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Lot Essay
"As compelling as Varo found the intuitive and irrational aspects of mystical philosophies, she was also attracted to the logic and order of scientific investigation." - Janet Kaplan
"Remedios Varo, ah, how the painting of that woman enchants me!” raved Diego Rivera on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at Mexico City’s Galería Diana, in 1956. A resounding success, the show included major works—e.g., El malabarista (El juglar) (1956; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the present Revelación—and confirmed Varo’s ascendance within postwar circles of Latin American and Surrealist painting. “[Varo] has been consecrated as a sublime mistress of the plastic arts,” declared critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, “so that from now on her name ought to be inscribed with gold letters in the sacred phylacteries where those of true worth in art history are seated” (in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, p. 133). Varo had fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow expatriates Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon, she became enamored with the land that André Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” She supported herself with a variety of commercial work during her first decade in Mexico, notably by making illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer; not until her marriage to the Austrian émigré Walter Gruen, in 1952, did she have the wherewithal to devote herself fully to painting. The works that she made beginning in the mid-1950s—among them Armonía (1956) and Creación con rayos astrales (1955)—mark the pinnacle of her career and manifest the technical mastery and speculative imagination for which she is renowned.
An avid student of the physical sciences, Varo probed the thresholds of the natural and the supernatural in her mature work—not least in the superb Revelación, which marvelously renders the flow and flux of time. “As compelling as Varo found the intuitive and irrational aspects of mystical philosophies, she was also attracted to the logic and order of scientific investigation,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “Still very much the engineer’s daughter, she read science as avidly as metaphysics, and her personal journey was propelled as much by her interest in scientific phenomena as by her study of the mystics. Turning to the sciences, she recognized in the newest developments in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and botany infinite possibilities for further exploration. She made careful distinction, however, between the kinds of scientific practice that she trusted and those that she did not, warning in a number of her paintings”—among them Planta insumisa (1961) and the sculpture Homo rodans (1959)—“against manipulative abuses of authority, myopic belief in facts, infatuation with gadgetry, and misguided attempts to conquer nature. Seeing scientific inquiry as analogous to spiritual pursuit, she felt that science must adopt the role not of domination but of harmony with natural forces” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 172).
Varo foregrounds the relativity of time, its dilation and even its multidimensionality, across the eight clockfaces that encircle the pensive, and seemingly wonderstruck protagonist of Revelación. “A clockmaker at his bench is surrounded by grandfather clocks, each of which shows the same time but contains a figure wearing a different period costume,” Kaplan explains. “Suddenly, a whirling disk spins into his window and he looks up, as Varo described it, with ‘an expression of astonishment and illumination’ to find a fundamentally new vision of how time works. The clockmaker ‘represents our ordinary time,’ and all of his timepieces operate within the Newtonian construct of a ‘clockwork universe,’ a system of absolutes in which the flow of time is uniform and unchanging.” If Newton had postulated the universe as a perfect mechanical clock, predictably controlled by the laws of physics, Varo was increasingly attuned to contemporary theories about the quantum nature of space-time. “The vision that has caught the clockmaker by surprise and sent his spare parts crashing to the floor represents the Einsteinian revelation that time is relative,” Kaplan continues. “Since each observer in each place will experience it differently, according to his own frame of reference, time is not a fixed moment to be trapped within a clock” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 174-75).
"Varo’s own engagement with the fourth dimension would be defining for her art and worldview." - Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq
“Varo’s own engagement with the fourth dimension would be defining for her art and worldview,” note curators Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq. “In ways that were uniquely her own, Varo would become fascinated with the manipulation of time, in some cases considering the work of visionary watchmakers,” as in Revelación (“Spirit, Matter, Story, Soul,” Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, p. 25). In its preoccupation with time, Revelación exists within a storied Surrealist lineage that stretches back to Salvador Dalí’s limp watches—said to describe “the Camembert of time”—in The Persistence of Memory (1931; The Museum of Modern Art) and to René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938; The Art Institute of Chicago). Yet the relativity of time and space takes on new postwar (and post-atomic) poignancy in Revelación: Varo approaches the subject with a sense of both Surrealist wonder and technoscientific critique, probing simultaneous visions of history within the pensive spaces of her sagacious clocks. From his upper-story studio, the stunned clockmaker sits motionless while the objects around him move seemingly of their own volition—pendulums swing wildly; clock wheels spin from table to ground—as if caught in a ripple of space and time. Varo had pondered the space-time continuum in Tejido espacio-tiempo (1954), and she would later postulate the reversibility of time in Naturaleza muerta resucitando (1963; The Art Institute of Chicago) and the bending of space in Fenómeno de ingravidez (1963). In Revelacíon, she stages the modern paradigm shift in physics with suitably metaphysical flair and in her magnificent mature style: animate and inhabited clocks—each a windowed world unto itself—tell the same (and simultaneously different) time.
Yet in this enchanted setting, the mysteries of time yield to mysteries of a higher order, and Varo tempers scientific learning (and Surrealist liberties) with allusions to the divine. Glimmering gossamer in the starlight, the spherical “revelation” enters the studio through an open window, recalling the traditional iconography of the Annunciation, in which the archangel Gabriel appears before the Virgin Mary in a ray of heavenly light. Here, the silvery orb galvanizes the room, setting in motion the weights and wheels of the clocks and transfixing the young clockmaker, whose illuminated face tilts upward in the shock of disbelief. This aura of revelation is amplified by the meticulously painted surface, whose “exquisitely controlled details” exemplify Varo’s tremendous technical dexterity. “Painting with thin glazes of oil and layers of varnish, she built up luminous color surfaces to which she added minute details, using a single-hair brush for precision,” Kaplan explains. “She also blew and blotted paint”—seen here in the starlit sky visible through the window—“and added further details and highlights by scratching into the surface,” a technique seen in the fine crosshatching that covers the walls, woodgrain, and tented ceiling (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 125). Inasmuch as the setting is suggestively arboreal, painted in a muted palette of warm browns and moss green, Varo plays havoc with the laws of nature: stringy weeds grow along a wall, and a long-haired cat—perhaps singularly nonplussed by the goings-on—sits watch over a smoldering, volcanic confection.
A noted cat-lover who took in many a stray, Varo saw divinity in cats, her chosen Surrealist alter-ego. She posited a preternatural feline sensibility in numerous works: sparks literally fly in Simpatía (La Rabia del gato) (1955), and in Mimetismo (1960) a cat bears stunned witness to an unwitting metamorphosis. In The Days of Gabino Barreda Street (1944), Gunther Gerzso’s tribute to the expatriate Surrealist community in Mexico City, Varo characteristically appears in a cat’s-eye mask, three cats peeking out from the folds of her costume. The sagacious cat who appears in the foreground of Revelación may well refer to one of her own. “One afternoon, when I was about five years old, Leonora and I walked down Avenida Álvaro Obregón on our way to Remedios Varo’s small but inviting flat,” recalled Gabriel Weisz Carrington. “While she and my mother gossiped and smoked, laughing intermittently, I made friends with her lovely grey cats, who would leap out and then vanish, flashing their soft tails. One moment they’d tread cautiously with their velvet paws, the next slide at top speed over the wooden floorboards, spurred on by infinite curiosity. They each had an enigmatic personality. . . . They all had something to say” (The Invisible Painting: My Memoir of Leonora Carrington, Manchester, 2021, p. 19).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
"Remedios Varo, ah, how the painting of that woman enchants me!” raved Diego Rivera on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at Mexico City’s Galería Diana, in 1956. A resounding success, the show included major works—e.g., El malabarista (El juglar) (1956; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the present Revelación—and confirmed Varo’s ascendance within postwar circles of Latin American and Surrealist painting. “[Varo] has been consecrated as a sublime mistress of the plastic arts,” declared critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, “so that from now on her name ought to be inscribed with gold letters in the sacred phylacteries where those of true worth in art history are seated” (in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, p. 133). Varo had fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow expatriates Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon, she became enamored with the land that André Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” She supported herself with a variety of commercial work during her first decade in Mexico, notably by making illustrations for the pharmaceutical firm Casa Bayer; not until her marriage to the Austrian émigré Walter Gruen, in 1952, did she have the wherewithal to devote herself fully to painting. The works that she made beginning in the mid-1950s—among them Armonía (1956) and Creación con rayos astrales (1955)—mark the pinnacle of her career and manifest the technical mastery and speculative imagination for which she is renowned.
An avid student of the physical sciences, Varo probed the thresholds of the natural and the supernatural in her mature work—not least in the superb Revelación, which marvelously renders the flow and flux of time. “As compelling as Varo found the intuitive and irrational aspects of mystical philosophies, she was also attracted to the logic and order of scientific investigation,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “Still very much the engineer’s daughter, she read science as avidly as metaphysics, and her personal journey was propelled as much by her interest in scientific phenomena as by her study of the mystics. Turning to the sciences, she recognized in the newest developments in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and botany infinite possibilities for further exploration. She made careful distinction, however, between the kinds of scientific practice that she trusted and those that she did not, warning in a number of her paintings”—among them Planta insumisa (1961) and the sculpture Homo rodans (1959)—“against manipulative abuses of authority, myopic belief in facts, infatuation with gadgetry, and misguided attempts to conquer nature. Seeing scientific inquiry as analogous to spiritual pursuit, she felt that science must adopt the role not of domination but of harmony with natural forces” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 172).
Varo foregrounds the relativity of time, its dilation and even its multidimensionality, across the eight clockfaces that encircle the pensive, and seemingly wonderstruck protagonist of Revelación. “A clockmaker at his bench is surrounded by grandfather clocks, each of which shows the same time but contains a figure wearing a different period costume,” Kaplan explains. “Suddenly, a whirling disk spins into his window and he looks up, as Varo described it, with ‘an expression of astonishment and illumination’ to find a fundamentally new vision of how time works. The clockmaker ‘represents our ordinary time,’ and all of his timepieces operate within the Newtonian construct of a ‘clockwork universe,’ a system of absolutes in which the flow of time is uniform and unchanging.” If Newton had postulated the universe as a perfect mechanical clock, predictably controlled by the laws of physics, Varo was increasingly attuned to contemporary theories about the quantum nature of space-time. “The vision that has caught the clockmaker by surprise and sent his spare parts crashing to the floor represents the Einsteinian revelation that time is relative,” Kaplan continues. “Since each observer in each place will experience it differently, according to his own frame of reference, time is not a fixed moment to be trapped within a clock” (J. Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 174-75).
"Varo’s own engagement with the fourth dimension would be defining for her art and worldview." - Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq
“Varo’s own engagement with the fourth dimension would be defining for her art and worldview,” note curators Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq. “In ways that were uniquely her own, Varo would become fascinated with the manipulation of time, in some cases considering the work of visionary watchmakers,” as in Revelación (“Spirit, Matter, Story, Soul,” Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2023, p. 25). In its preoccupation with time, Revelación exists within a storied Surrealist lineage that stretches back to Salvador Dalí’s limp watches—said to describe “the Camembert of time”—in The Persistence of Memory (1931; The Museum of Modern Art) and to René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938; The Art Institute of Chicago). Yet the relativity of time and space takes on new postwar (and post-atomic) poignancy in Revelación: Varo approaches the subject with a sense of both Surrealist wonder and technoscientific critique, probing simultaneous visions of history within the pensive spaces of her sagacious clocks. From his upper-story studio, the stunned clockmaker sits motionless while the objects around him move seemingly of their own volition—pendulums swing wildly; clock wheels spin from table to ground—as if caught in a ripple of space and time. Varo had pondered the space-time continuum in Tejido espacio-tiempo (1954), and she would later postulate the reversibility of time in Naturaleza muerta resucitando (1963; The Art Institute of Chicago) and the bending of space in Fenómeno de ingravidez (1963). In Revelacíon, she stages the modern paradigm shift in physics with suitably metaphysical flair and in her magnificent mature style: animate and inhabited clocks—each a windowed world unto itself—tell the same (and simultaneously different) time.
Yet in this enchanted setting, the mysteries of time yield to mysteries of a higher order, and Varo tempers scientific learning (and Surrealist liberties) with allusions to the divine. Glimmering gossamer in the starlight, the spherical “revelation” enters the studio through an open window, recalling the traditional iconography of the Annunciation, in which the archangel Gabriel appears before the Virgin Mary in a ray of heavenly light. Here, the silvery orb galvanizes the room, setting in motion the weights and wheels of the clocks and transfixing the young clockmaker, whose illuminated face tilts upward in the shock of disbelief. This aura of revelation is amplified by the meticulously painted surface, whose “exquisitely controlled details” exemplify Varo’s tremendous technical dexterity. “Painting with thin glazes of oil and layers of varnish, she built up luminous color surfaces to which she added minute details, using a single-hair brush for precision,” Kaplan explains. “She also blew and blotted paint”—seen here in the starlit sky visible through the window—“and added further details and highlights by scratching into the surface,” a technique seen in the fine crosshatching that covers the walls, woodgrain, and tented ceiling (J. Kaplan, op. cit., p. 125). Inasmuch as the setting is suggestively arboreal, painted in a muted palette of warm browns and moss green, Varo plays havoc with the laws of nature: stringy weeds grow along a wall, and a long-haired cat—perhaps singularly nonplussed by the goings-on—sits watch over a smoldering, volcanic confection.
A noted cat-lover who took in many a stray, Varo saw divinity in cats, her chosen Surrealist alter-ego. She posited a preternatural feline sensibility in numerous works: sparks literally fly in Simpatía (La Rabia del gato) (1955), and in Mimetismo (1960) a cat bears stunned witness to an unwitting metamorphosis. In The Days of Gabino Barreda Street (1944), Gunther Gerzso’s tribute to the expatriate Surrealist community in Mexico City, Varo characteristically appears in a cat’s-eye mask, three cats peeking out from the folds of her costume. The sagacious cat who appears in the foreground of Revelación may well refer to one of her own. “One afternoon, when I was about five years old, Leonora and I walked down Avenida Álvaro Obregón on our way to Remedios Varo’s small but inviting flat,” recalled Gabriel Weisz Carrington. “While she and my mother gossiped and smoked, laughing intermittently, I made friends with her lovely grey cats, who would leap out and then vanish, flashing their soft tails. One moment they’d tread cautiously with their velvet paws, the next slide at top speed over the wooden floorboards, spurred on by infinite curiosity. They each had an enigmatic personality. . . . They all had something to say” (The Invisible Painting: My Memoir of Leonora Carrington, Manchester, 2021, p. 19).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park