Arty Farty Friday ~ REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo - at first I thought it to be the name of a male, but it's not. Remedios Varo's name given at birth was María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga. In Spain names do take on a more epic quality than in most other countries of the world. Anyway, Remedios Varo, as she became known, was born on 16 December 1908 at 10:45 pm in Anglès, Spain. Her father was a hydraulic engineer, he taught her to draw in a style which had later clear influence on her artwork. Varo used imagery related to her father's profession. Complex pieces of imaginary machinery can be seen in her paintings, which draw also from her studies of alchemy theories and processes. Her figures are thought to be autobiographical. Science, dreams, witchcraft, mysticism and humor thread through her psychological or spiritual subject matter.

Educated in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona, rumored to have taken classes together with Salvado Dalí. She married painter Gerardo Lizarraga, then, apparently without benefit of divorce married, or (it's not clear) conducted a lengthy affair with, French poet Benjamin Péret. During the Spanish Civil War they fled to France. Settled in Paris. She soon gravitated towards the city's arty bohemian surrealist groups. Varo and English surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington became friends at this time, a friendship that survived for the rest of Varo's life.

As World War II began Varo relocated yet again, this time to Mexico City. Most of her her artwork was created in Mexico, where she was also able to pick up her friendship with Leonora Carrington, who had also fled to Mexico.

In order to cover living expenses, Varo took a variety of jobs: furniture painting, costume design, toy-making, commercial illustration for a company selling pharmaceuticals, and scientific drawings for Venezuala's Ministry of Public Health. Her marriage/association with Péret ended on his return to France. Her third husband-to-be, Austrian businessman Walter Gruen then entered the scene. Wed in 1952, she no longer needed to rely on odd jobs for her livelihood. Her true creative potential now emerged.

Varo's longtime interest in mysticism, alchemy, magic and, oddly, science co-exist in her paintings. Many, or most, of these are explained as being an exploration of the female psyche. It was only around the time she died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1963 when her career was thriving, that women were beginning to assert their independence after centuries of treatment as second-class citizens. Many of her paintings need to be viewed with this in mind.

A few examples of her work, some with explanation taken from Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women,by Estella Lauter. The book has an error in Varo's year of birth, by the way. She, as many women will, knocked a few years from her age for public consumption. It was not until her death that her true birth year was discovered.

Please click on the images for clearer and/or bigger versions:

 La Revelación (1955)

 Embroidering the Earth's Mantle

Re the painting titled Embroidering Earth's Mantle, explanation from Janet A. Kaplan's biography of Varo,
"Unexpected Journeys" ~

In the central panel of the autobiographical triptych, Embroidering Earth’s Mantle [...], Varo offered a closer look at the life of a convent student.... here captive in a tower, (they) work as in a medieval scriptorium, embroidering the mantle of the world according to the dictates of a “Great Master.” This hooded figure reads from the catechism of instructions while stirring a broth boiling in the same alchemical vessel from which the girls draw their embroidery thread. Each girl works alone, embroidering images onto a continuous fabric that spills out from table-height battlements around the facets of the tower. Together they create a landscape with houses, ponds, streams, boats, animals, and humans, all nestled within the folds of the fabric. Theirs is the traditional work of the convent, where needlework was deemed a skill appropriate for cultured young women.

Characteristically, Varo treated such tradition with irony. Among the girls working diligently, each at her own table, guarded by a comical veiled figure who lurks in the background playing a flute, Varo’s rebellious heroine has “embroidered a trick in which one can see her together with her lover” [...], their rendezvous subtly visible in a rendering hidden upside-down within the folds that flow from her table. In a masterful variant on the myth of creation, she has used this most genteel of domestic handicrafts to create her own hoped-for escape. Unlike Rapunzel and the Lady of Shalott, Varo’s young heroine imprisoned in the tower is not merely a metaphor for confinement, but also an agent of her own liberation. [...]

 Energia Cosmica

 Papilla Estelar (1958)

Papilla Estelar = either Stellar Porridge or Celestial Pablum, or similar.

(Page 90 of Estella Lauter's book linked above)
"[This painting creates] an image of female nurturing...The protagonist is seated at a table inside an octagonal enclosure in the sky. She is grinding the food from the stars and feeding it to the moon in its cage. She is at once powerful and impotent. Because the moon is waning, it seems likely that she is saving it from death...A closer look at her setting reveals the source of her ambivalence; although there are steps leading from her enclosure, she could not take them unless she could walk on clouds... [She] is as caged as the moon..."
Often seen as an autobiographical artist, Varo uses these women as her stand-ins exploring the occult, the Kabala, and alchemy.

 Creation of the Birds

Page 84-5 of Lauter's book "...protagonist has assumed the form of an owl in order to paint birds who will come to life and take flight for the first time... She dips the brush, attached to her own violin (in the place of her heart), into paint from an alchemical alembic where the substance from the stars is stored. With her other hand, she holds a triangular magnifying glass to intensify the light from the moon... The woman/owl gives wings to her visions of the birds."
[Page 91] "... [This] is her image of what will be required if human creators wish to make a world in which all the species of life can survive. Her choice of the owl, always a figure of wisdom, is clarified by the information that the pre-Hellenic, Cretan Athena was a patron of the arts and a goddess of renewal ..."

 Three Destinies

 Analogy of Winter

El otro reloj'  -The Other Timepiece (1957)

Sympathy (Sympatía), [Originally titled, The Madness of the Cat – La Rabia del gato], 1955

The "Sympathy" painting is mentioned in a very good biographical essay on Varo at a blog called Femspective. See HERE. The author offers one mundane explanation of this painting; I see another explanation, related to astrology. Does anyone else see the same?

 Premonicion (1953)

Varo doesn't appear to have as much interest in astrology as in the occult generally. There is one painting of "Taurus", but it's not as special as the rest of her work. There is oblique reference to astrology here and there among her paintings, if one looks for it, but I've found no evidence that she was "into it" to any extent.

 The World

Earth Air, Water, Fire - see?


ASTROLOGY

Remedios Varo's natal chart with data from astro.com where it is given an AA (very reliable) rating. Exact place of birth, Anglès, Spain, wasn't available on my software's atlas but it offered Zuera as nearest available. This puts placement of all planets the same as astro.com's' there are just three minutes of difference in the ascending degree.

I see her astro-signature, as it relates to her art style and choice of subject matter, reflected by Venus/Mars in Scorpio in harmonious trine to Neptune in Cancer. Venus, planet of the arts is being energised by Mars, which accounts for Varo's energetic support artistically for her gender and the need for equality of the sexes. Neptune's link to imagination, dreams and fantasy feeds into her way of illustrating her points in such a creative manner.

There's a nice chain of sextiles linking Neptune at 16 Cancer to Jupiter (her Sun's ruler) at 14 Virgo, to Mars/Venus at 14/22 Scorpio to Uranus at 15 Capricorn. I like to find such chains, they indicate a kind of smoothness in the way a person is using their energies in co-ordination, to successfully manifest their talents...depending on which planets are involved, of course.

There are also 3 oppositions in Varo's chart: Sun/Mercury opposite Pluto/North Node; Moon opposite Saturn; Uranus opposite Neptune. Her Sun and Moon, major components of her personality, are each opposed by a planet relating to intensity or rigidity/limitation. Maybe these two oppositions acted as drivers and brakes in her nature? The third opposition, Uranus-Neptune forms to link each end of the sextile chain already mentioned. It's a Cancer-Capricorn cardinal opposition framing the sextile-chain. One could say, whimsically, that in so framing, it seems to exclude Saturn and Pluto from the major mix, leaving a calmer, sweeter, more integrated configuration to hold sway.