Traces of Influence: Giorgio de Chirico, Remedios Varo, and \"Lo Real Maravilloso\"

TRACES OF INFLUENCE: GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, REMEDIOS VARO, AND “LO REAL MARAVILLOSO” Lauren A. Kaplan

In 1981, the Cleveland Museum of Art acquired one of the many Giorgio de Chirico paintings entitled Metaphysical Interior [Figure 1]. Reputable de Chirico scholars James Soby and William Rubin authenticated the canvas and assigned an approximate date of 1917.1 This attribution went unquestioned, as the painting fit nicely within de Chirico’s oeuvre from the Ferrara period (1915-1918), named after the city where he was stationed during World War II. While his earlier works showed deserted piazzas, de Chirico’s best-known Ferrara paintings depicted increasingly smaller interiors cluttered with the accoutrements of the artist and references to the Italian renaissance city itself. These miscellaneous objects are presented in the foreground upon a wooden stage, as if ready for some sort of performance in the claustrophobic interior space.2 This juxtaposition of the material real and the abstract pictorial scaffold made these Ferrara works uniquely compelling and highly influential upon subsequent artistic movements like Surrealism in Europe and magic realism in the Americas. Many of the world’s premier art museums boast paintings from this Ferrara period, yet de Chirico scholar Paolo Baldacci maintains that the artist was not very prolific between 1916 and 1918. He painted only twenty known works in 1916 and even fewer the following year.3 Moreover, of the some forty Metaphysical Interiors currently in circulation, Baldacci claims that a large number are forgeries, most likely executed by Surrealists in Andr´e Breton and Paul Eluard’s inner circle. Following World War I, Breton and Eluard acquired as many pre-1918 de Chiricos as possible.4 These works were valuable to the Surrealist group as an artistic model of dream painting with their strategy of enigmatic depaysement, the displacement of objects from their normal context, and because they were desirable, they sold for large profits. By 1924, there were so few available early de Chiricos that when Eluard approached the artist hoping to purchase more, de Chirico, who had been copying old masters for six years now, offered to make copies of his earlier works for a small fee, terming these reproductions verifalsi.5 After de Chirico broke with the Surrealists in 1926 and market demands caused even the verifalsi to grow scarce, a number of surrealist artists, most famously the Spanish Surrealist, Oscar Dom´ınguez, commenced painting

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Figure 1. Metaphysical Interior, attributed to Giorgio de Chirico, 1917, Cleveland Museum of Art

de Chirico forgeries.6 They continued this practice throughout the 1930’s and 40’s, partially for financial gain, and according to art historian Michele A. Cone, partially to funnel money to the Parisian anti-Nazi Resistance.7 The history of de Chirico’s relationship with the Surrealists and their forgeries of his work versus replicas made by the artist himself is key to unravelling the identity of the Metaphysical Interior now hanging in the Cleveland Museum. Over the last fifteen years, various scholars have investigated de Chirico forgeries, and the authenticity of the Cleveland painting has come into 26

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question. In 1994, Paolo Baldacci and Wieland Schmied published a catalogue that ascribed the Cleveland painting to Oscar Dom´ınguez.8 Seven years later, the art historian William H. Robinson challenged this attribution, noting that the Cleveland painting possesses a level of technical sophistication that is lacking in other confirmed Dom´ınguez copies. According to Robinson, the texture is thinner and more in line with true de Chiricos, and there is a certain balance and confidence to the composition as compared with Dom´ınguez’s usual “excessive, almost compulsive over-elaboration of details.”9 Due to these key differences in technique, he posits that the work is not a Dom´ınguez. Further, de Chirico developed two characteristic techniques while in Ferrara: highlights created through painterly impasto and a layering of colors on top of one another. Both are absent from the Cleveland painting. Robinson fails to arrive at a single conclusion, but instead, presents a number of possibilities. It may have been painted by de Chirico later in his career, or more likely, it was executed by another Surrealist forger, perhaps Max Ernst. This latter argument is compelling, yet perhaps Robinson should point not to Ernst but to a third artist who confessed to painting de Chirico forgeries: Spanishborn Remedios Varo, an artist briefly associated with the Surrealist movement. Among other things, Varo was known for her technical prowess, her attention to detail, and her matte surfaces, all of which are present in the Cleveland work. Robinson specifically mentions that the Cleveland Metaphysical Interior seems too intricately painted to be a Dom´ınguez—the top of the fishing float is carefully modeled and the cork holes in the float are created using a difficult method of twisting, lifting and reapplying the brush.10 Throughout her artistic career, Varo developed a penchant for such fastidious painting, and perhaps this meticulousness first blossomed when she attempted to carefully imitate the work of others. To the Mexican painter Gunther Gerszo, she confessed collaboration with Dom´ınguez on de Chirico fakes, even divulging her secret technique: “If you ever want to fake a de Chirico, don’t forget to sprinkle some bicarbonate of soda when the painting is finished to give it a mat sheen.”11 Varo’s chief motive in creating these forgeries between 1937 and 1941 was practical rather than artistic. While some, like Marcel Jean, have argued that Dom´ınguez seemed interested in perfecting de Chirico’s technique out of reverence for the Italian painter, it is clear that Varo resorted to mimicry chiefly out of financial necessity. According to Varo’s chief chronicler, Janet Kaplan, when Varo faked de Chiricos in Paris, she “was looking not for stylistic influence, but for enough money for food. . .If a pseudo-de Chirico sold more easily than a real Varo. . .so be it.”12 When Varo moved to Marseilles in 1940 with her partner, poet Benjamin P´eret, she continued to execute these forgeries for monetary gain, yet now her motive was to raise enough money to emigrate and escape war-torn Europe. After innumerable false starts, Varo and P´eret were able to escape to Mexico City aboard the Serpa Pinto, a Portuguese ship that left Casablanca 27

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in November, 1941.13 Like many other Spanish exiles, Varo was welcomed by Mexican President Lazaro C´ardenas, who offered refugees asylum and automatic citizenship. Due to this generous policy, and the fact that the liberal government did not pry into previous, possibly radical, political backgrounds, Mexico City became a haven for European artist immigrants during the Second World War.14 Soon, Varo was surrounded by a circle of friends that included her former husband, Gerardo Lizarraga, poet Octavio Paz, and painters Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gunther Gerzo, and Leonora Carrington. She finally felt at home. In her memoirs, Varo, who was born in Spain and lived in France for many years, wrote: “I am more a part of Mexico than any other part of the world. . .It is in Mexico that I have felt [most] welcome and secure.”15 Thus, after decades of forgoing her own artistic vision to survive economically—first in France and then during her initial years in this new country—Varo found in Mexico of the 1950s a place where she could develop her creative voice and her own signature style.16 In her magical, gem-like works, one discovers women on mysterious journeys through make-believe environments set against the backdrop of Romanesque architecture. If tracing Varo’s artistic influences, one may see hints of Hieronymus Bosch and other Renaissance masters, Surrealist techniques like decalcomania, and more than a slight resemblance to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.17 If the Cleveland forgery is, in fact, by Varo–a plausible identification that further examination could verify or dismiss–it also explains how, after years of replicating his images, elements of de Chirico’s style bled into her own. This assimilation of his technique was not intentional, for as noted previously, Varo did not copy de Chirico in purposive homage. Nor was this absorption admittedly mindful, for when asked to account for her creative models in a 1956 interview, Varo responded, perhaps disingenuously, “Consciously, I have none. Without a doubt, certain people and events have influenced my style of painting, but only in a way that is not deliberate.”18 Janet Kaplan has pointed out Varo’s incorporation of various de Chirico strategies, yet she does not discuss the subject in detail, nor does she even begin to investigate the reasons why de Chirico’s style so permeated Varo’s work a decade after she stopped reproducing his paintings. De Chirico’s influence upon Varo was more recently noted by Professor Fariba Bogzaran, who contributed to the beautifully illustrated book, Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo, but again, he only touches upon it momentarily before moving on to consider other matters.19 Neither author deeply examines the relationship between the two artists, an interconnection which I believe continued long after Varo left the Surrealists in Paris and well into her mature artistic years in Mexico City. Even if Varo’s only firsthand contact with de Chirico’s paintings occurred while she lived in Europe, I maintain that this encounter was profound enough to leave an indelible trace on her future artistic development. Indeed, striking similarities tie Varo’s work of the 1950s and 60s to de Chirico’s of the 1910s. Upon careful inspection, it seems that Varo had 28

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personal and historical reasons for continually incorporating elements of de Chirico’s imagery and practices into her own paintings. While de Chirico undoubtedly appealed to Varo because of curious overlaps in their individual backgrounds, his work also became important within the larger framework of Mexican art of the 1940s and 50s. As magic realism became a major artistic trend throughout Latin America and elsewhere, some, such as the German art critic Franz Roh and the widely read art historian HH Arnason, named de Chirico its progenitor, viewing his metaphysical work as an inspirational source.20 An in depth discussion of Varo and de Chirico’s corresponding biographies, coupled with an exploration of Varo’s use of de Chirico’s artistic strategies, will explain why Varo’s paintings continued to recall de Chirico’s long after her departure from Europe. This account deals largely with Varo’s own artistic aspirations, but also places both artists in the context of Latin American magic realism, or as it was called in Mexico, lo real maravilloso. The discerning viewer will likely identify visual parallels between the works of de Chirico and Varo, but before delving into these similarities, prime distinctions should be noted. Perhaps the most conspicuous difference is the extent to which each artist adheres to reality. While some of Varo’s compositions depict plausible narratives, a large number of them offer glimpses into a carefully constructed imaginary realm. People travel in vessels made from their own clothing, women metamorphose into furniture, and many figures resemble the artist herself. According to Janet Kaplan, Varo “explored the phenomena of this world as she invented its alternatives.”21 De Chirico, on the other hand, stayed largely true to the exterior world of early twentieth-century Europe. Though he distorted shadows, perspectives and other indicators of space and time, most of his images appeal to physical reality. Whereas Varo invented fantastic objects, de Chirico juxtaposed ordinary ones to make viewers see their innate strangeness. Built around bizarre contraptions, many of Varo’s masterpieces are self-referential. Although they can be read more generally, her small works often relate stories or themes from her personal history. Conversely, de Chirico’s works possess autobiographical components or motifs, yet their lack of a cohesive narrative makes it difficult for them to be read as individualized accounts; instead, their overall meaning tends to the universal, reflecting the jarring temporal and spatial conditions of modernity. Though the sense of alienation in de Chirico’s work is reflective of modern living conditions, it also relates to the artist’s personal history of geographical displacement. His family constantly moved throughout Europe when he was young, causing him to suffer feelings of estrangement. Like de Chirico, Varo was raised as a wanderer. Although born in Angles, a province of Gerona, Spain, in 1908, Varo and her family spent most of her childhood traveling throughout northern Africa and southern Spain, finally settling in Madrid when Varo was nine. Perhaps more significantly, both artists were dislodged from their country of origin in their 29

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Figure 2. Remedios Varo, Aquatic Motion, 1962, oil on masonite

adult lives and remained caught between two cultures—de Chirico between France and Italy, and Varo between Spain and Mexico. Due to these biographical connections, it is no wonder that de Chirico’s work spoke to Varo, perhaps even subconsciously, for she could relate to his themes of diaspora, exile, and melancholia.22 Yet while de Chirico pointed to his feelings of dislocation with images of moving trains, furniture stranded in a valley and titles including the words “departure” and “arrival,” Varo depicted herself as a nomad-traveler more directly. A number of her later images, such as Aquatic Motion (1962, figure 2), Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River (1959, figure 3), or Toward the Tower (1961, figure 4), display fairytale-like voyages, most often with Varo playing the role of traveler. Varo’s desertion of Europe was filled with the terror and pain of fascist regimes, first Franco in Spain followed by Nazi invaders in France.23 Though she ran to escape her childhood though a hasty marriage at age twenty-one, she seems to have spent her later years struggling to return to its warmth and security. As Janet Kaplan elucidates: 30

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Figure 3. Remedios Varo, Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River, 1959, oil on canvas

Much of [Varo’s] emphasis on the traveler and the journey, on ominous encounters with menacing figures, can be seen as her way of exorcising the adult terrors [of wartime Europe] while indulging childhood fantasies. Exiled from her homeland, she embarked on a pilgrimage, now internalized, to find more permanent, more stable roots.24 De Chirico and Varo’s roots share more than extensive traveling, and many other commonalities come through in their paintings.25 While de Chirico’s incorporation of trains is a reference to his father, the civil engineer sent to build railway, Varo’s use of nautical themes and bizarre water vehicles recalls her father, the hydraulic engineer, who sparked in his daughter a love of drawing and scientific inquiry. From a very early age, Varo and de Chirico were torn between their mothers’ devout religiosity— both attended religious grammar school at their mothers’ behest—and 31

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Figure 4. Remedios Varo, Toward the Tower, 1960, oil on masonite

their fathers’ worship of science and mechanics—both were encouraged to learn technical drawing by their engineer fathers. This dual upbringing that incorporated the spiritual and the scientific comes through in Varo’s paintings perhaps more than de Chirico’s, for her works are at once mystical and scientifically accurate. As Lois Parkinson Zamora explains, “the mechanical serves, and then transforms into the mystical” in Varo’s paintings.26 One can easily see Varo’s background as an engineer’s daughter, a girl who clandestinely copied his mechanical diagrams while she was meant to be studying Catholic texts at the convent school she attended throughout adolescence. 32

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While both artists greatly respected their fathers, neither felt particularly connected to these older men emotionally. De Chirico writes in his memoirs that his father was “an engineer and also a gentleman of olden times, courageous, loyal, hard-working, intelligent and good.” But he later admits that, “between my father and myself, despite the deep affection which bound us, there was a certain distance, an apparent coldness.”27 Similarly, Kaplan says of Varo that “although her temperament was similar to her father’s. . .she always felt cowed by him and kept him emotionally at a distance. She was much closer to her mother, who was the mainstay of the family.”28 Like de Chirico, who was raised largely by his domineering mother, Varo constantly sought her mother’s approval, and in her adult life, she worried that she had shamed her mother by cavorting with the Surrealists. Furthermore, both the de Chiricos and the Varos suffered the death of their oldest child, causing each artist–as a middle child–to cling to his or her younger sibling.29 While many of de Chirico’s paintings contain hidden allusions to his childhood, Varo’s oeuvre unveils her fears, her discoveries and her femininity. And though de Chirico painted a number of traditional selfportraits, as well as faceless mannequins that he considered surrogates for the metaphysical artist, Varo was perhaps more focused upon selfrepresentation, frequently painting heroines with her heart-shaped face and pointed nose. Though she once said in an interview, “I do not wish to talk about myself, because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person,” it seems that for Varo, they are deeply intertwined.30 In her self-referential works, she has taken de Chirico’s melancholia-producing strategies, already executed so precisely while reproducing his works in France, and updated them in the construction of an uniquely feminine and enticingly magical world. As photographer Eva Sulzer, Varo’s close friend, describes it, “We do not find ourselves here simply in front of the work of a painter, but in front of the creation of a world: a total world, a coherent world, a secret world.”31 One of the most striking elements of this world is its unique use of perspective, for like de Chirico, Varo clearly understood and exploited the psychological effects of convoluted spatial constructs and stage-like architecture.32 She built upon his use of Italian arcades and labyrinths, and like him, she often emphasized the artifice of buildings by depicting them as shells lacking in material substance, but perhaps filled with symbolic weight. Varo uses these tactics differently but to similar ends: whereas de Chirico employed expansive, empty piazzas to suggest the enigma of the infinite, Varo painted indistinct enclosed spaces to show her female protagonists’ seclusion. Lois Parkinson Zamora writes that Varo’s “brilliantly conceived spatial proportions, volumes, and textures. . .enclose space without imprisoning it,” and though many of Varo’s interiors seem to separate women from the rest of the world, they also enable women to enter a remarkable realm where alchemy is genuine.33 Both Varo’s and de Chirico’s spaces are irrational; his for their 33

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Figure 5. Remedios Varo, Mimesis, 1960, oil on masonite

openness and inconsistent perspective, hers for their dissociation with the laws of reality. Varo’s women sometimes appear trapped in these spaces, and occasionally their immobility becomes permanent. In Mimesis [1960, Figure 5], Varo paints a woman who has been sitting in a chair so long that she begins to become the inanimate object—the chair’s fleur-des-lis pattern is imprinted on her face and neck, and her hands and feet have turned into wood. This sense of stasis is also explored in Celestial Pablum [1958, Figure 6], in which an expressionless maternal figure, sequestered in a tower in the sky, methodically grinds up star matter and feeds it to a caged crescent moon. These images may suggest a fear of submission or domesticity, and art historian Whitney Chadwick argues that Celestial Pablum reveals Varo’s ambivalence towards motherhood—although Varo here presents it as a thankless and demanding job, she tried many times to conceive without success.34 Yet at the same time, these images suggest a fascination with magical transformation and alchemy. While Mimesis depicts the animate becoming inanimate and the dead coming to life, Celestial Pablum suggests the mutation of starlight into nourishment. The metamorphosis 34

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Figure 6. Remedios Varo, Celestial Pablum, 1958, oil on masonite

that occurs in Varo’s paintings mirrors the conversions that she enacted early in her career, when she converted paint and sodium bicarbonate into valuable de Chirico compositions solely through her adroit skill as a copyist. This enticing work also points to her association with the occult and the ideas of Russian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who believed that greater human awareness could be acquired through art and music. Gurdjieff was in contact with many Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s, and in 1935, he founded a small group called The Rope, which consisted exclusively of women seeking spiritual enlightenment. It is unclear whether Varo attended these meetings, but it is evident that she was familiar with Gurdjieff’s teachings, either from her time in Paris, or through encounters with the groups espousing his theories in Mexico.35 In this vein, Celestial 35

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Pablum’s tower in the sky, with stairs leading up to it, can be read as a metaphor for an ascension to higher consciousness. The connection between the protagonist and the moon represents the link between humans and the cosmos, hinting at Varo’s desire to recreate the entire universe–one populated largely by women–on her small masonite board. Thus, as de Chirico tried to illustrate the dilemmas of modern man in his uninhabited piazzas, Varo attempted to show the inner lives of women in her detached spaces. Even in images where Varo’s women are not confined, they seem estranged from their surroundings. Like de Chirico’s objects that are decontextualized and remote from one another (even when they are physically quite close), Varo’s characters rarely interface. When her compositions involve more than one person, the individuals are shown as if in their own worlds, never conversing or touching. Even when together, each one is solitary. For Lois Parkinson Zamora, Varo’s female characters represent “everywoman” in their isolation from each other and their surroundings. “Varo’s everywoman is alone,” she writes, “her struggle to free herself from material entrapments and cultural encumbrances is private and spiritual, not public or political.”36 As such, Varo’s heroines can simultaneously represent the individual artist and woman in general on a quest to reach a higher state of being through solitary activity. A sense of psychological isolation, prevalent in the works of Varo and de Chirico, engenders compositions with uncanny stillness. Because people and objects do not interact, they seem to exist outside of time, coming from and heading nowhere in particular. Even though Varo’s paintings have a narrative bent, she often chooses a moment from a story, freezes it, and dislocates it from the rest of the tale. Octavio Paz, who was fascinated by Varo’s work, clarifies beautifully: “She does not paint time, but the moments when time is resting.”37 This quality of immobility caused many to view de Chirico’s, and later Varo’s works as magic realist. One of the main characteristics of this artistic style, according to art historian Jeffrey Wechsler, is a “knife-edge tension between the possible and the irrational,” and this friction is present in varying degrees in the work of both artists.38 Perhaps this tension is most palpable when Varo and de Chirico use multiple perspectives and vanishing points to confuse an otherwise realistically rendered scene. A strikingly similar use of this technique can be found in a juxtaposition of Varo’s Farewell of 1958 [Figure 7] with de Chirico’s Anxious Journey of forty-five years earlier [1913, Figure 8]. These works depict nearly identical labyrinths comprised of nondescript Italian arcades; however, where de Chirico’s shows only a train approaching behind a brick wall, Varo’s includes two individuals, a man and a woman, wandering into the distance. Their squiggly shadows meet in the foreground, seemingly ready to embrace, but their bodies move towards opposite corners of the canvas. Both artists undermine our faith in the shadow as an index of truth by painting silhouettes that do not correspond with the objects producing them. Here, de Chirico’s jagged shadow on the left of 36

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Figure 7. Remedios Varo, Farewell, 1958, oil on canvas

his composition does not correspond to any tangible object, while Varo’s shadows trace not physical reality, but suggest her characters’ emotional longing. Similarly, Varo’s arcades mimic de Chirico’s, receding into space at extreme angles, forming a space that is difficult to optically comprehend and impossible to enter. De Chirico uses these tactics to remind his viewers that objects are not what they appear; Varo employs similar strategies to indicate conflicting emotions. In Spiral Transit [1962, Figure 9], Varo established fourteen vanishing points, which critic Margarita Nelken proclaimed to be a record; in Phenomenon of Weightlessness [1963, Figure 10], she manipulates the planes of space to create multiple versions of the floor, ceiling and walls.39 These inconsistencies confound the viewer, making it difficult for one to ascertain where he or she is standing. Yet they also 37

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Figure 8. Giorgio de Chirico, Anxious Journey, 1913, oil on canvas

help Varo to meld together her two main interests, science and mysticism, to devise a world that is at once meticulously rational and completely improbable. This peculiar world is meant to be traversed and surveyed by the artist herself, for like de Chirico, Varo was interested in the notion of the artist as clairvoyant, explorer or seer. De Chirico often represents the artist prophet as a human simulacrum, as in The Seer [1915, Figure 11], where a mannequin sits before an easel with a perspectival plan of an arcade, possibly the building that we see in the background, as if to show us how the arcade was drawn. It is significant that this figure is androgynous, for Varo too places gender-ambiguous figures in this role of ‘seeker of truth.’ As feminist scholar Deborah J. Haynes posits, “we may perhaps ‘read’ Varo’s human figures as female [since we are so used to finding Varo herself], even though traditional markers of feminine identity are missing.”40 Haynes suggests that Varo’s use of gender-ambiguous figures is a rebellious act meant “subvert traditional models of gender relationships,” and even goes so far as to call Varo’s strategy a type of “gender masquerade. . .which may function as a powerful ‘glitch’ in the social system that produces traditional dichotomies of self and other through race, class, gender and other distinctions.”41 Given the personal content of Varo’s work, it seems improbable that she had a social agenda in using androgynous figures here; instead, a more biographical reading of this pictorial device is valuable. In Varo’s life, the role of scientist or engineer was always played by a male figure— her father—yet in her adult life, Varo conducted her own experiments for 38

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Figure 9. Remedios Varo, Spiral Transit, 1962, oil on masonite

recreation. For instance, she wrote to an unidentified scientist in 1959: “I am trying to create a product that softens and reduces the skin of peaches to a thin film that I can eat, since I love peach flavor, but the skins damage my stomach.”42 . In her use of androgynous scientific explorers, she has invented a character that is the union of her father and herself, merging her own feminine features and scientific curiosity with her father’s masculinity and profession. Dr. Alan J. Friedman, physicist and director of the New York Hall of Science claims that Varo is the only artist he knows who accurately presents “the core moment of discovery that is so exciting in science. She realized that this central act of the imagination, and this free play of the mind is very similar to what artists do.” Of Phenomenon of Weightlessness, Friedman says that Varo captured that revelatory moment of discovery exactly: “[the scientist] sees that there is another way of treating gravitation and reference frames, and he is astonished that he has come up with the idea.”43 In some of Varo’s works, like this one, the discovery seems enthralling, yet in others, it is depicted as futile drudgery. In The Useless Science, or the Alchemist [1955, Figure 12], another gender-ambiguous figure sits before an alchemical alembic, which is attached to a complex array of machinery and suspended above a fire. The androgynous figure cranks the process along, but the simple procedure being carried out—the gathering and bottling of rainwater—does not warrant this complex system of 39

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Figure 10. Remedios Varo, Phenomenon of Weightlessness, 1963, oil on masonite

belt-driven wheels and pulleys. Kaplan suggests that Varo is “poking fun at the pretensions of science” with her title while also showing a certain reverence for alchemy, the practice that had intrigued her since her youth.44 This fascination with alchemy and transformation is evident within Varo’s canvases but also in her activity as a forger, in which she turned cheap art materials into valuable de Chiciro fakes. Perhaps it was her identification with alchemy, along with her dire need for emigration funds, that helped Varo to validate her creation of these de Chirico paintings. She may have seen herself as a magician rather than a forger, which explains why she openly disclosed her actions to Gruen and others, seemingly without a sense of remorse and even a tinge of pride. After moving to Mexico, Varo’s interest in alchemy persevered as she also became intrigued by the interrelatedness of art and nature. Whitney Chadwick recounts an illuminating tale: 40

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Figure 11. Giorgio de Chirico, The Seer, 1915, oil on canvas

One night Varo discovered a plant that produced egg-shaped fruits. Fascinated, she brought the plant to her apartment, set it in the center of her plant-filled terrace in the moonlight, and placed her tubes of paint around it. She felt that this special plant, her paints and the moon were harmonious together and that their conjunction would prove auspicious for the next day of painting.45 This belief in the interdependence of art, science and life is most clear in her work The Creation of Birds [1957, Figure 13]. In it, an 41

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Figure 12. Remedios Varo, The Useless Science, or The Alchemist, 1955, oil on masonite

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Figure 13. Remedios Varo, The Creation of Birds, 1962, oil on masonite

anthropomorphised owl paints a bird using primary colors distilled from the atmosphere and a brush connected to its heart through a violin. The owl uses a magnifying glass to shine moonlight onto the birds and they suddenly alight from the page and fly out the window.46 It is a completely fantastical scene rendered with such exactitude and lucidity that its magic begins to cohere. As mentioned earlier, Jeffrey Wechsler considers an artwork magic realist if it contains a “tension between the possible and the irrational,” and this definition can be aptly applied to many works by de Chirico and Varo. This tension is especially ripe in Varo’s more scientific images, for according to some in the scientific community, she depicts various theories with amazing clarity and accuracy.47 Like de Chirico, Varo often creates pictures that are at once of this world and completely outside it; they are puzzling, yet also rationally constructed. Though some of her works fall into the surrealist category, a great many of them simply “turn daily life into eerie form,” a key characteristic of magic realism. As Wechsler explains, “magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible by simply painting them as if they existed.”48 By painting her scenes with such painstaking detail, Varo seeks to convince us that her world is possible. Gabriel Garc´ıa Marqu´ez’s notion that magic realism is 43

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simply “reality, without the limitations which rationalists. . .have tried to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand” can also be related to Varo’s later paintings.49 De Chirico aimed to thwart positivism and logic with his strategy of depaysement (displacement), and Varo, along with other artists like Leonora Carrington, clearly drew upon this strategy. In fact, magic realism is the third and most consequential link between de Chirico and Varo. Ever since Franz Roh coined the term in 1925, de Chirico (along with Carlo Carr`a) has been deemed the father of magic realism, and today when reading H.H. Arnason’s textbook, History of Modern Art, students find de Chirico clearly linked with the artistic tendency: “In general, the magic realists, deriving directly from de Chirico, create mystery and the marvelous through juxtapositions.”50 Wechsler himself argues that, “although not all magic realists are. . .directly beholden to de Chirico, the Italian artist was a vital source for a great portion of the imaginative realism of [the twentieth] century.”51 Roh cites de Chirico and Carr`a as sources for the magic realism (or Neue Sachlichkeit) of Weimar Germany, and in 1927, a condensed version of his seminal work, Magic Realism: Post Expressionism, was translated into Spanish and disseminated throughout Latin America in the periodical Revista de Occidente.52 Beginning in this early essay, and then more concretely in his book German Painting in the Twentieth Century of 1958, Roh outlines the characteristics of magic realism extrapolated from metaphysical painting and then embodied in Varo’s art: static settings, sober yet clearly rendered objects, a certain compositional coldness, a thin, smooth paint surface that results in an effacement of the painting process, technical thoroughness and multiple juxtapositions, which include the use of near and far views. In 1958, Roh stated clearly that, “the original features of this new direction in art came from the Italian arte metafisica;” however, later in the twentieth century, magic realism arguably blossomed most in the literature and art of Latin America. Although the concept of Latin America as inherently fantastic is today rejected as a foreign-imposed stereotype, some intellectuals initially embraced it, arguing that strange juxtapositions and an amalgamation of cultural sources—European and indigenous, modern and ancient, catholic and mystical—coalesce in Latin America to create a world that is inherently “marvelous.” Cuban novelist and literary critic Alejo Carpentier aptly explained this phenomena in his 1949 essay, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in which he developed the term lo real maravilloso (marvelous real) and accounted for its presence in Latin America. In his post-colonial critique, Carpentier focuses on the differences between European surrealism and Latin American magic realism, eventually arguing for Latin America’s superior authenticity. He contends that Europeans experience their culture intellectually while Latin Americans experience it viscerally through their natural surroundings.53 Latin American magic realists do not need to construct lo real maravilloso by manifesto, like the 44

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Surrealists, but rather, depict the remarkable world that already envelops them. In this important essay, he wrote: Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology. . . the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing, America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real? . . . Here the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace.54 Carpentier, born to French parents in Cuba in 1904, spent eleven years in Paris from 1928-1939, where he was introduced to Andr´e Breton, Paul Eluard and other Surrealists.55 Since his years of association with the Parisian avant-garde overlapped with Varo’s, and since they both worked to fight fascism in Spain, it is likely that their paths crossed throughout the 1930s. Varo must have been familiar with the essay that he published in 1949, only two years before she entered her most prolific years, for in her own writings, she too mentions Latin America’s magic, which she was seeing through foreign eyes. Though she said in an interview “I think that I would paint the same way in any location in the world,” it seems that Mexico’s intangible real maravilloso, so powerfully outlined by Carpentier, greatly affected her artistic vision, perhaps causing her to return to de Chirico in an effort to depict the strangeness she encountered in her adopted homeland.56 Though many artists were affected by the work of Giorgio de Chirico, either directly or indirectly, through magic realism or surrealism, Varo represents a direct link between his work and the Latin American magic realist tradition. She initially began replicating his paintings for economic survival, but she emerged from this experience haunted by the bewildering realms represented in those paintings and willingly transposed elements of his vision into her own. As Varo matured into a selfproclaimed “Mexican” artist, de Chirico’s metaphysical themes, iconography and methodology evolved through her, enabling her to convey her own story, and that of some of her female contemporaries. She built upon de Chirico’s blend of reality, fantasy and precision to depict the eccentricities of her daily life as a European woman transplanted in a world tinged by traces of unfamiliar pre-Columbian history. De Chirico’s metaphysical works, so often considered enigmatic and melancholy, established a bridge between Varo’s European past and her Mexican present by connecting her former Surrealist identity to the marvelous reality she experienced in her new surroundings. As her works become increasingly well-known and begin to enter more American collections, it is possible that a true Varo may one day hang beside the artist’s fake de Chirico in Cleveland.

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Endnotes 1 Information regarding the painting’s authentication and limited provenance is available in William H. Robinson, “De Chirico Forgeries: The Treachery of the Surrealists” IFAR Journal Vol. 4, No. 1, 2001. According to Robinson, curator of modern art at Cleveland, the museum purchased the work from Bernard Poissonier, an important de Chirico collector, who had owned the painting since at least 1952. At a prior point, Metaphysical Interior was also owned by Paul Eluard, but it is unclear whether Poissonier obtained it directly from Eluard himself. In an email correspondence between myself and Robinson, he confirmed that no additional information has been found regarding the provenance of this work since the publication of his article in 2001. 2 For more information and images of the Ferrara paintings see Paolo Baladacci, de Chirico: The Metaphysical Period 1888-1919. Translated by Jeffrey Jennings, (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1997), pp. 298382. 3 Baldacci, 317. 4 The Surrealists discovered de Chirico through Breton, who first saw the artist’s painting The Child’s Brain hanging in Paul Guillaume’s gallery in 1918. Intrigued, Breton jumped off the bus to get a closer look and found what he believed to be a “model for painting dreams.” Breton and Eluard soon began to collect early de Chirico’s and Eluard even traveled to Rome in 1923 to court de Chirico and purchase paintings from the artist himself. For more information on de Chirico’s complicated relationship with the Surrealists see: Karen Kundig, “Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealism and Neoromanticism” in Giorgio de Chirico and America, pp 97-106. 5 Robinson, 12. 6 For a more thorough history of de Chirico forgeries see Paolo Baldacci and Wiland Schmied, Giorgio De Chirico: Betraying the Muse, De Chirico and the Surrealists, (London: Finarte, 1994). 7 Robinson mentions how, ironically, many of these fake de Chiricos were purchased by wealthy German collectors with Nazi sympathies. Thus the same sorts of paintings were enjoyed by both Nazi supporters and their detractors, even if for dissimilar reasons. On another interesting note, Dom´ınguez used his forgery skills to create false identity papers in Paris after 1943 (p.17). 8 For more information about this attribution, see Baldacci and Schmied. 9 Robinson, 15. 10 Robinson, 15. 11 Gunther Gerszo mentioned this in an interview with Janet Kaplan, and he is quoted in: Janet Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, (New York: Abeville Press Publishers, 2000), 64. It should be noted that although others have discussed Varo in articles or studied her work for exhibition catalogues, Kaplan was the first art historian to write a monograph on Varo, and this paper is indebted to her extensive research and excellent reproduction of images. 46

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Ibid, 64. Ibid, 82. 14 Susan Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, (Vermont: Lund Humphries, 2004), 57. For more information, also see Janet Kaplan’s book, which mentions that it was extraordinary for the Mexican government to admit so many European e´ migr´es at a time when it was celebrating its Indian roots; it is even more remarkable that many of these immigrants were Spanish in a country that generally mistrusted Spaniards. 15 Remedios Varo, Cartas, Textos, y Otros Sue˜nos, (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Tlaxcala, 1994), 14. 16 Janet Kaplan explains that, due to financial difficulties, Varo was not able to spend much time working on her own art during her first ten years in Mexico; instead, she worked on advertising campaigns for the pharmaceutical company Casa Bayer in order to earn a living. She was only able to devote herself to her art after marrying Austrian author Walter Gruen, who supported her financially. 17 While growing up in Madrid, Varo spent much time at the Prado, where she saw many works by Bosch and other Renaissance painters. The artist’s childhood will be discussed later in this essay, but for more information see Janet Kaplan’s monograph, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, (New York: Abeville Press Publishers, 2000). 18 Varo, 68. 19 Fariba Bogzaran, “The Oneiric Key: Dreams of Alchemy,” in Margarita de Orellana, ed., Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo, (Mexico City: Artes de M´exico, 2008), 172. Though Bogzaran mentions de Chirico, she does so in a very different context than I do here. Bogzaran is interested in studying the connection between Varo’s dreams and her paintings, and de Chirico becomes a logical link since the Surrealists viewed his early works as models for dream painting. 20 Roh and Arnason’s contentions will be outlined in detail below. One should note that many literary scholars and art historians refer to magic realism as a “trend” or “tendency” rather than a cohesive movement. Art historian Jeffrey Wechsler argues that there is no need for an allencompassing framework or definition of the movement, because “imaginative realism has happened with different people in different times and places throughout history.” See Jeffrey Wechsler, “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, (Winter, 1985), 293. 21 Janet A. Kaplan, “Remedios Varo,” Femenist Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1987), 40. 22 All biographical information on Varo can be found in Kaplan’s book, but for a concise biographical sketch see: Luis-Martin Lozano, The Magic of Remedios Varo, exhibition catalogue. Translated by Elizabeth Goldson and Liliana Valenzuela. (Washington D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2000), 143-5. 13

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De Chirico, by contrast, reached an accommodation with Fascism, though he was never an overt supporter. In the end, he too fled France in 1940 after his and his brother’s works became targets of an anti-Semitic, anti-modernist campaign. 24 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 9. Kaplan argues that Varo incorporates travel into her paintings because of her experience with personal exile, but one could also view the theme of displacement more universally. Both readings are accurate and they are not mutually exclusive. This essay attempts to reconcile these two interpretations in different aspects of Varo’s work. While some matters will be read through the lens of her biography, others will be considered more generally. 25 Though most Varo scholars do not note de Chirico’s influence on her art, those writers who do discuss it fail to delve into the biographical parallels between the two artists. Kaplan comes closest when she mentions that both had engineer fathers who forced the artists to travel as children, but she does not draw attention to any other similarities in the artists’ backgrounds. 26 Lois Parkinson Zamora, “The Magic Tables of Isabel Allende and Remedios Varo” Comparative Literature, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), 118. 27 Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, translated by Margaret Crosland. (London: Peter Owen, Ltd., 1971), 3-15. 28 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 15-16. 29 Lozano, 143-5. 30 Quoted in Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 9. 31 Quoted in Ibid, 7. 32 Kaplan does compare Varo’s use of architecture and space to de Chirico’s in her short discussion of the two artists, in Unexpected Journeys, 207-8. 33 Parkinson Zamora, “Magic Tables,” 140. 34 Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 131. To elaborate upon Chadwick’s claim, I would suggest that perhaps by the time she created this image at the age of fifty, she had resigned herself to a life without children and seemed grateful to have escaped their trappings. Conversely, this image could represent Varo’s longing for a child, as the woman who closely resembles the artist is forced to care for an expressionless moon–a symbol of femininity–rather than a human being. 35 Tere Arcq carefully examines Varo’s involvement with Gurdjieff’s teachings in her essay, “The Esoteric Key: In Search of the Miraculous,” in The Five Keys (pp. 19-87). Arcq postulates that Varo may have met Gurdjieff when working with the Surrealists in the mid 1930’s, but she locates the influence of Gurdjieff’s ideas on Varo’s artistic output in a work of 1945, entitled Icon, which consists of an ogival wooden box with two doors. The interior painting explores notions of time, the universe and the interconnection of earth and the cosmos using Gurdjieff’s symbolism and motifs that Varo will repeat throughout her oeuvre. Arcq goes on to interpret many of Varo’s works through this occult lens. 48

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Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Tables,”134. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, trans. Henlen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 45. 38 Jeffrey Wechsler, “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, The Visionary Impulse: An American Tendency. (Winter, 1985), 296. 39 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 208. Kaplan mentions some of these works when she briefly links Varo with de Chirico stylistically, but does not analyze the paintings in depth, nor does she discuss their larger meanings within the oeuvres of the artists. Tere Arcq, on the other hand, argues for a more Gurdjieffian reading of these works, stating that these multiple perspectives comprise an attempt to capture the entire world in one picture. 40 Deborah J. Haynes, “The Art of Remedios Varo: Issues of Gender Ambiguity and Religious Meaning,” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (SpringSummer, 1995), 28. 41 Haynes, 27. 42 Varo, Cartas, 86-7. 43 Natalie Angier, “Scientific Epiphanies Celebrated on Canvas,” The New York Times, April 11, 2000. 44 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 124 45 Chadwick, 14. 46 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 180. 47 Angier, 2 48 Quoted in Wechsler, 297. 49 Quoted in Simkin, Scott, “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer 1988), 144. 50 Arnason’s text is quoted in Wechsler, 293. 51 Ibid, 294. 52 Founded in 1923 by Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revista de Occidente aims to disseminate important literary and artistic ideas throughout the Spanish speaking world. In general, it brings ideas from Europe, Spain specifically, to Latin America. It is still published eleven times annually. 53 Carpentier became closely associated with the Surrealists while he lived in Paris from 1928-1939, but he broke with the movement in the late 1930s. As he formulated his notions about Latin America’s uniquely marvelous qualities, he began to view Surrealism as contrived, and Carpentier’s thinly veiled criticism of the movement is readily apparent in his writings of the 1940s. For more information about Carpentier’s background and his involvement with the Surrealists, see Roberto Gonz´alez Echevarr´ıa, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 54 Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magic Realism: Theory, History and Community, ed. Wendy B. Farris and Lois Parkinson Zamora, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), 88. 55 Gonz´alez Echevarr´ıa, 58-65. 56 Varo said this when asked if Mexico influenced her painting, Cartas, 67. 37

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Bibliography Aberth, Susan. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Vermont: Lund Humphries, 2004. Agos´ın, Marjorie. A Woman’s Gaze: Latin American Women Artists. New York: White Pine Press, 1998. Angier, Natalie. “Scientific Epiphanies Celebrated on Canvas,” The New York Times, April 11, 2000. Arcq, Teresa. E-mail messages to author, April 6-8, 2008. Baldacci, Paolo. De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period 1888-1919. Translated by Jeffrey Jennings. Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1997. Baldacci, Paolo and Wieland Schmied. Giorgio De Chirico: Betraying the Muse, De Chirico and the Surrealists. London: Finarte, 1994. Braun, Emily, ed. Giorgio de Chirico and America. New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York; Rome: Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico; Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1996. Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America,” orig. 1949. Reproduced in English in Faris and Zamora (pp. 75-88). ——. “Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” published in Spanish in 1975. Reproduced in English in Faris and Zamora (pp. 90-105). Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. de Chirico, Giorgio. The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico. Translated by Margaret Crosland. London: Peter Own, Ltd, 1971. de Orellana, Margarita, ed. Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo. Mexico City: Artes de M´exico, 2008. Faris, Wendy B. and Lois Parkinson Zamora, eds., Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995. Gonz´alez Echevarr´ıa, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Haynes, Deborah J. “The Art of Remedios Varo: Issues of Gender Ambiguity and Religious Meaning,” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring-Summer, 1995), pp. 26-32. Kaplan, Janet A. “Remedios Varo,” Femenist Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 38-48. ——. Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2000 Levy, Julien. Memoir of an Art Gallery. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Lozano, Luis-Martin. The Magic of Remedios Varo. Translated by Elizabeth Goldson and Liliana Valenzuela. Washington D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2000. Menton, Seymour. “Jorge Luis Borges, Magic Realist,” Hispanic Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), 441-426. Merjian, Ara. “Like a Messenger, to the Deep,” catalogue essay in The Talismanic Lens: Leonora Carrington. San Francisco: Frey Norris Gallery, 2008. ——. E-mail messages to author, March 6-15, 2008. 50

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Overstreet, Richard. E-mail messages to author, March 17-20, 2008. Paz, Octavio. Alternating Current. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Robinson, William H, “De Chirico Forgeries: The Treachery of the Surrealists” IFAR Journal Vol. 4, No. 1, 2001. pp. 10-17 ——. E-mail messages to author, March 16–22, 2010. Roh, Franz. “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism” 1925, except reproduced in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community, (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995). ——. German Painting in the Twentieth Century. Munich: F. Bruckmann Verlag Publishing, 1958. Reprinted in English, 1968. Rubin, William, ed. De Chirico. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982. Simkins, Scott, “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2. (Summer, 1988) pp. 140-154. Varo, Remedios. Cartas, Textos, y Otros Sue˜nos, Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Tlaxcala, 1994. Wechsler, Jeffrey, “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, (Winter, 1985), pp. 293-298. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “The Magical Tables of Isabel Allende and Remedios Varo,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 44, No. 2. (Spring, 1992), pp. 113-143.

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