Remedios Varo

Biography

In “Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst” (1961) a woman in a long green cloak walks across an empty courtyard. In one hand she holds a basket, in the other a small bearded man’s head, which she is lowering into a round well. The picture has been read in many ways, but I think one should first see in it simply a joke, a very calm and very malicious one.

Remedios Varo Uranga was born on 16 December 1908 in Anglès, a small town in the Catalan province of Girona. She was named after the Virgin of los Remedios, and the family took the name literally, as “remedy”: an elder daughter had died before she was born. Her father, Rodrigo Varo, an Andalusian from Córdoba, was a hydraulic engineer who moved the family with him from one construction project to the next across Spain and North Africa. He was a liberal, learned Esperanto, took his daughter round museums and made her copy his technical drawings with care. Her mother, Ignacia Uranga, was born in Argentina into a Basque family, and when the girl was eight she sent her to a strict convent school. Remedios was a wilful pupil who read Jules Verne and Poe. More than forty years later the school would come back in her triptych of 1960–1961.

In 1924, aged fifteen, she entered the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, one of its first women students. Besides the required subjects she chose scientific drawing, and the realist Manuel Benedito taught her the old technique of oil painting. At the Prado she looked at Bosch, Goya and El Greco. She graduated from the Academy in 1930. Most of what she painted between 1926 and 1935, student work included, has vanished without trace.

Straight after graduating she married a fellow student, the painter Gerardo Lizárraga. They spent a year in Paris, where Varo enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and soon dropped out, and in 1932 they moved to Barcelona and worked for an advertising firm. It was there that her affair with the painter Esteban Francés began. She shared a studio with him on the Plaça de Lesseps, played “exquisite corpse” and joined the Logicofobista group. In 1936 her work was shown at the group’s exhibition at the Catalonia gallery in Barcelona and at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London.

In August 1936 the French poet Benjamin Péret came to Barcelona as a volunteer for the Republicans, and Óscar Domínguez introduced them. Péret dedicated his collection of love poems, “Je sublime” (“I Sublimate”), to her, and in 1937 she went with him to Paris. Through him Varo entered André Breton’s inner circle, which included Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Joan Miró, Wolfgang Paalen and Leonora Carrington. She never formally joined the group and later recalled sitting through those meetings with her mouth open. Around this time she began to give 1913 as her year of birth; that is how it was later recorded in her passport and on her gravestone. Her biographer Janet Kaplan connects this with the Surrealist ideal of the “child-woman”.

The war threw her out of Europe. After Franco’s victory in 1939 the way back to Spain was closed to anyone connected with the Republicans, and Varo never saw her homeland again. In early 1940 Péret was arrested; she too spent some time in detention, though where and for how long is unknown, since she never spoke of it. In the same period something almost unbelievable happened: in Emerico Weisz’s documentary about refugee camps she recognised Lizárraga, to whom she was still married, and together with friends she obtained his release. In June 1940, when the Germans entered Paris, she went south, first to Canet-Plage and then to Marseille, where refugees were looked after by Varian Fry’s rescue committee. Péret, a Communist, could not get into the United States, so they chose Mexico, which had declared an amnesty for Spanish refugees. They sailed from Casablanca on the overcrowded liner Serpa Pinto and by the end of 1941 were in Mexico City.

The first Mexican years were poor ones. A flat in the San Rafael district, birds, stray cats, whatever odd jobs came along: Varo assisted Marc Chagall (according to some accounts, with costumes for the ballet “Aleko”), but what fed her most reliably were advertising drawings for the Bayer company. There is hardly any painting from these years, but a great deal of writing. Leonora Carrington became her closest friend, and the photographer Kati Horna was close by; the three of them went to meetings of the followers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and the three of them made fun of those meetings too. With Carrington, Varo wrote plays, the two of them taking turns to add pieces of text.

In 1947 Péret went back to France, but Varo stayed, and soon left with a French scientific expedition for Venezuela, where she drew mosquitoes under the microscope for an anti-malaria campaign and saw her mother and her brother Rodrigo, an epidemiologist. She returned to Mexico City in 1949.

In 1952 she married Walter Gruen, an Austrian émigré, and gave up commercial illustration. She worked slowly. First came graphite sketches, then the smooth side of a hardboard panel, primed with gesso and sanded, into which she scratched fine lines at random; next the whole background, and only after that the figures. She used decalcomania, blown paint, glazes and mother-of-pearl inlay, and often scratched her signature down to the ground. The figures in her paintings nearly always share one face: heart-shaped, with almond eyes and a long nose, in other words her own. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1955 at the Galería Diana, the second and last in 1962 at the Galería Juan Martín.

Her last finished canvas, “Still Life Reviving”, is dated 1963: fruit and plates whirl above a table around a candle. Remedios Varo died in Mexico City on 8 October 1963. A year later a posthumous exhibition opened at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and drew a record number of visitors. She never took Mexican citizenship and remained a Spanish citizen to the end.