The Re-enchantment of Surrealism: Remedios Varo’s Visionary Artists

Abstract

The visionary prowess of the artist was established, in both the visual and verbal arts, by the Symbolists in fin-de-siècle France. This article asserts a continuity between the avowed spiritual dimension of their work and the visionary power of surrealist art asserted—despite strong resistance from the centre—by a group of renegade surrealists in the 1920s and beyond. To do so, it explores the representations of artists that Spanish-born Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908–1963) depicts in her work, demonstrating how they might be better understood when analysed in relation to Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s (1866?–1949) esoteric aesthetics. In doing so, it reveals a neglected, postsecular trajectory in the history of Surrealism.

Key words:

• Remedios Varo
• Surrealism
• Mysticism
• Le Grand Jeu
• Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff
• Peter Demianovich Ouspensky
• Modernity
• Western Esotericism

Notes

1 See, for example, Odilon Redon’s 1879 lithograph Vision, in which the artist uncovers an aspect of reality normally left unseen. This piece and the rest of Redon’s Dans le rêve portfolio of lithographs can be viewed online as part of the online collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/192455> (accessed 20 June 2018).

2 Very few studies engage with this spiritual strand of Surrealism. Celia Rabinovitch, in Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), recognizes the religious impulse in Surrealism despite its secularity and presents it as a third-way approach, between the sacred and the profane. A shorter volume, Nadia Choucha’s Surrealism and the Occult (Oxford: Mandrake, 1991), places Surrealism in the context of esoteric currents inherited from Romanticism. This is also the case with Patrick Lepetit’s The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2014), which contains significantly more contextual information but is lacking in significant close analysis of surrealist works. More recently, Vivienne Brough-Evans, in her Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose (New York/London: Routledge, 2016), deals with the sacred as conceived by Georges Bataille and the other renegade surrealists of the Collège de Sociologie. The most thorough study of the occultation of Surrealism to date is Tessel M. Bauduin's Surrealism and the Occult: Occultism and Western Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U. P., 2014).

3 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977 [1^st ed. 1949]). Further references are to this edition and are given within parentheses within the body of the article.

4 For more examples of Varo’s use of mystical symbolism, see Ricki O’Rawe & Roberta Ann Quance, ‘Crossing the Threshold: Mysticism, Liminality, and Remedios Varo’s Bordando el manto terrestre (1961–62)’, Modern Languages Open (2016), <https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.138/> (accessed 22 March 2018).

5 The conflation of the spiritual and the scientific was central to New Religious Movements in the twentieth century. For example, the motto for Aleister Crowley’s journal The Equinox, set up to distribute the teachings of his new religion, Thelema, was ‘The method of science—the aim of religion’. See Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2013), 62. For more on the relationship between science and esotericism, see Jean-Pierre Laurant’s L’Esotérisme (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993).

6 Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo (New York: Abbeville, 1988), 129; and Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists of the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 194, 202 & 219. Analysing work from this period, Deborah Haynes notes that ‘Varo was unusual among the Surrealists for her explicit and persistent interest in religion’ (Deborah Haynes, ‘The Art of Remedios Varo: Issues of Gender Ambiguity and Religious Meaning’, Woman’s Art Journal, 16:1 [1995], 26–32 [p. 27]). For further work sympathetic to the diversity of Varo’s spiritual symbolism, see Rosa Ruis Gatell, ‘Armonía y creación en el cosmos de Remedios Varo’, in Remedios Varo: caminos del conocimiento, la creación y el exilio, ed. María José González Madrid & Rosa Rius Gatell (Madrid: Eutelequia, 2013), 77–99.

7 Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult, 27–28.

8 According to Melanie Nicholson, the language of the sacred, the mystical and the esoteric within Surrealism ‘was conceptualized not in orthodox religious terms (most of the original surrealists were agnostics or atheists), but in terms of the numinous, a notion popularized by Rudolf Otto’s seminal work The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (1917)’ (Melanie Nicholson, Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], 19).

9 Scholars have addressed postsecularity with different emphases, but all assert the increasing, but shifting, visibility and importance of religion and spirituality (by which I mean non-doctrinal approaches to a deity) within modernity and postmodernity. Two important studies are Jürgen Habermas, ‘Secularism’s Crisis of Faith: Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25 (2008), 17–29, and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 2007).

10 John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007), 6.

11 Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 171–72; Tere Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, in Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo, ed. Tere Arcq (México D.F.: Artes de México, 2008), 21–87. Gurdjieff’s teachings were mostly transmitted orally to his followers, who gathered in groups to learn and practise his techniques. He did record his teachings in an allegorical tale, which was published shortly after his death. See G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man (London: Arkana, 2000).

12 The role of the occult in Surrealism is contested. I do not mean to resolve it in this article, but to assert a surrealist prehistory that might elucidate Varo’s artistic journey. For a thorough and insightful discussion of the polemic, see the aforementioned Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult, and María José González Madrid, ‘Surrealismo y saberes mágicos en la obra de Remedios Varo’, doctoral thesis (Universitat de Barcelona, 2014).

13 There are of course myriad other exceptions to this assumption, from modernists that maintained or re-developed religious belief—the most famous of which is perhaps T. S. Eliot—to those whose relationship with religion refused the order of existing monolithic structures but who remained haunted by the mysterious and the supernatural. See, for example, Robert Havard’s investigation of the persistent influence of religion on the Spanish surrealists Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: Robert Havard, The Crucified Mind: Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain (London: Tamesis, 2001).

14 Roger Griffin, ‘Series Editor’s Preface’, in John Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), ix–xiv (p. xii). The relative absence of discussion about religion in modern art is beginning to be questioned by art historians. For an engaging reflection on this oversight, see the Introduction to Charlene Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–16.

15 Wolfgang Paalen, ‘Surprise and Inspiration’, in his Form and Sense, intro. by Martica Sawin (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013 [1^st ed. 1945]), 55–68 (p. 55).

16 Paalen, ‘Surprise and Inspiration’, 57.

17 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001 [1^st ed. 1905]).

18 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2014), 119; viii–ix.

19 Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 180–81.

20 As Marshal Berman writes: ‘to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’ (Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988], 15).

21 Wolfgang Paalen, ‘The New Image’, in Form and Sense, 37–54 (p. 39). See also the essay ‘Art and Science’, 83–94, in the same collection.

22 In this regard he stands in contrast to Theodor Adorno, who claimed in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ that ‘cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today’ (Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in his Prisms, trans. Samuel & Shierry Weber [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983], 17–34 [p. 34]).

23 Daniel Garza Usabiaga, ‘Anthropology in the Journals Dyn and El Hijo Pródigo’, in Surrealism in Latin America: ‛Vivísimo Muerto’, ed. Dawn Ades, Rita Eder & Graciela Speranza (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), 95–110 (p. 98). Dyn was run by Paalan in Mexico. Six issues were published between 1942 and 1945.

24 Interview with Raquel Tibol in 1957, quoted in Janet A. Kaplan, ‘Remedios Varo y el Surrealismo: una nueva mirada’, in Remedios Varo: caminos del conocimiento, ed. González Madrid & Rius Gatell, 15–36 (p. 17).

25 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Helen R. Lane & Richard Seaver (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1974), 3–47.

26 André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Lane & Seaver, 119–94 (p. 178).

27 Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)’, 123.

28 André Breton, ‘On Surrealism and Its Living Works (1952)’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Lane & Seaver, 295–394 (p. 304).

29 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, 10.

30 Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1970 [1^st ed. 1933]), 272.

31 Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, 313.

32 Spretnak, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, 6.

33 Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard, with an intro. by Roger Shattuck (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 157.

34 Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Howard, 172.

35 Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Howard, 157.

36 Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, 269.

37 Kathleen Rosenblatt, René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 136. Daumal lived and worked with Madame de Salzmann, who took over control of Gurdjieff’s teachings after his death, between 1933 and 1938. Gurdjieff himself often led the group in their studies (142).

38 Rosenblatt, René Daumal, 137.

39 There is no clear evidence that Varo and Daumal met, despite coinciding closely in interests, friends and, occasionally, even geographically. It is clear that Varo revered Daumal’s work, given her painting Ascensión al monte análogo (1960), named after Daumal’s Gurdjieffian novel Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidian and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, trans. Carol Cosman, with an intro. by Kathleen Ferrick & an afterword by Véra Daumal (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2004 [1^st ed. 1952]).

40 Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia U. P., 1990 [1^st ed. 1984]), 5.

41 All catalogue numbers, designated with the abbreviation CAT, are taken from Remedios Varo: catálogo razonado, ed. Walter Gruen & Ricardo Ovalle (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1994). The entire catalogue can be viewed online at <www.remedios-varo.com> (accessed 20 June 2018). Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent references are to this first edition of the catalogue.

42 Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism, 270. Orthodox Surrealism may also have inherited a suspicion of the occult from Freud, who described it as a ‘black mud tide’ (C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded & edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard & Clara Winston [New York: Vintage Books, 1989], 150).

43 Luis Martín Lozano, ‘Remedios Varo: una reflexión sobre el trabajo y los días de una pintora’, in Remedios Varo: catálogo razonado, ed. Walter Gruen & Ricardo Ovalle, 3ª ed. (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 2002), 43–73 (p. 63).

44 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 72.

45 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 69, 74.

46 Victor Brauner, ‘On the Fantastic in Painting, in Theatre’, in Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 67–69 (p. 67).

47 Ricki O’Rawe, ‘Remedios Varo’s Feminine, Spiritual Quest’, in Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon, ed. Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble & Tara Plunkett (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 111–28.

48 Chénieux-Gendron, Surrealism, trans. Folkenflik, 4–5; italics in the original.

49 For a detailed overview of Varo’s contact with the Fourth Way and its influence on her work, see Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 21–87. For a detailed reading of how it informs the visual vocabulary of her artistic search for Self, see my ‘ “Ruedas metafísicas”: “Personality” and “Essence” in Remedios Varo’s Paintings’, Hispanic Research Journal, 15:5 (2014), 445–62.

50 Michel de Salzmann, ‘G. I. Gurdjieff’’, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, 16 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1987), VI, 139–40 (p. 139). G. I. Gurdjieff was a spiritual teacher who was born Alexandropol (now Gyumri) in Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire. After travelling through Asia and the Middle East for twenty years, he returned to Russia in 1912 with a spiritual system designed to aid an individual’s search for an inalienable Self. He taught that to fulfil the spiritual potential of ‘real man’, one must work to develop inner harmony and self-consciousness. Aided by close followers, Gurdjieff’s teachings spread throughout Europe and America—North and South—despite the outbreak of war.

51 Ouspensky studied intensively with Gurdjieff between 1915 and 1918, but broke away from his formal teaching in 1924. He refrained from publishing his account of Gurdjieff’s teachings until after his death.

52 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension’, in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman et al. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 219–37 (p. 229).

53 P. D Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, trans. Claude Bragdon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 161–62; italics in the original.

54 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, trans. Bragdon, 83.

55 Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, trans. Bragdon, 331.

56 Anna T. Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’: A Modern Sufi Odyssey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 39.

57 Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 36.

58 Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 19.

59 Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 31.

60 Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 73.

61 John G. Bennett, quoted in Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 73–74.

62 A. R. Orage, ‘Talks with Katherine Mansfield’, The Century Magazine (New York) (November 1924); quoted in Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 43; italics in the original.

63 J. H. Matthews, The Surrealist Mind (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna U. P./London & Cranbury: Associated Univ. Presses, 1991), 72.

64 Orage, ‘Talks with Katherine Mansfield’; quoted in Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 43.

65 Walter Gruen, ‘Remedios Varo: nota biográfica’, in Remedios Varo: catálogo razonado, ed. Gruen & Ovalle, 41–49 (p. 47).

66 Isabel Castells, ‘Una entrevista inédita’, in Remedios Varo, Cartas, sueños y otros textos, intro. & notas de Isabel Castells (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1997), 67–68 (p. 67).

67 In the ‘Introduction’ to Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, ed. & trans. Michael Richardson & Krzystof Fijalkowski (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 1–18, Michael Richardson sketches the evolution of Surrealism, indicating the range of approaches designated by the term.

68 Anna Balakian, André Breton, Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford U. P., 1971), 211.

69 André Breton, Entretiens (1913–1952) (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 243.

70 Tara Emma Plunkett, ‘Self and Desire: Surrealism in the Images and Texts of Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington’, PhD thesis (Queen’s University Belfast, 2013).

71 See Lourdes Andrade, ‘De amores y desamores: relaciones de México con el surrealismo’, in El Surrealismo entre Viejo y Nuevo Mundo (Las Palmas: Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria/Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1989), 101–09 (p. 102).

72 Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘Gerzso and the Indo-American Gothic: From Eccentric Surrealism to Parallel Modernism’, in Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso, ed. Diana C. Du Pont (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 195–213 (p. 201).

73 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 33.

74 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 172.

75 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 172.

76 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 37. Other than her contact with Rodney Collin (reported by Arcq), much of Varo’s artistic development of Gurdjieff’s ideas was led by her contact with the British painter Christopher Fremantle, who had studied directly with Gurdjieff and had been instructed by Madame de Salzmann to lead the group in Mexico. See Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 35–36.

77 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 37.

78 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 37; quotation drawn from a personal interview carried out by Arcq.

79 Christopher Fremantle, On Attention: Talks, Essays and Letters Based on the Ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff, ed., with an intro., by Lillian Firestone (Denville: Indications, 1993).

80 Lillian Firestone, ‘Introduction’, in Fremantle, On Attention, ed. Firestone, i–vi (p. iv).

81 Firestone, ‘Introduction’, in Fremantle, On Attention, ed. Firestone, iv.

82 Varo was independently interested in Buddhism and her library contained a copy of writings by the Zen Buddhist teacher D. T. Suzuki. See Haynes, ‘The Art of Remedios Varo’, 28.

83 Juan Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage, foreword by Herbert Read (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002), 242.

84 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 12^th ed. (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999), 142.

85 Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 185.

86 Peter Marshall, The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy (London: Macmillan, 2001), 202.

87 Elizabeth Sánchez, ‘Creative Questers: Remedios Varo and the Narrator of Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos’, South Central Review, 23 (2006), 58–79 (p. 66). Elsewhere, Creación de las aves has commonly been recognized for its depiction of a feminine creative power. See Whitney Chadwick, ‘Women Artists and the Hermetic Tradition’, in Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, ed. Whitney Chadwick (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 181–218 (p. 202); Estella Lauter, Women As Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1984), 84–85; María Alejandra Zanetta, La otra cara de la vanguardia: estudio comparativo de la obra artística de Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos y Remedios Varo (Lewiston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 201.

88 The Law of Octaves, which she will have encountered in Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, expands the periodicity of eights found in the musical scale and the periodic table into a Ray of Creation, which Ouspensky believed to be an ancient knowledge that explained all the mechanisms of the universe, manifest and hidden (Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 81–82).

89 Louis Pauwels, Gurdjieff, with paintings by Felix Labisse, Georges Rohner & Ferro (New York: S. Weiser, 1972), 101.

90 John G. Bennett & Elizabeth Bennett, Idiots in Paris: Diaries of J. G. Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett, 1949 (York Beach: S. Weiser, 1991), 9.

91 Pauwels, Gurdjieff, 101.

92 According to Beatriz Varo, ‘la idea primordial del cuadro El flautista es la de la fuerza del sonido; según la tradición hindú, al sonido de la flauta de Krishna nace el mundo’ (Beatriz Varo, Remedios Varo: en el centro del microcosmos [México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990], 108–09).

93 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 66.

94 Remedios Varo, ‘Comentarios de Remedios Varo a algunos de sus cuadros (dirigidos a su hermano el Doctor Rodrigo Varo)', in Remedios Varo: catálogo razonado, ed. Gruen & Ovalle, 51–60 (p. 52).

95 Varo, ‘Comentarios de Remedios Varo a algunos de sus cuadros’, 54.

96 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 178.

97 Gurdjieff began his manuscript in Russian in 1927 and revised it over many years. It was finally published, posthumously, in a French translation by Jeanne de Salzmann and Henri Tracol, as Rencontre avec des hommes remarquables (Paris: René Julliard, 1960). This edition formed part of Varo’s collection.

98 Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 13.

99 Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 178.

100 Varo, ‘Comentarios de Remedios Varo a algunos de sus cuadros’, 54; italics in the original.

101 Varo, ‘Comentarios de Remedios Varo a algunos de sus cuadros', 54; italics in the original.

102 Gloria Durán, ‘The Antipodes of Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and Remedios Varo’, Symposium, 42:4 (1989), 297–311 (p. 305).

103 Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjieff’s ‘Beelzebub’, 13.

104 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 36.

105 An impressive demonstration of these movements can be found in Peter Brook’s 1979 film adaptation of Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men.

106 Ritos extraños [Dibujo previo I] (1959 [CAT 255]); Ritos extraños [Dibujo previo II] (1959 [CAT 256]).

107 Arcq, ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, 33; Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 172.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.