HER DARK MATERIALS
After reading the treatise on lumbar vertebrae coming from the erudite pen of the renowned anthropologist W. H. Strudlees, which was disseminated by the Viennese Anthropologists Guild, and after confirming the harm it has done and the great confusion it adds to that which already exists, I have decided to write up the following notes. I have no qualms about branding said treatise as lewd and inaccurate, and I don’t know which distresses me more: its osseous-historical inaccuracy or the refined lewdness it exudes.
SO BEGIN THE POLEMICAL FINDINGS of one Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, currently accessible at the Art Institute of Chicago via QR code. His quarrel with Strudlees is a methodological one, for, having conflated “myrtles” with “myths” (the former, Fuhrängschmidt reminds us, are “recounting[s] of phenomenal events that were empirically verified,” the latter “short fables” told by “Babylonian wet nurses”), his esteemed colleague has overlooked the existence of our human ancestor Homo rodans.1 Precisely detailed and illustrated in the Cadenced Multimyrtle, a compendium of poems and cantos from 2300 BCE, its fossilized remains are presently on view at the institute, preternaturally intact and encased in a vitrine. The “abundance of lumbar vertebrae” described in the Multimyrtle extend below the monkey-size skeleton’s pelvis, curling outward before involuting to form an anatomical structure clearly identified as a wheel with six spokes radiating from its center. Even the untrained eye can plainly see that Homo rodans once roved the planet, not on foot, but by rotational locomotion.
Were Homo rodans a paleontological artifact, it would deliver a swift and devastating corrective to the bipedalist dogma of human evolution. In fact, it’s an artwork, constructed by Remedios Varo from chicken, turkey, rabbit, and fish bones in 1959. Travestying scientific objectivity and occult wisdom with comic bathos, this pataphysical specimen and squib number among the marvelous contrivances in “Science Fictions,” the first monographic exhibition devoted to the Catalan-born Surrealist in the United States in twenty years.2 Jointly organized by the Art Institute and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the show gathers some twenty paintings Varo made from 1955 until her death eight years later, along with full-scale cartoons, sketches, notebooks, and selections from her omnivorous library that reflect her dual interest in magic and science (or as Fuhrängschmidt might have it, “myth” and “myrtle”).3 As the institute’s Caitlin Haskell and guest cocurator Teresa Arcq write in the show’s introductory wall text, “The artist believed that, together, the seemingly conflicting knowledge structures of science and esotericism could not only lay bare the rules—both seen and unseen—that govern human behavior but also provoke change on personal and societal levels.” The word seemingly does a lot of work here, resolving an epistemological tension into a syncretic holism. As the paleotechnic wonder of Homo Rodans already suggests, it’s precisely this tension, easily elided, that subtends and vitalizes Varo’s art, charging its sympathetic humor and weird sortilege.
These qualities have long attracted audiences to Varo’s work. Her second retrospective, mounted in 1971 at the Museo de Arte Moderno, drew record-breaking crowds, one of which even stormed the museum when it was closed for a holiday, trying to break down the doors.4 While Varo, pace the New York Times, was hardly an “overlooked” artist, her “fabulist, fairy-tale style,” as her biographer Janet Kaplan noted, has been “vulnerable to cursory dismissal,” and her inclination toward symbolism and mythopoeia were doubtlessly liabilities in some circles (it should come as no surprise that the index of the 2016 edition of Art Since 1900 jumps from Vantongerloo to Vasarely).5 A recent reevaluation of critical priorities (an enthusiasm for “alternative modernisms”; a vogue for figuration; a consolidation of the feminist countercanon; and an unembarrassed acceptance, if not commendation, of the spiritual in art) has secured a new cachet and contemporaneity for Varo’s work, which last year was prominently featured, along with that of her friend Leonora Carrington, in “The Milk of Dreams,” Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale exhibition.
VARO WAS BORN in Girona, Spain, in 1908, the daughter of a devout Catholic housewife and a hydraulic and civil engineer. At age fifteen, she became one of just a handful of female students enrolled in Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where Salvador Dalí had just returned after a one-year expulsion.6 Her first exposure to Surrealism came via his work, as well as that of Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and Óscar Domínguez, whose technique of decalcomania she would later employ, against the Surrealist tenets of chance and automatism, to create paintings of exquisite, supraconscious refinement.7 It was through Domínguez that Varo met the French poet Benjamin Péret, a card-carrying automatist and Trotskyite who at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War had traveled to Spain to join an antifascist militia in Aragon.8 Fleeing to Paris after Lorca’s assassination, she lived in a ménage à trois with Péret and the painter Esteban Francés under circumstances she would later describe as “heroic” poverty, allegedly forging de Chiricos to make ends meet.9 In Varo’s telling, her position within interwar Parisian Surrealism was that “of a timid and humble listener,” a peripherality typical of female participants in the male-dominated movement.10 Soon, war and fascism followed Varo to France. In 1941, aided by André Breton and the Emergency Rescue Committee’s Varian Fry, she and Péret crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a Portuguese ocean liner, seeking political asylum in Mexico.
There, Varo found a close-knit community of émigré artists and intellectuals displaced by the war. Her most intimate friendship was with Carrington, an English-born painter and novelist who shared Varo’s magical passions and perverse sense of humor. As Carrington reports to Breton in a letter from 1943, “Remedios and I have timidly dipped our fingers into practical witchcraft, at times with palpable results.”11 On display at the institute, Varo’s “recipe to provoke erotic dreams” is suggestive of these conspiratorial activities, calling for a kilo of horseradish, three white hens, a head of garlic, a mirror, two calves’ livers, a brick, two clothespins, a whalebone corset, two false moustaches, and a hat “to taste.”12
Despite all the Surrealist fun and games, Varo’s early years in Mexico City involved little painting. Living “hand to mouth” in a shabby tenement entered through a window, she did commercial illustration work to support herself, Péret, and their clowder of rescued stray cats.13 The conditions of possibility for the meticulous and consuming work for which she is today celebrated did not emerge until, years after separating from Péret, she began a relationship with an Austrian émigré music-store owner named Walter Gruen, who would remain Varo’s companion until her death from a heart attack, in 1963. Though not a rich man, Gruen, as the curators note, provided Varo “with the economic stability that allowed her to dedicate herself completely to painting.”14
Opening the show in Chicago, a small panel from 1955 titled Caravan depicts a male figure in a hat and overcoat driving an extraordinary conveyance across a landscape of decalcomanial shrubs. Retrofitted with a wind turbine and various gears and pulleys, the carriage tows a medieval folly cut away to reveal a woman seated at an upright piano in a multiplex interior of vaults and stairways. “This caravan represents a true and harmonious home,” the artist wrote; “inside it are all perspectives and it happily moves from here to there, the man directing it, the woman quietly producing music.”15 The gendered language cuts against the feminist claims the show makes on behalf of Varo’s work. (It’s likely for this reason that her quote is truncated in the museum’s wall label.) Yet far from prescribing some retrograde and essentialist gender ideology, the painting quite simply indexes the situation of its making—the material experience of a female painter at midcentury who spent much of her life laboring to sustain the male artists in her circle, and was able to perfect her art only when a man, in turn, allowed her to have a room (or here, a caravan) of her own.
EDUCATED IN THE METHODS of technical drawing by her engineer father, Varo directed this skill toward the ideation of fantastic technologies, often deployed in pursuit of metaphysical treasures. In Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River, 1959, a lone female voyager in an aquatic vessel fabricated from some miraculous utilitarian textile navigates the swampy course of the legendized South American waterway, finding at its origin an ever-flowing chalice—at once the Holy Grail of Arthurian lore and the American Fountain of Youth coveted by Spanish conquistadors.16 The boat’s ovoid form—the dissident Surrealist critic Roger Caillois once compared Varo’s watercraft to “gutted eggs”—resonates with the cocoon-like morphologies of the gossamer UFO in Starship, 1960 (a rare futurist moment for Varo), and the fabulously intricate two-wheeled mechanism depicted in Vagabond, 1957, which does triple duty as the wayfarer’s clothing, home, and means of transport. As Caillois noted of Varo’s work, “Cranks, pedals, windlasses fixed on the tips of umbrellas, and funnels complete a fragile, heteroclite, naive machinery, built at random and of undoubtedly illusory efficiency.”17
It’s tempting to contrast Varo’s machine aesthetic with the fritzing apparatuses of Dada. If the latter ironized the lethal technologies of total war and the banal clockwork of capitalist modernity, Varo’s artisanal contraptions, which function by dint of wind, water, and quantum leaps of faith, harked back to an early-modern era before the disenchantments of the Enlightenment and the alienations of industrial revolution.18 Likely more relevant to Varo than the cyborg anomie of Dix and Grosz or the libidinal anti-aesthetic of Picabia and Duchamp were the ideas of the Greek Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff, whose eccentric fusion of Sufi mysticism, Eastern Christianity, and Neoplatonist and Rosicrucian arcana would be a formative intellectual reference from the mid-1940s on. Gurdjieff’s disciple P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (1949), a volume of the master’s teachings owned and annotated by Varo, pronounces (with tiresome repetitiousness) humankind’s condition to be that of the “man-machine”: a “blind and unconscious” automaton “acting under the influences of external stimuli.”19 While for Gurdjieff this grim ontology can be transcended only through hypervigilant observation of one’s mechanical nature under the tutelage of an enlightened spiritual instructor, Varo instead sought the re-enchantment of the machine, fabulating daedal contrivances that exceed their own instrumental logics.
A body of hermetic knowledge concerned with the transformation of matter, usually that of base metals into gold, the protoscience of alchemy likely appealed to Varo as a metaphor for artistic creation, as a philosophy of cosmic harmony and spiritual ascendance, and as a remnant of an age before the autonomization and polarization of science and magic. In Search of the Miraculous contains a passage describing the psyche as a “human factory,” which through a series of “alchemical processes” can transform “coarser matters, in the cosmic sense, into finer ones . . . gradually bring[ing] the whole organism onto . . . a higher plane of being.” The Master cautions that under “ordinary conditions of life,” such a transformation is impossible, as “the ‘factory’ expends all that it produces.”20 This difficulty appears to be the subject of Varo’s Useless Science, or the Alchemist, 1955, wherein a sequence of elaborate procedures, ostensibly intended to distill a magic elixir from the drops of rainwater collected by a funnel in the roof of an alchemist’s laboratory, produces ambiguous results. A seated woman cloaked in a Masonic tile floor turns a crank rigged to a byzantine system of belts, pulleys, gears, and bells feeding into an alembic boiling over a pale-yellow flame. The gaseous epiphenomena of this chain reaction permeate the night sky as its fluid product slowly drips into small green bottles. As Whitney Chadwick observed, “Whether the drops of liquid falling from the sky actually pass through the transforming alembic remains in doubt. They may simply go directly from funnel to spout, water turned into water.” Here and elsewhere in the painter’s work, there is a “feeling that elaborate expenditures of energy and complicated mechanical procedures may, in fact, only lead to the obvious.”
In other pictures, Varo is more sanguine about the vitalizing potential of hermetic magic. The Flutist, 1955, and Magic Flight, 1956, depict music as a force with constructive and aeronautic powers, reflecting the primacy of sound in Gurdjieff’s cosmology and his theory of a vibrational universe. In Creation of the Birds, 1957, a strigine artist-sorceress brings her handiwork to life through an opaque system of magical appliances—a still that transmutes stardust into pigment; a brush fastened to a violin, infusing her painting with the essence of music; and a prism refracting starlight onto her avian opuscule, which miraculously flies off her paper and into three dimensions.21 In Harmony, 1956, a composer arranges disparate objects on a spatialized staff, seeking a universal consonance that, in Varo’s words, “unites all things.” In a remembrance of Varo published in Caillois and Octavio Paz’s 1966 monograph, the philosopher Juliana González, whom the artist immortalized in Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (Could Be Juliana),1960, contended that her friend’s paintings sprang from a “primordial desire for transcendence, from the deep conviction that this world is just a small manifestation of a greater, infinite Whole.”22 “Enlivened by a breath of religiosity,” Varo’s fabulous machines and “sublimated creatures” always tend
toward an ennoblement of reality and not to its chaotic vision or the exaltation of its imperfections. In this sense, Remedios is a conservator of a traditional hierarchy of values by which she always gives preference to the poetic over the prosaic, to the luminous over the depressive, to the sublime over the grotesque, to the living over decompositions. And here there is undoubtedly a very personal tone of romantic optimism that clearly shines through in her artistic creation and that radically distinguishes it from the general tendency of surrealism.23
Indeed, there is a note of cabalistic idealism in Varo’s work—not to mention much of the early-twentieth-century abstraction (Mondrian, Kandinsky, af Klint, et al.) that it so unresembles—that echoes today in certain post-Enlightenment tendencies on the left (often, a catholicon for despair, manifesting in a quixotic and gently patronizing neo-primitivism) and, far more perniciously, in the mythic neo-Jungian traditionalist bullshit of the contemporary right. In recent years, the long-overdue validation of Varo, Carrington, and other esoterically inclined women artists has been underwritten by an almost reflexive coarticulation of mysticism, feminism, animism, and ecology, often polarized against an equally overdetermined package of positivism, masculinism, anthropocentrism, and Prometheanism. I by no means say this to disparage Varo’s work or “Science Fictions,” an exhibition and catalogue that do much to advance the artist’s reception in the United States, demonstrating a rare sensitivity to her formal devices and the knowledge systems that informed her enchanted lifeworld. Against (post)critical celebrations of kitschy witchy womanhood and the fractal superstitions of our new Dark Age, I fail to conjure a materialist Varo (she sounds like a bummer anyway). But I want to suggest that the synthesis in her work of fiction and science, magic and machine, might be—like the dubious alchemy she painted in 1955—partial and frustrated, resulting often in ambivalence and antinomy even as it elicits irrepressible wonder and delight.
CONSIDER TOWARD THE TOWER, 1960, the first of three separate panels comprising the untitled narrative cycle collectively known since their debut as Varo’s “triptych.”24 A heptad of yellow-haired novices, mounted on velocipedes with sewing-machine pedals and knitting needles in lieu of handlebars, egress via the arched doorway of a turreted beehive—a symbol, per González, of an “old and austere world with walls made of virtue”—toward the still-unseen donjon Varo identifies as their place of work.25 Identically clad and coiffed, the hive-minded motorcade obediently follows a po-faced Mother Superior and a beaky male cyclist who dispenses homing pigeons from an oversize knapsack. The artist explains that the girls are held captive by the surveillance of the birds as well as by some sinister mesmerism. Only the young woman in the front, who is indistinguishable from the rest but whose gaze drifts away from the procession and out toward the viewer, “resists this hypnosis.”
The ends of this sorcery are revealed in Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, 1961, one of Varo’s most accomplished and beloved paintings and the next chapter in the “triptych.”26 Now cloistered in an octagonal tower, the novitiates are shown at work embroidering beams of fabric that cascade into the landscape below, their needlepoint likenesses of trees, towns, plants, people, and animals actualizing into these selfsame phenomena. The transubstantiation of representation into reality, signifier into signified, depicted in Creation of the Birds is here scaled up to cosmogonic myth, with a cloister of distaff Pygmalions replacing God the Father, creating all things through their demure, feminized labor.27 Sewn embellishment, traditionally conceived as reproductive in the mimetic sense of the word and associated with social reproduction in the domestic sphere, here becomes a technology of productive world-making.
If we attend, even briefly, to the relations of this production, we see that this is no unproblematic exaltation of gendered and trivialized work. The young ladies’ industry is directed by a masked and hooded demiurge who stirs the miasmic contents of an hourglass-shaped vessel, the vapors spawning threads that attach to each woman’s workstation and feed their needles. As Haskell observes, these fibers extend as well “from the vessel’s lower compartment . . . powering each spindle like an engine and determining the rate at which the cloth passes across the frame.”28 This crypto-Fordist scenario suggests not only exploitation and alienation but a patriarchal order with sacerdotal characteristics. Holding a book, the cloaked eminence recites a “catechism of instructions” that dictates the activity of the novices.29 Identified by Varo as the “Great Master,” he is attended by a female coadjutor who wears an apostolnik and plays liturgical music from a recorder. When we recall that the needleworkers are hypnotized and incarcerated, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle offers—even more so than Useless Science—an ambivalent view of mysticism, one whose miracles are inscribed in logics of hierarchy and domination.
Varo’s work results often in ambivalence and antinomy, even as it elicits irrepressible wonder and delight.
The painting thus lies in tension with Varo’s study of Gurdjieff, a charismatic spiritual leader who promoted, among other activities, “weaving and embroidery to achieve a higher state of consciousness,” and who endeavored to rouse humanity from its “waking sleep” while “exerting extra-lucid and hypnotic powers” over his followers.30 In the catalogue, Arcq intimates that Varo had a “fraught relationship” to Gurdjieff’s teachings, which nonetheless remained crucial intellectual influences on the painter’s mature output.31 Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, written around 1956 and published almost two decades later, gleefully parodies the guru’s methods—known in the novel and in reality as the Work—and, as Arcq notes, contains significant narrative and symbolic correspondences with Varo’s triptych.32 As Carrington would later recall of her time in midcentury Mexico’s esoteric circles, “All these Gurdjieff people . . . were utterly humourless, and I thought they were very funny.”33
In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, the leftmost needleworker—the clever girl impervious to the Master’s hypnosis—designs her ingenious escape. Embroidering her own image onto the sprawling tapestry of the world below, she stitches two embryonic blue-and-brown figures in a prefiguration of the triptych’s final panel, in which we find our heroine and her young lover absconding across an expanse of golden particulate matter Varo identified as “the desert,” jointly navigating a fur vessel held together by superfine threads.
In the catalogue, Arcq associates the triptych with “a female spirituality aligned with ecofeminist concerns”; the wall text in the gallery where it hangs asserts that “Varo’s paintings are charged with the artist’s belief that creative acts could prompt personal and social change.”34 I do not know whether Varo explicitly identified as a feminist, or what that contested term—now something of a shibboleth in presentations of historical women artists—would have meant to her in 1961. Unlike Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet—in which the residents of an asylum for “senile ladies” join forces against the institution and the cultish influence of Dr. Gambit, setting in motion a chain of events that culminates in another Ice Age and an ecological realignment of society—Varo’s triptych is a tale of individual rather than collective liberation, a narrative that chimes plangently with her personal experiences of war and exile. Also notable is Varo’s inclusion of the male beloved, whose presence seems thematically and technically superfluous to the young woman’s feat of agentive self-creation. Again, this resonates with Varo’s life, as her biographer Kaplan observes. Varo married young to escape her family’s control, wedding the painter Gerardo Lizarraga, her classmate at the academia, in 1930; eleven years later, she would make the perilous transatlantic crossing with Péret, seeking refuge on a continent as foreign to her as the painted couple’s destination—an unearthly terrain of cliffs and grottoes conjured through controlled accidents of grattage.35
I’LL CONCLUDE on a personal favorite, Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician), 1956, acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2018 and currently on loan in Chicago. Here, an itinerant conjurer with a face of mother-of-pearl inlay entertains a crowd of twenty-one enthralled villagers. Posed on a stage extending from his vehicular abode (part machine, part architecture, and outfitted with wheels, sails, and a cupola encircled by birds), he is surrounded by various medicinal roots, herbs, tinctures, and sundry magical gubbins—the kinds of items Varo and Carrington would have purchased, as associate conservator Mary Broadway notes in the catalogue, at the Mercado de Sonora in Mexico City.36 But Varo seems to locate us, architecturally, at the center of a European hamlet—a mélange of pitched gothic roofs and Mediterraneanizing facades ripped from de Chirico—and, temporally, in the vernacular early modernity of Bosch and Rabelais.37 The juggler tosses pearlescent spheres into the air, captivating his audience, which is ambiguously gendered and jointly attired in a raiment the artist described as a “common costume”—a massive swath of gray fabric perforated with openings for each of their physiognomically interchangeable heads. Spatially and sartorially differentiated from this collective body is the magician’s assistant, sometimes understood to be a cipher for Varo herself. She stands tranquilly in the fabulous caravan, eyes closed and hands clasped as if in meditation, surrounded by three animals of heraldic significance: a lion, a goat, and an owl.
González offers the following interpretation of the painting: “The juggler performs his prodigies before a uniformed crowd, insensible to the extraordinary act. Magic is possible for the superior man who can bring to light his unknown capacities and apprehend with them the unknown force of nature.”38 This reading accords with an understanding of Varo as an esoteric seeker preoccupied with noumenal essences and recondite cosmic knowledge. The spiritual elitism and patriarchal baggage of this idea is plain enough (and it is tempered in the interpretation of the painting offered in the catalogue).39 What isn’t so plain, however, is whether The Juggler’s rapt audience in fact bears witness to a “demonstration of transcendence”—as the curators write—or an act of skillful legerdemain. The word magician—and indeed magic—contains both possibilities.40 Varo identified the figure as a “prestidigitator . . . full of tricks, color, and life.” The deflationary probability that we may be witnessing a feat of trickery rather than thaumaturgy is also suggested by Varo’s potential allusion here to The Conjurer, a sixteenth-century painting once attributed to Bosch that depicts, with hard-nosed cynicism, a charlatan hoodwinking a throng of agog burghers with a common cups-and-balls routine.41
There’s hardly any trace of Boschian pessimism in The Juggler, or elsewhere in Varo’s oeuvre, but rather a gentle, calibrating irony that González attributed to the artist’s alchemical preoccupation with holding opposing forces in balance. Varo, she writes,
despised any extreme attitude that was not capable of encompassing its opposite: staying in the depths without returning to the simple, reaching the limits of the tragic without surpassing them with humor, getting lost in abstraction without making contact with the earth. For Remedios, everything had its reverse, its opposite face; everything could contain an irony, a contradiction, and an ambiguity.”42
We can thus imagine the nacreous magician as a spiritual master who has achieved Gurdjieffian “crystallization,” or, not unlike the painter herself, as a virtuostic illusionist. Joined in a mutual yoke suggestive of liveried gothic angels or the Neo-Concretist solidarity of Lygia Pape’s Divider, 1968, this multitude may represent the inchoate masses striving toward individuation and enlightenment, an assembly of naïfs ensorcelled by spectacle, or—if we make a hermeneutic leap of faith, departing from disciplinary correctness and following the errant, generative threads of pseudomorphic association—a kind of collective body unconstrained by tropes of stupefaction or somnolence. As Octavio Paz wrote in his eulogy of Varo: The secret theme of her work: harmony . . . lost equality.43
“Remedios Varo: Science Fictions” is on view through November 27 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
NOTES
1. Remedios Varo, “On Homo Rodans” (1959), trans. Margaret Carson, Art Institute of Chicago, accessed September 10, 2023, artic.edu/remedios-varo-homo-rodans. From Isabel Castells, Remedios Varo: Cartas, sueños y otros textos (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1994), 61–65.
2. In a 1959 letter to her mother, Varo wrote of Homo Rodans, “(everything is done and written as a joke).” See Lara Balikci, cat. 19, in Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, ed. Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 113.
3. On display in the exhibition are Spanish translations of Milton Silverman’s Magic in a Bottle (1947), F. Sherwood Taylor’s The Alchemists: Founders of Modern Chemistry (1957), Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1956), and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (n.d.), as well as a French translation of H. P. Lovecraft’s Demons and Wonders (n.d.) and a 1963 issue of the French-language journal Fiction containing a short story by Ray Bradbury. The show’s accompanying catalogue compiles a list of surviving titles found in Varo’s library, preserved by the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Huxley, twenty-one of whose works appear on the list, appears to have been Varo’s favorite writer. In addition to books by science-fiction authors including Robert A. Heinlein, Sir Fred Hoyle, Clifford D. Simak, and H. G. Wells, Varo preserved several issues of the French popular-science journal Diagrammes treating such topics as space exploration, plasma, electromagnetic waves, and new fuels.
4. Janet A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys; The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbeville, 2000), 229. Kaplan’s biography was originally published in 1988.
5. See Julia Bozzone, “Overlooked No More: Remedios Varo, Spanish Painter of Magic, Mysticism and Science,” New York Times, September 24, 2021. The article is part of “Overlooked,” a series of obituaries of significant figures, often women, whose deaths went unreported in the newspaper. See page 234 of Kaplan for her note on Varo’s style.
6. Dalí would be permanently expelled from the art school two years later. See Kaplan, 27–29.
7. I borrow the word supraconscious here from Varo’s friend the Mexican philosopher Juliana González. In an essay published in a 1966 book edited by Octavio Paz and Roger Caillois, she distinguished Varo’s work from the Surrealist preoccupation with the unconscious: “Of course, the surrealist experience had been definitive for her, channeling her innate tendency toward the imaginative and deeply shaping essential features of her personality. . . . However, she was very far from sharing those paths that tended towards sub-consciousness because she pursued a state of supra-consciousness.” See Juliana González, “Transmundo de Remedios Varo,” in Remedios Varo, ed. Octavio Paz and Roger Caillois (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1966), 166. All translations from this volume are by the author.
8. Then married to the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, Péret was expelled from that country in 1931 after cofounding the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in São Paulo with the Marxist intellectual Mário Pedrosa. In 1935, the two men became brothers-in-law when Pedrosa married Elsie’s sister Mary Houston. Estranged since the mid-1930s, Péret and Elsie, who died in New York in 1943 in an apparent suicide, never divorced. Pedrosa would become a leading theorist of Concretist and later Neo-Concretist art in Brazil, championing the work of artists including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. In 1980, he signed membership card no. 1 of Brazil’s Workers’ Party. For more on Pedrosa, see Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glória Ferreira, Paulo Herkenhoff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For the New York Times report on Houston’s death, see “Brazilian Soprano Is Found Dead Here,” New York Times, February 21, 1943. Additional sources and speculations about Houston’s life and death are gathered at sites.google.com/site/endsherlifeelsiehouston/home.
9. Varo is said to have conspired with Domínguez in these forgeries. See Alivé Piliado Santana’s chronology in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 154. See also Kaplan, 63–64. As Kaplan notes, “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.” According to her biographer, Varo had a lifelong pattern of “multiple relationships, all open, nothing hidden, which developed into friendships that lasted long after any romantic connection had ended” (36).
10. Kaplan, 55.
11. Quoted in María José González Madrid, “‘On the True Exercise of Witchcraft’ in the Work of Remedios Varo,” in Surrealism, Occultism and Politics in Search of the Marvellous, ed. Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou, and Daniel Zamani (New York: Routledge, 2018), 207. Translation by author.
12. Kaplan, 95. See also Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 201.
13. Kaplan, 92 (“hand to mouth”); 97 (Varo and Péret’s apartment); 90, 97, and 123 (cats). Among Varo’s commercial projects were pharmaceutical advertisements for the German drug manufacturer Bayer, which had a branch in Mexico City. As Haskell and Arcq note, “Several of the elements that came into play in Varo’s works after 1955—such as checkerboard floors, Gothic architecture, scenes that recede into infinity, and renderings of invisible agents—can be found in her Casa Bayer images for painkiller advertisements, for which the company asked Varo to evoke medieval torture” (22).
14. Haskell and Arcq, “Spirit, Matter, Story, Soul,”in Science Fictions, 26.
15. All of Varo’s descriptions and interpretations of her works cited in this essay are found in “Indice de ilustraciones,” in Paz and Caillois, Remedios Varo, 173–78.
16. See Alex Zivkovic, cat. 17, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 104–106. Zivkovic identifies the chalice in the painting with both the Holy Grail and the Fountain of Youth. During Varo’s sojourn in Venezuela from 1947 to 1949, she joined an expedition searching for gold along the Orinoco River, the source of which was not discovered until 1951. Zivkovic postulates that, in addition to this adventure, Varo’s painting may have been inspired by the 1898 novel The Mighty Orinoco by Jules Verne, one of Varo’s favorite authors.
17. Caillois, “Inventario de un mundo,” in Paz and Caillois, Remedios Varo, 24.
18. Caillois observes, “The machines: They are of an artisanal type. Most of them even make you think of toys” 23.
19. See P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 52.“‘What do you expect?’ said G. ‘People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature.’” See also page 112: “If he carries out all these rules while he observes himself, a man will record a whole series of very important aspects of his being. . . . He will understand and see that he is in fact an automaton acting under the influences of external stimuli. He will feel his complete mechanicalness. Everything ‘happens,’ he cannot ‘do’ anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside.” In 2001, Harvest Books published a new edition of In Search of the Miraculous with a foreword by best-selling author and two-time Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
20. Ouspensky, 179–80.
21. See page 202 of Chadwick for the art historian’s interpretations of Useless Science and Creation of the Birds.
22. In Varo’s painting, González is seen exiting the office of “Doctor von FJA,” whose name is an initialism combining the last names of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler. Scholars have interpreted the painting as a satire, à la Homo Rodans, of patriarchal modes of knowledge production. See Claire Howard, cat. 22, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 124–27.
23. González, 166–67.
24. Held in separate collections, the three works were first shown at Galeria Juan Martin in 1962; this was the sole occasion they were exhibited together in Varo’s lifetime. See Haskell, “Introduction to the Triptych,” in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 129–30. Last year’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (where Homo Rodans was also on view) reunited these paintings for the first time since their debut.
25. González, 165. On page 24 of the same volume, Caillois notes Varo’s “obsession with the bicycle,” as seen in the vehicular anatomy of Homo Rodans.
26. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 includes a description of this painting, which the novel’s protagonist recalls seeing on a trip to Mexico City: “In the central painting of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre,’ were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.” Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), 11. As Kaplan notes, Pynchon is known to have visited Mexico City in 1964, the year of Varo’s first retrospective (see Kaplan, 230).
27. Other commentators have addressed Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle’s treatment of devalued and feminized labor. See, for example, Kaplan, 215: “Challenging stereotypical associations of women with the devalued and often trivialized domestic realm, [Varo] appropriated images of household life—knitting, cooking, feeding—as settings for transcendent discoveries and magical creations. In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, . . . [she] cleverly transformed the art of embroidery (that most genteel of domestic accomplishments, long used to prepare schoolgirls for docile femininity) into godlike act of creation and means of escape.”
28. Haskell, cat. 25, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 141.
29. Kaplan, 19.
30. For Gurdjieff and weaving, see Haskell and Arcq, 25. For “waking sleep” see Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973), 32. Arcq attributes the quote about Gurdjieff and hypnosis to the French journalist Louis Pauwels, whose 1954 book Monsieur Gurdjieff recounts the author’s experiences in the spiritual leader’s group in Paris. According to Arcq, Varo owned a copy of Pauwels’s book and dog-eared the page describing Gurdjieff’s hypnotic powers. See Arcq, cat. 24, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 137.
31. Arcq, cat. 24, 137.
32. See Arcq, 139. Carrington’s nonagenarian protagonist, Marian Leatherby, is banished by her family to a home for old women affiliated with the shadowy Well of Light Brotherhood. The institution is housed in a dreamlike castle and is superintended by a “Master” named Dr. Gambit, widely believed to be a caricature of Gurdjieff. Marian’s best friend, Carmella Velasquez, who aids Marian and the other residents in their uprising against Gambit and who amuses herself by writing letters to strangers chosen at random from the phone book, is based on Varo, who shared this hobby with her fictionalized counterpart. See Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (Boston: Exact Change, 1996).
33. Carrington quoted in Ricki O’Rawe, “‘Should We Try to Self Remember While Playing Snakes and Ladders?’: Dr. Gambit as Gurdjieff in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1950),” Religion and the Arts 21 (2017): 193. According to O’Rawe, Carrington was likely put off by Gurdjieff’s authoritarian pedagogical style, as well as by the sexual entitlement he assumed toward his female disciples and the “flagrant chauvinism of the teachings,” among them that women cutting their hair short would induce “various sorts of venereal inflammations . . . and what they call ‘cancer.’”
34. Arcq, cat. 24, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 137.
35. Kaplan, 22.
36. Mary Broadway, cat. 8, in Haskell and Arcq, Science Fictions, 70.
37. As Kaplan noted, Varo appears to have “absorbed little of Mexican culture into her work”; her output “seems singularly untouched by the presence of indigenous art that surrounded her in Mexico” and is “largely a response to pictorial modes drawn from European sources” (220).
38. González, 167.
39. See Broadway, 68–69: “Elevated not only spiritually but also physically, the juggler is tasked with guiding his audience toward liberation through self-knowledge.”
40. The work’s Spanish title, El juglar (El malabrista), literally translated as “The Minstrel (The Juggler),” likewise identifies the figure with illusionism and entertainment.
41. For a comparison of The Juggler to The Conjurer, see Kaplan, 193. Gruen told Varo’s biographer that “from her earliest years all Varo wanted to look at was Bosch. Always Bosch” (Kaplan, 191–93). Caillois also linked Varo’s work to Bosch’s, stressing the systematicity of both painters’ symbolic worlds. “Hieronymus Bosch conceived and painted an analog world with secret laws under insane appearances. Despite everything, he relied on a theology and iconography, of course aberrant, fantastic and largely arbitrary, but which corresponded to widespread and fluctuating beliefs from which he dared to draw extreme conclusions. I wonder if—since everything is equal on the other hand—this case [that of Varo] is not comparable. The ancient theology was eclipsed by ideologies whose rhetorical resources are no less, the exegeses equally erudite and wise, the vocabulary no less esoteric and conventional. . . . Even in a magical or dream world, strength does not come from gratuity but from coherence” (Callios, 26). Part of the collection of the Musée Municipal in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, The Conjurer, like many works once attributed to Bosch, is now credited to a follower of the Brabant painter. Some scholars believe the painting, one of five variations on this theme, to be a copy of a lost original by Bosch. For more on this picture and its attribution, see Jeffrey Hamburger, “Bosch’s ‘Conjuror’: An Attack on Magic and Sacramental Heresy,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 14, no. 1 (1984): 5, doi.org/10.2307/3780529.
42. González, 166.
43. Paz, “Visiones y desapariciones de Remedios Varo,” in Paz and Caillois, Remedios Varo 10. An English translation of the poem appears in Kaplan, 230–31.
