August 2020 – my daily art display

Remedios Varo. Part 3. Escape and flight from oppression.

Remedios Varo’s six year old marriage to Gerado Lizarraga was in decline and she started a romantic relationship with the young Spanish surrealist painter Esteban Francés, and a short time later, she left the marital home and she and Esteban went to live together in a room in a small house in the city. Whilst there, the two lovers produced a number of surrealist works. Remedios also became friendly with a group of surrealist artists known as the Logicophobists, who wanted to bring about a close connection of art with metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, and although she never became an official member of the group in 1936 she exhibited three of her work with theirs at the Catalonia de Barcelona gallery.

The Spanish Civil War broke out on July 17th 1936 between two political groups. The Republicans who supported the Second Republic of Spain which had been founded in 1932 following a bloodless coup and the Nationalists, led by General Franco, who opposed it. Remedios’ young brother, Luis, joined Franco’s army but was killed shortly afterwards. Remedios was devastated by the death of her brother and could never understand why he decided to fight under the banner of the “enemy”.

In October 1936, Remedios Varo met Benjamin Péret, a French poet, a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement. Péret had married the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston in April 1928. Her brother was Mario Pedrosa, a Trotskyist activist, and the next year, Péret and his brother-in-law founded and hosted the Communist League of Brazil, which was based upon the ideas of Trotsky. Péret was eventually arrested, imprisoned and expelled from Brazil as a “communist agitator” on December 30th, 1931, a few months after the birth of his son Geyser. He returned alone to France and carried on with the political struggle as a Trotskyist and participated in the Spanish Civil War as one of the many Trotskyists and anarchists, who claimed to fight for a classless society. When Remedios and Péret first met she was twenty-seven and he was thirty-seven.

Péret was a close friend of the Surrealist painter, André Breton. In 1937, Péret returned to Paris and Remedios went with him, breaking off her ties with her husband Gerardo and her lover, Esteban Frances, but the latter later decided to follow the couple to Paris. Remedios and Péret were now lovers but the couple’s life was marked by poverty and political uncertainty. She described the position she found herself in the French capital:

“…It is not easy to live on painting in Paris…Sometimes I did not have more food in an entire day than a small cup of coffee with milk. I call this ‘the heroic epoch’…That bohemian life that is supposed to be necessary for the artist is very bitter…”

It is Spring 1937 and Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret are safe in Paris having escaped the mayhem in Spain caused by the Civil War. Remedios, through her close relationship with Péret, was accepted into the heart of the Surrealist group. She commented on her lowly position within the inner sanctum:

“…My position was the timid and humble one of a listener; I was not old enough nor did I have the aplomb to face up to them, to a Paul Eluard, a Benjamin Péret or an André Breton. Here was I with my mouth gaping open within this group of brilliant and gifted people…”

The Souls of the Mountains by Remedios Varo (1938)

Whilst living in Paris she shared a Montparnasse studio with Péret and Francés and although this ménage-a-trois caused rivalries Remedios managed to enjoy life in Paris. In 1938 she completed a painting entitled The Souls of the Mountains. In this work, mountains are portrayed as slim volcanic tubes which are seen rising from a light-impregnated mist. Out from the inside of the tallest pair of these mountains emerge a head of a woman each bearing a resemblance to the artist. Remedios experimented not just with what she depicted but also how she depicted things. In this work she has used a Surrealist technique known as fumage. The technique of fumage was invented by the Austrian surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen in the late 1930s and is achieved by passing a flame quickly across a surface fresh with oil paint. Paalen found that the smoke would trace unique marks in the wet surface. In this work by Varo the fumage technique created clouds swirling around the cylindrical mountains, linking the stony peaks and is suggestive of dreams and apparitions.

Again, we try and get into the head of the artist and work out what the painting is all about. The encased females in the painting appear to be imprisoned all alone inside the mountain. Remedios continually harked back to the past and on her feeling of imprisonment within the family home, the constraints made upon her at her convent school and the feeling of isolation and this depiction reminds us of her struggle to break free. The mountains have a phallic shape and this could be Remedios’ take that she lives in a male-dominated world and that female artists of the time were not looked upon as real painters but were compartmentalised as being the “spouses of artists”. The overall dark and depressing palette of the depiction was chosen by Remedios so as to give the work a feeling of isolation and disheartening confinement. The title of the work gives us a clue that the depiction is about a life force under oppression which is deprived of its freedom and entitlement to be acknowledged. Remedios believes that the souls in the painting should be released from their incarceration so that they may be able to express themselves fully and without any restrictions from their surroundings. Likewise, Remedios believes female artists should be freed from the restrictions of a patriarchal society.

Left to right: Victor Serge, Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo and André Breton in front of the Villa Air-Bel (c.1940-41)

So, what was life like for Remedios Varo and her Surrealist group ? Maybe the late American art historian, Robert Goldwater summed it up in his publication, Reflections on the New York School, Quadrum 8. He wrote about the group:

“…international in character, bohemian in a self-confident, intensive fashion….. living as if they had no money worries….[Yet they] existed on the margin of society……As thee latest issue of a long line of romantics, they accepted this situation as a condition of creativity and made it a positive virtue. They carried with them a warmth of feeling, an intensity and concern for matters aesthetic, a conviction of the rightness of their own judgements and an unconcern for any other…”

This encapsulates Remedios Varo’s lifestyle at the time. She believed fervently in the importance of art and she was reliant on spontanaity and put her trust in her subconscious instincts. At the time, Péret was working as a proof-reader as the sale of his paintings did not bring in enough money to survive and he would often have to beg for food. When Remedios joined him, she too had to endure this lifestyle but she didn’t care as she loved this bohemian way of life and revelled in the company of the extraordinary and stimulating group of people with whom she was surrounded. They too were mesmerised by her and during this time she had a number of love affairs. However, her joie de vie was to be short lived as politics and war were to change her life once again. Hitler was on his march towards European domination and with his annexation of the Sudetenland and the takeover of Austria, people in France feared the worst. By July 1939, the worst had arrived and Parisians were told that if they were able, they should get out of their city which was now paralysed with anxiety. It was an even more dangerous time for foreigners who lived in the French capital. They were threatened with deportation back to their own countries. Remedios, being a former Republican sympathiser, could not return to Spain where the right-wing Nationalists under Franco now ruled with an iron fist and where summary executions of Republican sympathizers were common. Her former husband, Lizarraga, had fled from Franco’s armies and arrived in France but, as a Spanish refugee, he found himself interred in a French concentration camp.

In February 1940, Péret, being an outspoken Communist, was recalled to military service but three months later he had been incarcerated in a military prison in Rennes for his political activities. On June 14^th 1940 the Nazis entered Paris. An independent French government was established in Vichy and the Franco-German armistice was signed. Included in the treaty was an article which required the Vichy French government to surrender on demand any fugitive wanted by the Third Reich. Remedios was now in great danger for her connections with Péret. She knew that because of her left-wing Republican views and past actions, she would not survive if she was deported to Spain and yet to remain in Paris would ultimately mean a journey to an internment camp. Her friends tried everything to save Remedios from arrest but during the Winter of 1940 she was taken in by the police. She was eventually released but she knew, despite wanting to stay behind until Péret was released, she had to get out of the French capital.

She did manage to escape the chaos in June 1940 and through help from her friend, Oscar Dominguez. She managed to get a ride in a car owned by an American couple who were also escaping from Paris. She arrived on the south coast at the small fishing village of Canet-Plage which lay close to Perpignan. It was here she stayed with a number of Surrealist painters who had taken refuge on the Mediterranean coast. Soon she and a Romanian Jew, Victor Brauner, who had also fled south, paired off and went to live together in Marseilles. This was yet another of her love affairs. As a reminder of their time together he gave her a watercolour, probably a portrait of her, and he wrote on it:

“…To my very dear friend Remedios with the memory of an indelible period of my life. Your admiring friend, Victor Brauner, Marseille, Oct 1941…”

Remedios kept Brauner’s watercolour and a letter from him all her life.

Varo and Brauner were now part of a large group of intellectuals, artists and Jews who were trying to escape the Nazis. They were joined by Péret at the end of the year. He had managed to bribe the Nazi guards and then made a long and dangerous journey south. The city of Marseilles was bursting with refugees all desperate to get out of the country. They were living on little food and the fear of being caught in random but regular police roundups.

Varo and Péret eventually found refuge at the Villa Air-Bel, a large residence outside the city which was being used by a group calling themselves the Emergency Rescue Committee. This was a group that officially helped refugees legally obtain visas so they could leave France. The group’s secret agenda was to get those people on the Gestapo’s blacklist – specifically writers, artists and political activists, out of the country, by any means possible, The organisation was led by an American, Varian Fry. Fry was one of the founding members and as soon as the Committee was set up, they established a list of people to save in priority, mainly artists and writers, who had fled Germany and Occupied France to hide in the South.

Group of artists posing on the grounds of the Villa Air-Bel near Marseilles (1941)

Remedios Varo, now back with Péret, was in great danger. Many of their fellow refugees had gained passage to America but Péret had been refused entry to America due to his previous communist activities. As each month passed in Marseilles the danger of being arrested by the Vichy police became ever greater. They knew they had to escape. Their perilous situation was documented in notes in the files of the Emergency Rescue Committee:

“…He [Péret] is in immediate danger as his democratic ideas are opposed to the Vichy government, and he faces persecution. He and his family [referring to Varo, although Péret did not marry Remedios Varo until 1942, after the death of his first wife] are in danger of starvation, as the problem of the food supply in their region is acute…”

Remedios Varo’s immigration papers (1942)

The Emergency Rescue Committee recognised the couple as “qualified as intellectuals and worthy of attention” and proceeded to try and attain visa for them so as they could leave France. It was a long and torturous fight to get the documentation and took six months to achieve. However, it was not just the visas they needed but money, again something they did not have. Once again it was up to the Emergency Rescue Committee to get them financial help from their American backers. Their fund-raising pamphlets were quite clear with their message which displayed hard-hitting headlines such as:

“…Wanted by the GESTAPO, Saved by America…”

The pamphlet then asked for contributions of $350, as the price of a life of one escapee.

Remedios and Péret’s thoughts then turned to Mexico as a place of refuge. They had a number of things going for them with this idea. Varo spoke Spanish. The President of Mexico had stated that he would accept all Spanish refugees and to any members of the International Brigade living in France, who had once fought against Franco. So, the destination for Péret and Varo was decided, now all they needed was to get there and procure a safe sea passage across the Atlantic. For this to happen they had to travel from Marseilles to Casablanca and then board a ship to Mexico. They eventually made it to Casablanca and on November 20^th 1941, a year after they had arrived in Marseilles, they set sail from Casablanca on the Portuguese freighter Serpa Pinto. The couple arrived in Mexico at the end of 1941. They had been battered by the ferocious winter seas of the Atlantic Ocean crossing and also fearful of being attacked by Nazi naval ships. Remedios remembered the ordeal in a later interview, she said:

“…I came to Mexico searching for the peace that I had not found, neither in Spain – that of the revolution – nor in Europe – that of the terrible war – for me it was impossible to paint amidst such anguish…”

…………..to be continued

Most of the information for this blog, apart from the usual sources, comes from Janet A. Kaplan’s excellent book entitled Remedios Varo, Unexpected Journeys. This is a must-read book if you want a fuller version of the life and times of Remedios Varo.

Remedios Varo: Part 2. Lovers and war.

Whilst attending the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid Remedios met Gerrado Lizarraga, a fellow student. He was a Basque from Pamplona, a lanky, long-nosed man, known for his honesty and great sense of humour. During the time at the Academia she remained living at home and it was during her years at the Academia that she realised she had to break free of the family. She desperately wanted her independence. As an unmarried twenty-one-year old woman she was expected to live at home with her family and remain under their tight control. She realised that marriage was the only way out of this restrictive situation.

This constant battle against a restrictive lifestyle whether it be life at the convent school or life at home whilst attending the Academia must have played on Remedios’ mind for many years. In 1955 whilst living in Mexico she completed a painting entitled Ruptura (Rupture) which recalled life in “captivity” and the escape. In this work we see her character in a similar situation that reminded her of her own experience whilst in Madrid. Before us we see a hooded figure in a brown travelling cloak leaving a building, from which dead leaves and old papers flutter away in the breeze. Look at the faces in the windows, all staring out at the departing figure. For Remedios, this was what life was like in her teenage years. – constantly being watched over and spied upon. She would later write about how she would hide her diaries under a loose stone on the floor of her bedroom and how she had sprinkled sugar on the floor by her door to see if anybody had entered her room while she was absent. The figure in the painting is going down a long flight of steps. The setting is a winter’s day, the trees having shed their leaves. On either side of the steps are high stone walls which are covered in vegetation. These imposing walls suggest constraint and incarceration, the very feelings which Remedios had during her late teenage years Climbing up the walls we can see a number of snails carrying their large shells, their “homes”, on their backs and is a memory of the burdens Remedios had to carry through her early years. Although there would have been parental control and the convent school would have kept an eye on what she was doing, much of Remedios’ perceived spying would be just a figment of her imagination.

I took advantage of all that I learned, in painting the things that interested me on my own, which could be called, together with technique, the beginning of a personality.”

Gerardo Lizarraga and Remedios Varo (1930)

The year she left the Academia, 1930, was also the year she married her boyfriend and fellow student and political activist Gerardo Lizárraga. They got married in the Basque city of San Sebastian, a place she knew well from her family summer holidays. He was three years older than Remedios and was a politically committed artist and his bohemian and carefree lifestyle appealed to Remedios. For Remedios, marriage enabled her to escape the overwhelming control of her parents, especially her mother. She was fascinated by Surrealism and the surrealist ideas which were beginning to permeate Spanish art from France, especially Paris. She wanted to fully immerse herself into the world of Surrealism and so in 1931 she and Lizárraga moved to Paris. Remedios wanted to experience art tuition other than that pedalled by the Academia de San Fernando and signed up for courses at the Accademia de la Grande Chaumiere, a free art school which was legendary throughout Paris. However, she only lasted there a few three weeks. She felt overwhelmed and under too much pressure and decided that life for her and her husband in Paris should simply be an opportunity to immerse themselves in what Remedios later recalled was a poor bohemian lifestyle, one which allowed them to remain self-assured and untroubled by life. It was a chance to savour an unrestricted life free from her parents.

Like her early departure from the teaching at the Accademia de la Grande Chaumiere, she decided that after a year in the French capital it was time to return to Spain. In 1932 Remedios and her husband went back, not to Madrid, but to Barcelona which had a much more unconventional and innovative feel to it. Barcelona was the closest to Paris in its avant-garde atmosphere. It had become the intellectual and artistic centre of Spain and of course it gave a sufficient distancing from her parents.

Another man entered Remedios’s life soon after she and her husband arrived in Barcelona. He was the Catalan artist Esteban (Esteve) Francés who was born in Portbou, a small town close to the French border. Later he and his family went to live inland to the larger town of Figueras, in North Eastern Spain, also the birthplace of Dali. In 1925, at the age of twelve, he moved to Barcelona where, after a brief period studying law, he enrolled at the art and design school, Escola de la Llotja. He was nineteen when he first met Remedios Varo, and later they shared a studio in Barcelona in the Plaza de Lesseps.

Composición surrealista by Esteban Frances (1934)

He, like Varo, had a great interest in the avant-garde world of Surrealism. Although Remedios lived with her husband, she and Esteban became lovers. This affair marked the first time Remedios had broken the stern moral code under which she had been raised. It was to be first of many open relationships she maintained throughout her life. Being a member of the bohemian set, Varo flouted conventional morals and had few recriminations.

Remedios Varo completed one of her earliest surrealist compositions in 1935 with her pencil on paper artwork, simply entitled Composition. It is a strange depiction of a bone-like tree, a flaccid stretched-out figure and insect/human hybrids all of which flow like a dream one into the next.

L´Agent Double (Double Agent) by Remedios Varo (1936)

Remedios had fully engaged herself in the Surrealist movement and had joined the group known as Logicofobista, whose aim was to epitomise the mental state of the internal soul in a Surrealist style. It was during her time spent as a member of this group that Remedios Varo produced her painting L´Agent Double (Double Agent). Trouble had been brewing in Spain since the early 1930’s which, in 1936 culminated in an almost three-year very bloody civil war. In 1936 Remedios Varo completed this work which reflected the political tensions in Spain at that time. The setting is a small enclosed room which has a separate image on each of the walls and the floor. The back wall is covered with full fleshy female breasts and a small bushy tree, suggesting a hairy pubic triangle. To the right, coming through the window an elongated red arm holding a ball-like object, from which a sperm-like tail is attached which wriggles away into a small dark opening low down on the far wall. On the opposite wall we see a large-handed figure, part heavy-limbed male, part curvaceous female standing up, nose pressed hard against the surface of the wall. It seems to be trapped within the confines of the room. Climbing up the back of this figure is a giant bumblebee. Looking at the floor we see a woman’s head rising out of a crack in the floor surface. It is the first self-portrait of Varo to appear in one of her paintings. Many more would follow over the years. She cautiously looks out and on either side of her head we see vapour or roots rising. This part of the painting is also a reminder that as a child and a teenager Remedios used to hide things, such as her writings and diary, from her family under a stone, part of the floor in her bedroom.

It is easy to describe what we see before us but a little more difficult to make sense of what we see. The year 1936 was the start of the Spanish Civil War, a war which was to see about 200,000 people die as the result of systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities. Fighting and killings however, had preceded that date in the struggles between the left-wing sympathisers of the Republican Government also known as the Loyalists who supported the Spanish government and the right-wing Nationalists led by General Franco. Spies and secret agents for both sides were ever present. In the painting entitled Double Agent we are posed the question as to who the double agent is. Is it the figure appearing from out of the floor and who has the perfect vantage point to see what is going on. Has she trapped the part man, part woman? Or is it the figure with its nose pressed to the wall that has trapped her. Or are they both trapped by the creature with the long far-reaching hand? It is all about entrapment and of the fear of treachery and double agents at a time in Spain when one did not know who your ally was and who was your enemy. It was a painting which juxtaposes eroticism with distorted unreal and unrelated objects. Welcome to Surrealism !

Enter the life of Remedios Varo of a man who was to play an important part of her life. He was Benjamin Péret, a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement and a close friend of André Breton. Péret had met Varo in October 1936, through her friendship with Oscar Dominguez, an artist from the Spanish Canary Islands who had close connections with Gaceta de arte, a Tenerife journal devoted to all Surrealist activities. Péret had come to Spain in 1936, a month before the civil war had begun, along with many other left-wing foreigners who wanted to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was a Communist activist and had been jailed in Brazil for his subversive activities. Soon a love affair between Varo and Péret began. Péret was nine years older than Varo but was in love with her. In a letter, dated October 15^th 1936 to André Breton, the French writer and poet, who was concerned for the safety of his friend in Barcelona and wondered when he would return to the safety of France. Péret repiled in a letter:

“…I am involved in a love story that holds me here until the young person can accompany me to Paris, so I can say nothing of my return…”

Péret wrote love notes in his books which he gave to Remedios. He was absolutely besotted with her and in his book of love poems, Je sublime, there was a dedication “to Remedios Lizarraga” and part of one of the poems, Source, Péret wrote:

“… It’s Rosa weather with a real Rosa sun

And I’m going to drink Rosa with a Rosa meal

Until I fall into a Rosa sleep

Dressed in Rosa dreams

And the Rosa dawn will wake me like a Rosa

Mushroom

In which Rosa’s image will be surrounded

By a Rosa halo…”

Remedios was equally in love with Péret. So what was the thing that forged this love affair between the two ? For Varo it was probably the fact that Péret was a published poet, a French Surrealist and a close friend of Breton. He was a romantic who had dedicated poems to her. He had left France to fight as a revolutionary defending her country. For Péret she was an attractive younger woman who doted on him. What more could he ask for ? Péret moved back to Paris in early 1937 and in the Spring of that year, Remedios Varo decided to join him, leaving her homeland, her husband and also her one-time lover Estéban Francés, who would later follow her to Paris.

Eyes on the table, by Remedios Varo (1938)

Remedios Varo had escaped the chaos and blood-letting of the Spanish Civil War which had taken the life of her younger brother and moved to the safety of the French capital. However, unknown to her at the time, Paris and France was to be almost the death of her………….

………………………….to be continued.

Remedios Varo. Part 1: Surrealism, the early days, family life and schooling.

We all have our favourite art genre and within that genre we also probably have our favourite artists. For me, I like the Golden Age painters of The Netherlands and the Scandinavian artists who were known as the Skagen painters. For some people narrative paintings are their favourites for others they prefer paintings that have various symbols depicted, each conveying a hidden meaning. Today I am going to look at an artist who is famous for her painting genre, a genre which is both equally strange and yet somewhat fascinating. Let me introduce you to the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo who was born María de los Remedios Varo y Uranga.

André Breton (photo by Henri Manuel) 1927

Before I look at the life and works of Varo, first let us try to understand Surrealism. Surrealism was founded in Paris by the French writer and poet André Breton in 1924. Breton had been a leading light in the Dadaist movement, an artistic movement which was practiced by a group of European writers, artists, and intellectuals in protest against what they saw as a senseless war, World War I, which had claimed an estimated 37.5 million lives. Out of Dadaism was born Surrealism, which was an artistic and literary movement. The Surrealists wanted to put an end to the overbearing dictates of modern society by destroying its mainstay, that of rational thought. Surrealism was preoccupied with spiritualism, the thoughts of Sigmund Freud with regards psychoanalysis and the political thoughts surrounding Marxism. Surrealists wanted to achieve the creation of art which came from the artist’s unconscious mind and that lacked any reasoned thoughts. Surrealism was a forerunner of Automatism which is the avoidance of conscious intention in producing works of art, especially by using mechanical techniques or subconscious associations. Breton maintained that Surrealism was pure psychic automatism.

Varo family
Back: Remedios and older brother Rodrigo Jnr
Front: Mother, paternal grandmother, younger brother Luis and father

In a series of blogs, I will be looking at the life and work of Remedios Varo. María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born on December 16^th 1908 in the small walled village of Anglès which lies ten kilometres west of Girona and eighty kilometres north-east of Barcelona. The village is situated in a Pyrenees valley close to the River Ter. Remedios was the daughter of Rodrigo Varo-i-Zayalvo who hailed from Cordoba in Andalucía and his wife Ignasia Uranga Bergareche, a large woman of strong character, who came from a Basque family but was actually born in Argentina. Remedios was the middle child of three, having an older brother Rodrigo Jnr., who would later become a doctor and a younger brother, Luis, who would sadly die in the Spanish Civil War. Her mother gave her daughter the name Remedios in dedication to La Virgen de los Remedios as a remedy to help her forget the sadness associated with the death of her older daughter who died when she was very young. Remedios’ connection with her two brothers was very different. Probably because her older brother, Rodrigo, looked in horror at her life as a bohemian artist, their relationship was not a close one. On the other hand, Remedios was very close to her younger brother Luis.

Remedios’ father was a hydraulic engineer and it was his work on the nearby canal and lock systems which had brought the family to Anglès. In his line of work, he had to travel all around the country as well as to North Africa. His wife did not want to be left at home during her husband’s frequent business trips so she and the children would travel with him. The constant “wanderings” of the family and the disruption it caused had an overpowering effect on Remedios. She missed her home, and so, as she should did not want to forget her home life in Anglès, all her life, no matter where she went, she always kept with her a childhood postcard of the street in Anglès where she lived.

Father, older brother and Remedios (1912)

Remedios Varo’s religious upbringing was a tale of two parental beliefs. Her mother, Ignasia, was a devout Catholic whereas her father, Rodrigo, was more receptive to religious beliefs of different faiths. Remedios was very close to her mother but did not believe in her narrow Catholic beliefs favouring her father’s more varied and less dogmatic religious viewpoint. Varo’s father wanted his daughter to attend a “free” school which was independent from both the State and the Church and which many believed gave a more rounded education and were educationally superior to Catholic schools, but her mother demanded Remedios attended a Catholic school. Her mother’s will must have been acceded to as Remedios attended a Roman Catholic convent school run by nuns. A strict belief in Catholicism was demanded of the pupils and to counter this Remedios would immerse herself in books by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, which spun stories of fantasy worlds. She also liked to read about mysticism and alchemy. It was the strict regimented existence at the Catholic convent school which led, in 1931, to her painting the triptych in which she ridiculed the restraints of convent schooling.

Toward the Tower by Remedios Varo (1961)

The three paintings formed the autobiographical triptych entitled Embroidering Earth’s Mantle. The first of the three works was entitled Towards the Tower and Varo depicts a pack of identical girls following their leader in a trance-like state, bicycling away from a beehive tower in which they were once held captive. All the girls face the same way, except one, Varo’s inclusion of herself as the heroine. She depicts herself as the independently minded rebellious one. Leading the pack of schoolgirls is the Mother Superior and a strange looking man who has a sack over his shoulder from which we see flocks of blue-coloured birds escaping and hovering over the party of cyclists. Look at the bicycles. They are fabricated, in part, from the stiffened fabrics of their own clothes.

Embroidering Earth’s Mantle by Remedios Varo (1961)

In the central panel of the triptych, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, we observe the same young women. This time the setting is a room in the tower where the convent girls are made to work. The setting is what could be termed a medieval scriptorium, a room devoted to the writing, copying and illuminating of manuscripts commonly handled by monastic scribes. It is a cramped and isolated space in which the young women are weaving out the surface of the earth under the intense supervision from the Great Master who reads from the book of instructions whilst at the same time, stirring a boiling broth in the same alchemical vessel from which the women draw their embroidery thread. Behind him a veiled figure sits playing a flute. Each and every young woman works alone embroidering images of the landscape onto a continuous fabric which tumbles 0ut from table-height battlements around the sides of the tower. This act of embroidering and needlework was considered to be a skill suitable for cultured young women

Varo has added an ironic twist to the painting although it may not be very clear in the main picture. Remedios’ rebellious heroine in this triptych has embroidered an upside-down image of her and her lover within the folds of the cloth that emerge from her table.

In the final panel, Varo reveals The Escape; Varo’s heroine has successfully fled with her lover on a fantastical furry inverted umbrella which floats on a foggy mist. Both the clothes of the girl and her lover billow behind them in the wind and act as sails. For Varo the triptych is all about imprisonment and the chance to liberate herself from the strict academic confines of convent school life and her determination to free herself from the facelessness of being one among a homogenous many. It was her determination to escape isolation and be free. Her freedom was to come in 1930 when she was twenty-one and left home after marrying Gerrado Lizaraga a fellow art student.

Portrait of Grandmother Doña Josefa Zejalvo by Remedios Varo (1926)

In order to keep his daughter, Remedios, amused on his business trips he would allow her to redraw his blueprints, and at the same time explain the function of the various systems. Remedios’s knowledge grew as did her inquisitiveness. This was the start of her artistic tuition. Her father was a hard taskmaster and would make his daughter repeat technical drawings until they were right. Over time her draughtsmanship constantly improved and her pencil lines gradually became more accurate as she became self-assured. This infused in her the lifelong characteristic of meticulousness. She had started to become a perfectionist. Besides his training of Remedios in draughtsmanship, her father encouraged her love of art, by taking her to museums and art galleries.

Mother and daughter – Pencil sketches by Remedios Varo (1923)

By 1924 the family had relocated to an apartment on calle Segovia, one of Madrid’s main streets and because fifteen year old Remedios had shown a love of art the family arranged for her to attend the city’s Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Crafts) and later the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where she became one of the first female students of the academy. Like all the major art Academies of Europe, the Academia was known for its strict observance of the methodology of the Old Masters. They would not compromise and those who became disruptive were expelled. The year Remedios started at the Academy was the same year that fellow student, Salvador Dali, returned from his one-year expulsion for leading a student protest over a professional appointment at the Academia. Two years later he was permanently expelled. Despite this strict observance of academic art Remedios became interested in Surrealism. Of her education at the Academy, she said:

“…”I took advantage of all that I learned, in painting the things that interested me on my own, which could be called, together with technique, the beginning of a personality…”

In Janet A. Kaplan’s book, Remedios Varo, Unexpected Journeys she quotes a story from Remedios teenage years, an erotic fantasy she had endured in a dream:

“…One night, a strange being entered through the window and threw itself on top of me; it was like the devil. I resisted, but his eat was immense. The following day and with out having said anything at the table my grandmother said to me ‘Remedios, what has happened to you? Your hair is burned’…”

All her life Remedios would believe in the power of such dream images and in her mind, there was little to differentiate between reality and dreams.

Pencil sketches of Paternal grandmother by Remedios Vara (1925 and 1923)

Her “personality” was her strong attraction to Surrealism, which had gained a foothold in the Madrid art culture. Whilst studying at the Academia she would make many visits to the Prado and became fascinated with the works of Primitive painters, including tribal art from Africa, the South Pacific and Indonesia, as well as prehistoric and very early European art, and European folk art. She also loved the works of Hieronymus Bosch and also the mainstream art of El Greco and Goya. In 1930, she graduated from the Academia with a drawing teacher diploma.

…………………………….. to be continued.

William McTaggart. Part 2. The later years.

William McTaggart’s art was likened to Impressionism and yet he was a forerunner of that genre. He was a pioneer of Impressionism before it was given a label. It is true that he was fascinated with nature and man’s relationship with it, and he endeavoured to capture aspects such as the fleeting effects of light on water. He also, like the Impressionists, liked to paint en plein air. This aspect of his work was discussed in an early edition of the Art Journal:

“…A Scottish Impressionist”, points out that “before the term had been imported from France and Monet and the rest had formulated their creed, Mr McTaggart had evolved for himself a method and style not unlike what they ultimately achieved, but exceeding it in suggestion, significance, and beauty…”

As Happy as the Day is Long by William McTaggart (1880)

After the period when McTaggart depicted idyllic scenes populated with young children he turned to landscape and seascape work, the latter being motivated by the love of the sea as a child when he lived close to Machrihanish and the storm ravaged Atlantic coast, often battered by the great and unforgiving ocean. William McTaggart would visit Machrihanish and paint the bay and the vast expanse of the sea. He would paint en plein air at different times of the day capturing the understated appeal of the waves as they rolled towards the long continuous stretch of seashore under sunlight with the white streaks of the breaking waves. Other works depicted the rocky shoreline with just a hint of colour. In his works such as Machrihanish Bay, his depiction brings out a feeling not just the powerfulness of the sea but the aloneness, two feelings which he recognised would be in the mind of the fishing folk as they went on their daily voyage.

His 1890 painting entitled The Storm emphasised the darker side of the sea and the perils waiting for those who chose to underestimate or defy it. As we look at the painting, we can almost hear the howling wind and the sound of the crashing waves upon the rocky foreshore.

The Fishing Fleet Setting Out by William McTaggart (early 1890’st

It has to be noted that in McTaggart’s later paintings, details became secondary to his desire to depict his personal consciousness of nature and the life around him and the effect of differing light on what he saw before him. An example of this is his early 1890’s painting entitled The Fishing Fleet Setting Out. We see the children of the fishermen in the foreground almost camouflaged by the rocks. They are playing in the rock pools. In the far distance we see the fishing fleet setting out to sea. A detailed depiction of the children was not important to McTaggart who was more interested in the ever-changing state of the sea and the weather. He has used a pink/cocoa coloured ground which enhances and gives a hazy warmth to the scene.

The Coming of St Columba by William McTaggart (1895)

McTaggart painted numerous seascapes featuring the waters around southern Kintyre. In 1895 he completed a work entitled The Coming of St Columba. St Columba had left Ireland on a missionary voyage to Scotland in 563AD. He and twelve travelling companions travelled across the Irish sea in a wicker boat known as a currach which was covered with leather. Legend has it that he landed on the south of Kintyre, close to the small village of Southend before journeying onwards north to the Isle of Iona. In McTaggart’s depiction of the arrival of the saint he has used The Gauldrons instead, as the setting for the work. The Gauldrons (Scottish Gaelic: Innean nan Gailleann) meaning “Bay of Storms” is a bay facing the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Machrihanish in Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland, a short distance north of the tip of the Mull of Kintyre. The figures and boats were added in the studio after the landscape was completed

And All the Choral Waters Sang by William McTaggart (1902)

In 1902, he completed another seascape entitled And All the Choral Waters Sang which comes from a line of verse from the famous Victorian poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem, At a Months End:

“…Hardly we saw the high moon hanging,

Heard hardly through the windy night

Far waters ringing, low reefs clanging,

Under wan skies and waste white light.

With chafe and change of surges chiming,

The clashing channels rocked and rang

Large music, wave to wild wave timing,

And all the choral water sang…”

The depiction evokes the music of the crashing Atlantic waves on Machrihanish beach. McTaggart’s son-in-law, James Caw, who had married William’s daughter, Anne, said that the work was painted entirely in the open at Machrihanish in June 1902. In his book, William McTaggart, R.S.A., V.P.R.S.W.; a biography and an appreciation, Caw writes about this work:

“…Both breeze and sunshine pervade the masterpiece, to which Swinburne’s splendidly descriptive line, “And all the Choral Waters sang,” was given as title. Yet, while the mighty music of great waves breaking in many rhythmic chords of thundering surf upon the Atlantic shore is recreated to the imagination by the artist’s wizardry of line and colour and design, one feels as keenly the “Light that leaps and runs and revels through the springing flames of spray.” Looking north-west, the radiant early afternoon sunshine of June falls upon the ordered on-rush of these charging regiments of rearing and plunging white horses sweeping into the long curving bay, and raises their white foaming manes and flying silver tails to a brilliance greater than that of sun-illumined snow. And, between the gleaming lines of racing white, the wind-swept sky throws reflections of vivid changing blues, which, mingling with the lustrous greens amid the leaping waves and the rosy purples and tawnies afloat in the shoreward shooting ripples, make a wonderful and potent colour harmony. Words, however, are woefully inadequate to convey any real impression of this splendid picture — this great sea symphony in colour and light and movement. And, pathetic though “a symphony transposed for the piano” may be, reproduction of such a picture is even more disappointing…”

William McTaggart suffered two great losses in 1884. In November, his mother died, aged 80. She had been living in Glasgow but had in her latter years returned to Campbeltown. William had been greatly devoted to his mother and her death had greatly affected him. During the few days he and his wife had been at Campbeltown his wife’s health, which had been poor, deteriorated. On returning home they consulted her doctor who recommended an immediate operation and this was carried out immediately. Sadly, Mrs McTaggart never recovered and on December 15^th 1884 she died, aged 47. William and his children were devastated. His eldest daughter, Jean, would not let him out of her sight even when he was trying to court his future second wife, Marjorie Henderson.

In 1886 McTaggart completed a portrait of his eldest daughter, Jean. It was entitled Belle. She stands before us in a red frock with a lace collar. The painting was owned by Jean’s sisters who later bequeathed it to the National Galleries Scotland in 1991.

Marjorie McTaggart, William McTaggart’s second wife

On April 6^th 1886, William McTaggart married Marjory Henderson, who was the eldest daughter of Joseph Henderson, a well-known Glasgow artist, and who, despite their age difference, had forged a close relationship with McTaggart’s eldest daughter, Jean. William was fifty-one and Marjory was thirty-years of age. Unfortunately, this large difference in age led to a certain amount of unwelcoming gossip. However, this second marriage proved an incredibly happy one and, importantly, his new wife was accepted by all the children from his first marriage. William and Marjorie went on to have a further nine children. This harmonious atmosphere at home was so important to his progression as an artist

By the end of the 1880’s William Taggart’s paintings were selling so well that he started to refuse commissions which meant he was told what to paint. By doing this he could choose what to depict on his canvases, such as seascapes and landscapes of his choice. In 1889 all his works held by the art dealer, Dowells, were put up for sale and a total of £4000 was realised, an amazing figure for the time. In the May of that year he moved from his Edinburgh studio and went to live at Dean Park, Broomieknowe, on the outskirts of Lasswade, Midlothian, some ten miles south east of the Scottish capital. It was here he built himself a small studio which would last him six years until 1895, at which time, he built a much larger studio/gallery. He was sixty years old and finally he was able to relax and enjoy semi-retirement. He lived in an uncomplicated and undemanding manner and often welcomed young aspiring painters to his studio. He was always supportive and had words of encouragement for them. William McTaggart died of heart failure, at his home in Dean Park, Broomieknowe, Lasswade on the afternoon of April 2nd 1910 at the age of 75. He had been very poorly during the previous winter but it was still a shock to his family when he suddenly died. He had spent the last twenty years of his life at his home, Dean Park and although it was somewhat isolated from the artistic hubbub of Edinburgh, William was just pleased to have the company of his large family and visiting friends.

His funeral was held on April 5^th at Echo Bank Cemetery in Newington, Edinburgh and was attended by a large crowd with a procession of some twenty mourning coaches leaving Bonnyrigg for the short journey to Edinburgh. He lies with both his first and second wives: Mary Holmes and Marjory Henderson. Three of his children who died in infancy and are buried with him. His daughter, Annie Mary who married the art historian Sir James Caw, lies alongside. Joseph’s sons John Henderson and Joseph Morris Henderson also became painters as did his fifth daughter from his second marriage, Eliza (Betty) McTaggart.

A good deal of information for this and the previous blog came from the Bonnyrigg Lasswade Local History website:

bonnyrigglasswadelocalhistory.org/