Remedios Varo was born on December 16, 1908, in Anglès, Spain. Her mother was a devout Catholic from the Basque region while her father Rodrigo Varo y Cejalvo was an engineer, and it was he who encouraged her to become an artist. [1] Varo was always interested in the otherworldly, reading scientific texts growing up as well as adventure stories by Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, as well as mystical literature and Eastern philosophy. She loved paintings by Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch, which she experienced during visits to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.[2]

From 1924-29, Varo studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and School of Fine Arts in Madrid and enrolled in San Fernando Academy (Dalí’s alma mater) where she first encountered surrealism through programming by the Students’ Union. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, French surrealist Benjamin Péret came to Barcelona in August 1936 to support the anti-Nationalist cause whom she meets and begins a relationship with. They flee to Paris together in 1937 where, through Péret, she connects with Breton and other surrealists experimenting with ideas of the irrational, subconscious, and automatic techniques. In 1940, following the Nazi occupation of Paris, she flees to Marseille where Péret is already located along with André and Jacqueline Breton, Wilfredo Lam, and then finally to Mexico in 1941-42. She and Péret were both granted political asylum and while Péret ultimately returned to Paris, Varo decided to stay in Mexico permanently.[3] When she first arrived, the muralist movement, which included figures such as Jose Clemente Orozo and Diego Rivera, reigned in the national consciousness but there was also a key contingent of surrealism. In 1940, International Exhibition of Surrealism held at Galería de Arte Mexicano organized by Austrian surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico City, so surrealism was permeating intellectual circles there.[4] When Péret left to go back to Paris, Varo went to Venezuela with Jean Nicole, a French pilot, and was part of scientific expedition organized by the Institute Francés de América Latina, working as technical illustrator for Malariology Division of the Ministry of Public Health in Maracay; produced drawings for national anti-malaria campaigns; also drew for materials for Bayer México about pharmaceutical products. As Masayo Nonaka contends, “Varo’s career as a scientific researcher and illustrator stimulated her powers of reason and imagination as well as her sensorial faculties.”[5] She also became close consorts with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna, surrealist artists and European exiles and emigres like Varo. She was connected to many of the European surrealists prior to her arrival in Mexico but her relationships seemed to cohere in Mexico.

Earlier in her career and into the 1940s, Varo had to focus on commercial work to make ends meet, but she would also write and sketch.[6] Then in the late 1940s/early 1950s, Varo met businessman and art connoisseur Walter Gruen, who was so impressed by Varo’s work he decided to fully support her and her practice, offering for her to stay with him, so she can focus on painting, which she accepted. She died of a heart attack in 1963 when she was starting to receive national and international recognition for her work. In her short lifetime, she only had two solo exhibitions in Mexico, and her first retrospective took place the year after her death at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno/Palacio Bella Artes, Mexico City. In Mexico, she is considered a national treasure and her works are beloved by Mexican collectors. If they are not in institutional collections, as Luis-Martín Lozano writes, “Many of her paintings remain in the jealous possession of their original owners, who adore them and guard them like icons of antiquity.”[7]

[1] Lozano, “Deciphering the Magic of Remedios Varo,” 21.

[2] Luis-Martín Lozano, “Chronology,” in Luis-Martín Lozano, translated by Elizabeth Goldson Nicholson and Liliana Valenzuela, The Magic of Remedios Varo, National Museum of Women in the Arts, D.C., 2000, 112.

[3] Ibid, 112-113.

[4] Nonaka, Remedios Varo, 9.

[5] Ibid, 9.

[6] Kaplan, Remedios Varo, 93.

[7] Lozano, “Deciphering the Magic of Remedios Varo,” 15.