Remedios Varo Uranga (December 16, 1908 – October 8, 1963) was a Spanish-Mexican para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, Spain in 1908.[1] Her birth helped her mother get over the death of another daughter, which is the reason behind the name.[2] In 1924 she studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement. She met her second husband (after her death it was discovered that she had never divorced her first husband, painter Gerardo Lizarraga), the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. There she was a member of the art group Logicophobiste. They were introduced through a mutual friendship with the Surrealist artist Oscar Domínguez. Due to her Republican ties, her 1937 move to Paris with Péret ensured that she would never be able to return to Francos Spain. She was forced into exile from Paris during the German occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She initially considered Mexico a temporary haven, but would remain in Mexico for the rest of her life. In Mexico, she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but her strongest ties were to other exiles and expatriates, notably the English painter Leonora Carrington and the French pilot and adventurer, Jean Nicolle. Her third, and last, important relationship was to Walter Gruen, an Austrian who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe. Gruen believed fiercely in Varo, and he gave her the support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting. After 1949 Varo developed her mature style, which remains beautifully enigmatic and instantly recognizable. She often worked in oil on masonite panels she prepared herself. Although her colors have the blended resonance of the oil medium, her brushwork often involved many fine strokes of paint laid closely together—a technique more reminiscent of egg tempera. She died at the height of her career from a heart attack in Mexico City in 1963. Currently, the ownership of 39 of her paintings, first loaned and then given by Gruen to Mexico Citys Museum of Modern Art in 1999 is in dispute. Varos niece Beatriz Varo Jiménez of Valencia, Spain, claims Gruen had no rights to those works. Gruen, now 91, claims he inherited no works from Varo, who died intestate. Varo never divorced the husband she married in Spain in 1930: a court denied Gruens request in 1992 to be given inheritance rights as the artists common-law husband. He and his wife, Alexandra, whom he married in 1965, acquired all the paintings given to the museum on the open market after Varos death and are therefore his to give. He said he gave the only painting in Varos studio at the time of her death, Still Life Reviving, to the artists mother. The work was auctioned at Sothebys New York in 1994 for $574,000.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 16:30:02 +0000
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