chance patterns of decalcomania,

as Dominguez

had done,

she applied the technique to predetermined areas of the canvas to obtain surface

detail

that would

enhance

her desired

image.

for

In Solar Music,

example, the blotting technique was used to rich effect in the trees of the landscape — but they had already been conceived as trees before the technique

was applied. Varo consistently exercised firm artistic control while utilizing methods

the

that

had

Surrealists

ostensibly

developed

to

circumvent

such

conscious control. In answering an interviewer who asked, “When you begin

a work have you already decided what form it will take, or is it a spontaneous

process ... that

. . develops automatically?” Varo replied, “Yes, I visualize

it before beginning to paint and the treatment must be adjusted to the image that I have formulated.” Such differences in approach indicate Varo's increasing distance from

Surrealist identification. She did not pursue any serious exploration of psychic automatism,

which was a central tenet of orthodox Surrealism.!® Rather, she

mocked it, finding humor in the idea of images that emerged when they were

least expected. In a wonderfully deadpan letter penned into her sketchbook, addressed

to an unknown

psychiatrist chosen randomly from the phone book,

Varo described her traumatic confrontation with just such automatic images. Writing in French, she began: Monsieur,

Permit me to write to you and I hope you will excuse this

liberty as well as my bad French, but my state of trouble is great, [there are] certain phenomena I dare not confide in any of those who surround

me,

but I believe that you can counsel me.

The thing began six months ago. I was enthusiastically painting a scene with a lovely prairie, some sheep, and cows walking full of serenity. I confess that I was satisfied, but then little by little an irresistible force pushed me to put on the back of each sheep a little ladder, at the bottom of which were perched some images of my neighbor across the way. With anguish and sweat, I put some piles of well-folded handkerchiefs on the cows. You cannot imagine my surprise and desolation. I hid this painting and began to make others but I always felt it necessary to introduce some unexpected elements, the whole little by little disillusioning (if I dare say it), until the day when,

having accidentally spilled a quantity of tomato sauce on my pants, I found this stain so significant and moving that I quickly cut the piece of fabric and framed it. I was obliged to lead from [the time of] the first

painting of which I speak to you, an almost clandestine life, fearing my entourage would regard me as strange. . . . Is it a sudden triggering of my subconscious that wishes to free itself and that pushes me to paint differently and to act in a disordered way. . . ? or perhaps I am quite SUMply crazy, 0 With sections repeated and slightly altered, the letter appears in two 128

separate sketchbook entries written in Varo's hand but bearing the signature Fernando Gonzalez, whose address she gives as San Angel, the Mexico City suburb where she had enjoyed those Saturday soirees at the home of Gunther Gerszo. Written in French, it links Varo's Parisian period with her later Mexican years. No longer the shy young woman awed by Breton and his cohorts, in one delicious spoof Varo dismissed a basic tenet of Surrealist process —as though she was declaring her independence from the movement and its theory. Suddenly Varo had emerged as an artist of singular talent. The sophistication of this new work and the unity of its vision, so unlike the tentative experiments of her early years, prompt questions about whether she had been developing these paintings over a number of years and only now had the opportunity to show them (discrepancies in the dating leave this an open question) or whether, as

the common

lore became,

blown, once it had the Why did Vato not in 1942 until her 1955 When she first arrived

her previously

stifled talent

had

exploded,

full

chance for release. show her work in Mexico from the time of her arrival debut? Several related explanations can be posited. in Mexico, weary from escaping the vortex of war, she

did not expect to stay and therefore did not invest her energy in the Mexican art community. She still identified with the Parisian Surrealist circle, as witnessed

by her participation in their exhibitions in New York in 1942 and Paris in 1947. Conversely, Varo may have needed the distance from the Parisian Surrealists that her life in Mexico offered before she could establish an independent and mature artistic voice. If she did need time to recuperate from the Surrealist

circle’s seductive but potentially destructive power, from the inhibiting pressures of its limiting definitions (especially those for women, which championed youthful innocence over maturity of expression), her experience would be consistent with that of many other women associated with the movement in France before the war. As Whitney Chadwick documents, the Surrealist movement attracted a large number of women artists; but most, like Varo,

found themselves able to produce significant work only at considerable remove

from the circle of artists in Paris.'7 And for Varo, who had expressed early intimidation before Péret, it may have been important, subconsciously if not overtly, to be free from the scrutiny of her husband, known to some as the

“Grand Inquisitor of Surrealism.’ Also, settling in Mexico meant starting over, and the commercial jobs she took to make a living left Varo little time for personal work. For many years

her artistic energy was deflected into making gouaches to sell aspirin, painting decorations on furniture, and translating for foreigners, into doing publicity drawings and scientific illustrations, theatrical costuming and ceramics restoration — whatever

came

along

that would

help her to survive.

Now

freed

from the burden of providing for daily necessities, Varo was able to set up a studio again, her first real studio since Paris, and to realize the many ideas that had been incubating ali those years.

Varo's relationship with her friend Leonora Carrington is also of interest in this regard. The mature artistic identity evidenced in Varo's Mexican work appeared only after years of intense personal and artistic collaboration beee)

tween Varo and Carrington. The issues that Varo addressed in the paintings included in her Mexican debut — the transformative processes of alchemy and the occult, women’s creative powers and their relationship to nature, even the

special charged relationship between women and cats — all were favorite issues

of discussion and experiment during Varo's daily visits with Carrington. They shared a fascination with such investigation that extended beyond their infamous kitchen experiments and farcical recipes to a serious study of mystical literature. Meeting often in Carrington’s studio, a place their friend Victor Serge called little room

“a narrow

in old Mexico,

the most dream-saturated place I know

here,’”'? they began to build a language, both visual and verbal, with which to

explore the creative process as part of a spiritual quest. This process of intense interchange Gruen's

may

have been as important

encouragement

was

for her

for Varo's artistic maturation

self-confidence.

Together

they seem

as to

have freed her, psychologically as well as economically, to become involved in the Mexican art scene. But that very scene may further illuminate her absence from public view. Mexican art in the 1940s was still dominated by the revolutionary socialist ideology that had birthed the Mexican muralists. The indigentsta movement had stated as its goal the teaching of all Mexicans about the importance of their cultural roots in the Indian past. To fulfill the spirit of Mexicanidad, which dated back to the revolution begun in 1910, artists and intellectuals were encouraged to connect with the indigenous culture of Mexico. The muralist

movement,

which

began

in the 1920s,

expressed

this nationalistic

fervor and enshrined the idea that for Mexican art to avoid colonialization, it had to reject all foreign influences. Despite the welcome extended to the influx

of émigrés, this attitude still predominated in Mexico when Varo arrived in 1942. Given that attitude, there was little audience for the European sensibility of her work.

There is, however, a long tradition of the fantastic deeply imbedded in indigenous Mexican culture.”° In a country in which dressed fleas are sold as

souvenirs to tourists, in which donkeys with tarred stripes are passed off as zebras in the park, in which the goriest ex-voto scenes are offered as proofs of the efficacy of prayer, and in which sugar-coated candy skulls and doll-size mummies made of tafly are given to children as treats, the surreal is a reality seen daily in the streets. But such imagery is far different in intention and

context from the fantastic juxtapositions produced by the Surrealists. One is the traditional expression of a magical mentality, the other an intellectual invention.?!

That the Surrealists had been early to recognize this Mexican mentality as an antecedent of their European ideology is evident in the famous Surrealist

Map of the World, published in 1929, in which Mexico fills most of North America, totally replacing the unnamed United States (plate 117).22 Breton had conferred on Mexico his highest accolade, calling it “the Surrealist place, par excellence,” during his visit there in 1938.25 Sent by France as a cultural

ambassador, he had gone to Mexico with the intention of introducing Surrealism to the Mexicans. He even arranged the first Mexican showing of Dali and Bunuel’s classic Surrealist film, The Andalusian Dog (1928). But what Breton 150

117. The Surrealist Map of

the World, /929,

a rates

i marques cy

bh

rowrorm °e

cil

“Wait 08Pou

ILE DE PAQUES

The surrealist map of the world.

found was a place where the surreal in all its strange, contradictory, magical,

hallucinatory aspects seemed already a living presence. He was confronted with this presence during his very first hours in the country. As the story is told, Breton arrived in the port of Veracruz with his wife, Jacqueline, and their daughter, Aube, to find that no one was there to meet them. Arranging their own transport to’ Mexico City, they reached the university,

where

Breton

had

been

invited

to give a lecture.

But, to their

complete surprise, the building was all locked up. As Breton stood in the cantina across the street drinking tequila and trying to decide what to do, with no hosts, no lodgings, and no lecture, a man came into the bar, asked where Signor X was, and when Signor X was pointed out, the man shot him and left. By then the committee responsible for Breton’s visit had tracked him down and had gathered together some stray people to make up an audience —

they had totally forgotten that he was coming, so there had been no publicity at all. Standing up to speak to the hastily assembled group, Breton began, “‘I was going to talk about Surrealism, but in Mexico | see that I do not dare.’ Breton

was

fascinated

by this country where

the unexpected was

com-

monplace, where the macabre and the violent, “convulsive beauty” and “‘the marvelous” were not just artistic conceits but seemed to flourish naturally. When he returned to Paris, Breton arranged an exhibition in which he excitedly unveiled the treasures he had collected in the course of an 800-kilometer anthropological tour of Mexico that he had undertaken with Diego Rivera (who acted as his host) and Leon Trotsky (in political exile in Mexico, where he was later assassinated). The show included masks, carvings, retablos, exvotos, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century primitive paintings, as well as

powerful photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mexico's preeminent photographer, and early work by Frida Kahlo (whom Breton possessively claimed as a “Surrealist discovery’).

1

Breton’s appreciation of Mexico also prompted him to organize the /nternational Exhibition of Surrealism, which was

brought to Mexico in 1940 by

Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro. This exhibition was Mexico's first contact with the Surrealist movement as it had developed in Europe. As Moro excitedly announced in his catalog essay: “For the first time in centuries we witness a heavenly combustion in Mexico. A thousand tokens mingle and are seen in the conjugation of constellations which renew the brilliant pre-Columbian night.’° The social event of the season, the opening attracted Mexico's social and cultural elite, who stayed well into the night enjoying the well-stocked bar and elegant supper provided by Inés Amor, an influential gallery owner who is seen as the mother of modern art in Mexico. The show, installed in her newly opened Galerfa de Arte Mexicano, consisted of paintings (including Varo's 1938 Souvenir of the Valkyrte, plate 52), drawings, objects, exquisite corpses, decalcomanias, photographs, and collages by contemporary artists from fifteen countries, as well as indigenous Mexican folk art, primitive art from New Guinea, and drawings by the insane. The title page of the Spanish-

English catalog promised “clairvoyant watches,” “perfume of the fifth dimension,” “radioactive frames,” “burnt invitations” (invitations with elegantly singed edges were sent out), and an “Apparition of the Great Sphinx of the Night,” who appeared at the opening in the person of Isabel Marin (who would be Paalen’s last wife), wearing a flowing white tunic with an enormous butterfly

on her head. This “heavenly combustion” generated a large audience, but according to Rodriguez Prampolini: The exhibition of 1940, although it awakened a momentary enthusiasm, apparently fell on deaf ears, or better said, it seemed to run into and be smashed to pieces against the wall raised by the still “official” painting of revolutionary muralism. . . . 1940 is still a year totally devoted to the work of the mural painter. It is the moment of the force, the splendor, the domain of the personal values of those considered the “Three Greats.” It is also the year when, for the first time, young painters are exposed, at the opening of the Surrealist exhibition, to.

.

a program that puts the emphasis on the world of fantasy and imagination in full flight. . . . For artists who at this time are creating what they consider to be revolutionary truth, it must be a shock to see a different truth.?”

It was a shock rejected by the critics, who wrote overwhelmingly negative reviews. The show was called “puerile,” “out of date,” “provincial,” and “conventional.’* “In a word it seems old. And in art, old age cannot and ought not exist... . The exhibition . . . produces the impression of rubble, of refuse, of dusty objects, of ashes. The only life that exists is the personality, the powerful spirit of this or that painter, revealed in his work no thanks to Surrealism, but leaping out as though to save itself from its own ruins.”29 Those invested in the political ideology of revolutionary Marxism continued to attack Surrealism as “liberal” and “a capitalist growth.’ By the 1950s, however, Mexico had become more receptive to a broader

is;

range of expression. Younger artists were seeking to free themselves from what they now viewed as the “didactic purity” of muralism by consciously identifying with a more international community. More work by European artists was appearing in the galleries, and a wider variety of styles was emerging from contemporary Mexican artists. The enthusiastic response to the work of Frida Kahlo, first publicly shown in a solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1953, can be seen as a signal of the change in artistic climate. In honoring Kahlo’s work, the art community acknowledged the vision of a woman and an easel painter whose small canvases are filled with fantastic and directly personal imagery. Perhaps fortuitously and perhaps as a direct result, Varo was soon ready to exhibit as well. Her debut in the 1955 group show at Galeria Diana was so successful that Varo was quickly invited to have a one-woman exhibition there the following year. In this, her first solo exhibition, she included twelve works.*! Using the same meticulous style seen in the earlier exhibition, Varo created a series of paintings that offer further glimpses into the universe of her imagination peopled with fantastic creatures involved in magical tasks. There was a traveler in a strange boat floating through flooded woods toward a pear! that glowed in the distance, a traveling magician who mesmerized a crowd while juggling balls made oflight. In the The Flutit (plate 118), an enchanted musician, with a face encrusted with mother-of-pearl that glows as if lit from within, builds a tower of fossilized stones by using sounds from his flute to lift them into place. In Revelation or the Clockmaker (plate 157), an artisan seated in a workshop, amid clocks that capture and freeze time, is startled by a vision that whirls through the window and knocks the gears to the floor. Beautifully integrating style and subject in these works, Varo achieved command of a resonant personal style. She was also clearly enjoying herself, energetically inventing her alternative universe with a lively, intelligent enthusiasm. Again she received accolades from the critics, with some reviewers so excited that they veered toward hyperbole. One exclaimed, “[Varo] has been consecrated as a sublime mistress of the plastic arts, so that from now on her name ought to be inscribed with gold letters in the sacred phylacteries where those of true worth in art history are seated.’*? Even Diego Rivera was moved to praise: “Mexico has the good fortune that among us live three women painters who undoubtedly are among the most important women artists in the world: Remedios Varo, ah, how the painting of that woman enchants me!, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon.’% In addition to praise from art critics and fellow artists, Varo also received an enthusiastic response from collectors, and after this show she had to establish a waiting list of potential buyers. Some were so anxious to own a work by Varo that they were willing to commit to purchase a work before it

was finished, before it was roughed out, or even before it was conceived. Perhaps this enthusiastic response reflected an audience tiring of the hegemony of the famous muralists with their loose, broad style and didactic social realist themes. The public seemed to welcome Varo's delicacy of touch and exquisite concern for detail, enlivened by her rich sense of irony. The muralists did huge, serious paintings blazoned on public walls; Varo's canvases >=

NSS

118. The Flutist,

were

1955. Oil on

private response. It is this private quality that is so striking in her paintings.

Masonite with

They are quite small, very quiet, and invite the kind ofpersonal contemplation

mother-of-pearl, :

29/2 X 67/8 in. Private collection.

intimate,

often

humorous,

depicting personal

evoked by an illuminated prayer book.

narrative

and

scaled

to

Her painstakingly slow technique (a

small painting might require months to complete) demands slow and deliberate

viewing. The work is not bright or flashy or broad in any way. It is intimate, both technically and thematically, and it elicits an intimate response. Suddenly, Varo was an enormous success. She had always been shy about making her work public. (Her cousins in Spain still lament: “She seemed so talented. We never knew why she hung back and was so timid about her work.’’) And the recognition may have been difficult for Varo to accept. But she had to admit that she enjoyed it, as she makes clear in the first of many

letters in which she celebrated her new success and happily offered to provide her aging mother with anything she might need:

Dearest mama; I think that this letter is going to cross with yours, the last one that I wrote you was very short and told you that the date of my show was approaching. Happily this bad period is over, it was a great success and there were hundreds of people. For my character this is rather painful. But I have 15g

sold all of my paintings and I am richer than a toreador. Because of that, whatever you

fancy is yours

for the asking,

my greatest

pleasure

is

to be able to provide you with some comfort and to give you some little gifts. Truly, mama, ask me for what you want, look, from this show I am left with a profit of some hundred thousand pesos! It is almost a small fortune. I sent you one clipping from the newspaper and I will send you others.

Of course, as the exhibition will still be open until the 10th or 12th of next month, I have many things to do, to attend to some personalities, art critics, etc. and I am very busy. That is why I can’t write at length. At any rate, and even if you do not ask me going to send you a check next month

for anything, I am

to celebrate my Success,

but you

have to spend tt not save it. A hug from Walter. Thousands of kisses and hugs from Remedios.*°

The combination of critical and public acclaim that Varo enjoyed meant that she showed regularly in Mexico, winning awards and being represented

in most major exhibitions. These included two shows organized specifically for women artists and a 1961 exhibition organized by the Ateneo Espanol of Mexico to aid Spanish political prisoners. The first was an exhibition in 1956 designed as an homage to Frida Kahlo, who had died two years before. The Salon Frida Kahlo was initiated by Lola Alvarez Bravo, at whose gallery Kahlo had shown. Involving artists of widely divergent styles and sensibilities, each of whom participated as a way to express her respect and admiration for Kahlo, it was conceived as the first in a series of annual exhibitions in which

each woman invited would display one of her latest works as a tribute to Kahlo'’s memory.*° From each exhibition, one work would be chosen to become part of apermanent collection of art by Mexican women that would be housed at the newly opened Frida Kahlo Museum.” However, the series did not continue, and the collection was never begun. The 1956 exhibition became a unique homage to Kahlo as an artist and as a woman. An event organized by women for women to honor one of their own in a country so renowned for its

machismo is worthy of note. That it took place in 1956, before the international feminist movement

had made an impact anywhere in the art world, gives it

even greater significance. The other exhibition focused on women artists that Varo participated in took place in 1958. The First Salon of Womens Art, held at the Galerfas Excelsior,

included forty paintings and two sculptures by nineteen women, all living in Mexico.** Varo was chosen as the winner of the 3,000-peso first prize for her paintings Harmony (plate 172) and Be Brief. Although this exhibition, sponsored by women but juried solely by men, was different in structure and intent from the Salon Frida Kahlo, it provides further evidence of a consciousness about

women's contributions to the arts in Mexico during the 1950s. Her 1956 solo exhibition had established Varo as a self-supporting artist

who could sell whatever she wanted 155

to paint. Yet in 1957, although she

profoundly disliked making portraits, she took on commissions (at the request

of the Bal y Gays, the owners of Galeria Diana) from two prominent Mexican

families to paint portraits of their children. The Villasenor children, Andrea and Lorenzo, are shown playing in an elegant parlorlike space set in front of a darkened sky (plate 119). Using fabric cut from flowered draperies hanging nearby, the children have made an enormous kite that floats through the space, the girl struggling to control it as her brother rides on its back. With rainwater gathered in a pitcher that drips onto the checkered tile floor, they have made a puddle as well, using it as a pond on which to sail their three-masted toy boat. It is an image strangely evocative of lines by Rafael Alberti: “Two children of the night, terrible, expelled from the sky,/ whose childhood was a

stealing of boats and a crime of suns and moons.”** Cutting up the household

drapery and making puddles on the floor are hardly dignified portrait images for the children of a leading Mexican family. Varo clearly enjoyed setting these dutifully rendered likenesses into a scene of childhood mischief. In Daughters of the Arnouz Family, Varo depicted two girls, one a preteen,

the other an adolescent, as oversize figures in an elaborate seahorse boat (plate 121). Gazing out apprehensively, the girls seem uncomfortably cramped, especially in contrast to the school of flying fish that darts beside the boat in the open air and water.

For a third portrait commission of the same year, Varo painted the prominent Mexican cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chavez (plate 122). Depicting the doctor as a kind of Svengalian figure, she dressed him “in somewhat priestly clothing to suggest that this profession is perhaps a kind ofpriesthood. In his hand he holds a key. The persons coming from the gorge have a little door in place of a heart and he winds them up as they pass by.’“° In this comment on medicine's godlike pretensions, Varo also derided the mindless way that patients, here little more than puppets, allow “authorities” so much control. These were far from traditional portraits, but Varo's patrons must have expected something out of the ordinary in choosing her for their commissions. Even so, she did not enjoy the pressure of patrons’ expectations and soon began turning commissions down or conniving ways to drive them away. She much preferred to paint fantasy portraits of people she could invent herself. An example is the Portrait of Baron Angelo Milfastos as a Child (plate 123), a

drawing she created as a birthday greeting for her friend the Mexican painter Juan Soriano. It portrays a young boy seated in a small boat, who looks out from under a large skimmer with wide, innocent eyes. In the front of the boat lies a disembodied head; in the back, a large knife. On the back of the drawing Varo wrote the history of this lad, whose name translates as “angel of the thousand good fortunes.” Juanito, many greetings, don’t let it bother you that this drawing is so bad, because it is a document of great historic value. You are dealing

with the only portrait that exists of baron Angelo Milfastos when he was a child and began to cut off the heads of his aunts. He later died

on the gallows, but that was a great injustice and a judicial error. He was by no means a criminal but the inventor of a magnificent new

156

119. Portrait of Andrea and Lorenzo

Villasenor, 1957. Oil on Masonite, S07 X F773 in. Private collection.

120. Remedtwos Varo

painting the Villasenor portrait in her studto on

calle Alvaro Obregén, 1957.