Remedios Varo

A Catalan childhood and an academy in Madrid

Varo was born in 1908 at Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona in Catalonia, in north-eastern Spain, to a Catholic mother and an agnostic engineer father. Her own account of the household is the key to the paintings: a hydraulic engineer's drawing board on one side, a devout mother's religion on the other, and a daughter who took both seriously and never chose. She trained at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid — the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Spain's official art school, which the teenage Pablo Picasso had briefly attended, and by the 1920s a byword for strict traditional drawing.

In the mid-1930s she moved to Barcelona and joined the Logicofobistas, a short-lived group of Catalan Surrealists whose invented name means, roughly, those who fear logic. It was a small avant-garde — a circle of artists working deliberately ahead of, and against, established taste — in a city about to be at the centre of a war. The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, when army officers under General Francisco Franco rose against the elected Republican government; it ended in 1939 with Franco's victory and a dictatorship that lasted until 1975. Within months of the first shots her life in Spain was over.

Paris: Péret, Breton, and four years in the group

The war brought Benjamin Péret to Barcelona. Péret was a French poet, one of the founding members of Surrealism and André Breton's closest ally in it, and he had come to Spain to fight on the side of the Republic, the elected government the officers had risen against. Varo left Spain with him, and the two settled in Paris in the late 1930s — the Gallery Wendi Norris, which represents her estate, dates the flight to 1936, the year the war began.

Surrealism, for a reader meeting the word for the first time, was a movement founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton, on the proposition that the truest images come from the unconscious rather than from observation — from dreams, chance encounters, automatic writing and drawing, the mind left to run without supervision. By the late 1930s Breton's group was the most argued-about thing in Paris art, held together by Breton himself, who also expelled members periodically when they displeased him. Varo arrived inside it, as Péret's partner and as a painter in her own right.

She was in her late twenties, and the Paris years put her work in front of the world for the first time. She showed in the international Surrealist exhibitions that the group mounted between 1936 and 1938 — in Paris, in London, in Tokyo — the travelling shows through which Breton exported the movement. The paintings and collages that survive from these years are not yet the Varo of the famous pictures; they are experiments with the group's methods. Four of them are in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid today, Spain's national museum of modern art, including one with the French title La Faim — The Hunger — which belongs unmistakably to the hungry years it was painted in.

1940: the occupation, and the way out

The German army entered Paris in June 1940, and the Surrealists — foreign, left-wing, and in several cases Jewish — were among the most exposed people in the city. Péret, a communist and a former volunteer in Spain, was in immediate danger; Varo was a Spanish republican exile with no country to be sent back to, since Franco now governed Spain and returning would have meant prison. They escaped occupied France and crossed the Atlantic to Mexico City — the one capital that had opened its doors to refugees of the Spanish Republic, under its president Lázaro Cárdenas, and the city where a large part of the scattered Surrealist group washed up.

Leonora Carrington came out of the same collapse by another road. The English painter had been living in France with the German artist Max Ernst; when he was interned she fled to Spain, suffered a breakdown, was confined in a psychiatric clinic in Santander, got herself to Lisbon and married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc so that she could leave Europe. She reached Mexico within a year of Varo. The two women, who had known each other only slightly in Paris, became inseparable in exile: closest friends and collaborators, cooking, writing plays and joke recipes together, working a few streets apart for the next twenty years. It is one of the great working friendships in twentieth-century art, and it happened because a war scattered a Paris group across an ocean.

Mexico City: twenty years, and eight of them painting

The first Mexican decade was work for money. From 1942 to 1949 Varo drew advertising and illustration for Casa Bayer, the Mexican arm of the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer — precise, decorative little images of feverish patients and insects, made to sell medicine, and unmistakably by the same hand that would later paint alchemists. She also decorated furniture, restored ceramics and painted commissions. The Paris avant-gardist spent her thirties as a commercial artist.

From the mid-1950s her circumstances steadied and she painted full time, and everything she is known for arrives in a rush: figures with heart-shaped faces and enormous eyes, travelling in vehicles that are part boat and part bird; towers, laboratories, spinning wheels and celestial machinery; a technique of thin translucent glazes of paint laid on masonite, a smooth pressed-board panel, so fine that it reads like the jewel-like Flemish panel paintings of the fifteenth century — applied to subjects out of alchemy, the old pursuit of transforming base matter into gold, along with mysticism and physics. A solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1956 made her, quite suddenly, one of the most admired painters in the country — a Spanish refugee who had become a Mexican artist.

Still Life Reviving

Her last painting, finished in 1963, is called Naturaleza muerta resucitando — Still Life Reviving. A table levitates in a Gothic tower; fruits orbit above it like planets and split open into seedlings; the tablecloth twists into a vortex. The Spanish for a still life is naturaleza muerta, literally dead nature, so the title says plainly what the picture does: the deadest of painting's genres, brought back to life by orbital mechanics. Varo died suddenly of a heart attack in Mexico City that same year, aged fifty-four, having made about four hundred works in a career that had really only begun eight years earlier.

Her reputation has grown steadily since — she is among the most loved painters in Mexico, and the Art Institute of Chicago gave her a full survey, Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, in 2023, more than twenty paintings shown with sketches and papers from her archive. The Art Institute bought Still Life Reviving the following year. Her earliest surviving work stayed in Europe, in Madrid; the work she is known for stayed in the country she had reached as a refugee.