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拍品專文
“I do not believe that in its essence [Surrealism] can decline since it is a sentiment inherent to man,” Varo once reflected. “Surrealism has contributed to art in the same way that psychoanalysis has contributed to the exploration of the subconscious” (quoted in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 2000, p. 206). Active among Barcelona’s avant-garde until the collapse of the Spanish Republic, Varo moved to Paris in 1937 with the French poet Benjamin Péret and became ensconced in the Surrealist circle, led by André Breton. If she initially played the passive role of femme-enfant, she soon emerged as a creative force within the movement, participating in its collaborative games and its deep studies of esoterica and the occult. Varo fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow expatriates Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon she became enamored with the land that Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” In Caballero encantado, an artful image of creation and transfiguration, Varo shows the evolution of her Surrealist imagination and the essential animism of her world.
“Varo believed in the potent interdependence of people as well as of objects,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “Varo felt that all humanity was ‘bound by a cosmic, mysterious destiny,’ by an interconnectedness that she saw as the magic underlying existence. It was a magic she believed in as life’s motive force.” A medley of hybrid and enchanted figures inhabit her paintings, but she found particular poignance in the personification of birds—as scientist-artist in Creación de las aves (1957; Ovalle, no. 169), as huntress in Caza nocturna (1958; Ovalle, no. 209), and suggestively as knight in the present Caballero encantado. For Caballero encantado, as well as the other two works that share the same title, Varo found additional, and proto-Surrealist source material in works by Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya. “From her earliest years all Varo wanted to look at was Bosch, always Bosch,” recalled her last husband, Walter Gruen. “Like Bosch, Varo stayed close to nature,” Kaplan explains, drawing a comparison between the “variety of identifiable species of birds, oversize in comparison to their human companions” in El trovador (1959; Ovalle, no. 251) and the fantastical menagerie portrayed in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights circa 1490-1500. “This motif of the flying creature, used repeatedly in [Goya’s] Caprichos, his Disparates, and his drawings, is echoed in a number of her works,” Kaplan continues. “Both Goya and Varo also invented hybrid creatures capable of flight. . . . Both their creatures seem disturbingly human, despite their animal parts” (Unexpected Journeys, op. cit., pp. 181, 192-193, 201-202).
Varo’s painting never veers toward the violence seen in the Old Masters, and Caballero encantado suggests a more playful anthropomorphism and imaginative flight of fancy. The avian figure appears here in classic three-quarter view, its human hands perched delicately upon a tree branch and its chest emblazoned with the French fleur-de-lis. Its exquisite plumage, painted with a single-haired brush, falls in a chrysalis-like shape around its body, a form echoed across Varo’s oeuvre. In the second Caballero encantado from 1961, the figure wears a similarly flecked cape but bears a more human countenance and a wheeled, tail-like appendage; the third painting in the series, from 1962 and now in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, shows the hybrid figure fully in flight.
The present Caballero encantado originally belonged to Lola Álvarez Bravo, the pioneering modernist photographer. Varo participated in the group exhibition, Salón Annual Frida Kahlo, which Álvarez Bravo held at her Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in 1956.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Varo believed in the potent interdependence of people as well as of objects,” notes art historian Janet Kaplan. “Varo felt that all humanity was ‘bound by a cosmic, mysterious destiny,’ by an interconnectedness that she saw as the magic underlying existence. It was a magic she believed in as life’s motive force.” A medley of hybrid and enchanted figures inhabit her paintings, but she found particular poignance in the personification of birds—as scientist-artist in Creación de las aves (1957; Ovalle, no. 169), as huntress in Caza nocturna (1958; Ovalle, no. 209), and suggestively as knight in the present Caballero encantado. For Caballero encantado, as well as the other two works that share the same title, Varo found additional, and proto-Surrealist source material in works by Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya. “From her earliest years all Varo wanted to look at was Bosch, always Bosch,” recalled her last husband, Walter Gruen. “Like Bosch, Varo stayed close to nature,” Kaplan explains, drawing a comparison between the “variety of identifiable species of birds, oversize in comparison to their human companions” in El trovador (1959; Ovalle, no. 251) and the fantastical menagerie portrayed in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights circa 1490-1500. “This motif of the flying creature, used repeatedly in [Goya’s] Caprichos, his Disparates, and his drawings, is echoed in a number of her works,” Kaplan continues. “Both Goya and Varo also invented hybrid creatures capable of flight. . . . Both their creatures seem disturbingly human, despite their animal parts” (Unexpected Journeys, op. cit., pp. 181, 192-193, 201-202).
Varo’s painting never veers toward the violence seen in the Old Masters, and Caballero encantado suggests a more playful anthropomorphism and imaginative flight of fancy. The avian figure appears here in classic three-quarter view, its human hands perched delicately upon a tree branch and its chest emblazoned with the French fleur-de-lis. Its exquisite plumage, painted with a single-haired brush, falls in a chrysalis-like shape around its body, a form echoed across Varo’s oeuvre. In the second Caballero encantado from 1961, the figure wears a similarly flecked cape but bears a more human countenance and a wheeled, tail-like appendage; the third painting in the series, from 1962 and now in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, shows the hybrid figure fully in flight.
The present Caballero encantado originally belonged to Lola Álvarez Bravo, the pioneering modernist photographer. Varo participated in the group exhibition, Salón Annual Frida Kahlo, which Álvarez Bravo held at her Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in 1956.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park