Remedios Varo
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Named after the “Virgin of Remedies,” Remedios Varo, full name María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo, was born in 1908 (although later in life she spread the fib that she was born in 1913), in a small town of Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Catalonia, Spain. Varo attended a covent school, but rejected religion to the disappointment of her mother and happily left it behind when the family moved to Madrid. Throughout her childhood, Varo traveled, developing a deep love for adventure and voyages.
In contrast to her catholic mother, Varo’s father was a hydraulic engineer encouraged his daughter to copy technical drawings and fostered her education in science and philosophy. In Madrid, Varo attended the Escuela de Belles Arts, where she met her first husband, Gerardo Lizarraga. Varo enjoyed visiting Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Francisco de Goya’s masterpieces at the Prado Museum and she took an early interest in French surrealism.
By 1930, Varo and her husband were on their way to Paris to be at the center of the European art scene. After a year, they returned to Spain and became involved with the Spanish surrealists in Barcelona. In 1937, Remedios followed activist and artist Esteban Francés back to Paris, mutually leaving her husband in Spain to confront the Spanish Civil War. Varo experienced life along side the surrealists and fell for her roommate, poet Benjamin Péret.
Even with her circle of impressive friends, including André Breton, Varo copied Chirico paintings and sold candy to make ends meet. Varo along with other female surrealists were seen as femmes enfants, literally women children, and were generally not taken seriously by the men. This uneven treatment is one of the reasons why Varo, later in life, didn’t consider herself part of any artistic group.
At the start of WWII, Varo was arrested alongside her boyfriend for his political beliefs. Just days after they were released, Germany entered Paris. Varo, along with several other artists, escaped on a boat from Marseilles to Mexico and Mexico became Varo’s forever home.
The work of artists like Diego Rivera dominated Mexico, so again Varo struggled financially. She worked as an assistant to Marc Chagall and drew illustrations for pharmaceutical company Bayer.
In 1952, Varo married Walter Gruen, an Austrian political refugee whose finances finally allowed Varo to happily focus on her painting.
Producing art besides her was Varo’s closest friend, fellow expat and British surrealist, Leonora Carrington. Together they would create “surrealist recipes” for things like “how to produce erotic dreams,” which included a head of garlic and hats among other seemingly random ingredients. In a novel Carrington wrote about them as old friends, Varo’s witchy persona “smokes cigars between sucking on violet lozenges.” The two women saw no separation between alchemists and cooks and fine art and traditional women’s work. Even Carrington likened painting to making strawberry jam. Despite these ideas and Varo’s focus on depicting female figures, Varo never declared her art as feminist.
Varo like many surrealists of the time studied psychoanalysis. Yet like surrealism, psychoanalysis excluded women. In “Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst,” the composition is dominated by a woman with Varo’s signature wispy and gravity defining hair, cloaked in a green robe complete with a matching mask. The medieval background washed in orange pushes the figure forward as she discards a shrunken male head; therefore, discarding the patriarchy as “psychological waste.”
In addition the unconscious mind and science, Varo believed in magic and alchemy and the connection between the natural world and mechanical world. Varo pulled inspiration from both the catholicism of her childhood and mystic and heretic traditions. Many of her pantings illustrate strange vehicles in ethereal landscapes, androgynous figures whose hair swirls thoughout the composition, Romanesque architecture, magical and moody settings, warm orange tones, and autobiographical elements. Inspired by the narrative structure and harmony of Renaissance painting, Varo’s allegorical work emphasis line and form.
In 1963, Varo died of a heart attack. 8 years later, the a posthumous retrospective in Mexico City was attended by the largest audience in the Museo de Arte Moderno’s history. Breton called Varo, “the sorceress who left too soon.”
