“Mexico has the good fortune that among us live three women painters who undoubtedly are among the most important women artists in the world: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon.”
Diego Rivera, 1955

The theme of cosmic unity and interconnections between the spiritual realm and that of the natural and celestial worlds shapes the fantastic narratives of Remedios Varo’s pictorial universe. A student of Gurdjieffian philosophy, Tibetan Tantric, Zen Buddhism, and Hermitic traditions further synthesized with surrealist techniques of fumage, frottage and decalomania, Varo coalesced her years of rigorous European academic training with a fantasy-filled imagination nurtured by surrealism. Painted in 1959, Microcosmos (or Determinismo) evidences the sophistication of Varo’s singular artistic expression.

Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights
Fig. 1: Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych, oil on oak panels, 1490-1500, Museo del Prado, Madrid Fine Art/Corbis via Getty Images

Born into a middle-class Spanish family in the early twentieth-century, Varo’s childhood was characterized by the rigidity of a traditional Catholic upbringing. As a young student, she attended a convent school run by nuns in Madrid. Unsatisfied by a world of religious convention, which she considered oppressive and claustrophobic, Varo sought out acts of rebellion, indulging her early fascination with the occult by secretly writing to a Hindu yogi and collecting magic plants. Her interest in the fanciful was further spurred by trips to the Prado Museum with her father, where she internalized the painting of Hieronymous Bosch and masters of gold-leaf including Duccio (see figs. 1 & 2). At first awed by Bosch's macabre sense of humor, she later took careful note of the devices the Flemish master used to create a world so absurd yet to strangely plausible. Later, as a young, unmarried woman in 1920s Spain, she found herself restricted by the conservative social codes of Spanish society of the time. As a consequence, she turned her physical restlessness toward spiritual pursuits, studying mystic disciplines and reading metaphysical texts such as the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky and Helena Blavastky among others. Eventually, while a student at Madrid’s prestigious Academia de San Fernando, the wave of the Surrealist movement from France was beginning to seep into the intellectual and artistic rhythms of Spain. Varo was immediately allured by the Surrealist ethos of the omnipotence of the dream. For Varo, Surrealism offered the ultimate physical escape, a bohemian lifestyle of adventure she longed for, eventually marrying the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, moving to Paris and then settling in Mexico City.

Varo’s spiritual sensibilities manifest in the logic of spiritual phenomena and celestial harmony, depicting representations of astrological elements of water, fire and earth: Scorpio, Sagittarius, and Capricorn respectively.

Fig. 2 Duccio di Buoninsegna, Entry into Jerusalem (scene 1 from the Maestà), Tempera on Wood, 1308-11, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena

Upon Varo’s 1955 solo exhibition organized by Galería Diana in Mexico City, her works had already achieved a clearly defined and resonant language. Her paintings of intimate detail, both in technical execution and in their revealing autobiographical narratives, enchanted the Modernist titan Diego Rivera to proclaim, “Mexico has the good fortune that among us live three women painters who undoubtedly are among the most important women artists in the world: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon” (quoted in J. A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo, Unexpected Journeys, New York, 2000, p. 133). Later on in 1959, only a few short years after her artistic debut, Varo was approached with a commission to paint a mural for the new Cancer Pavilion of the Medical Center of Mexico City. “In the Mexico of the great muralists, where the large public image still received the highest accolades, it was an incalculable honor for a foreigner, a surrealist, an easel painter, and a woman to be asked to paint a public mural” (ibid., p. 140). While Varo accepted the invitation, she did so with hesitation. Soon enough, she canceled the project uninterested by the burdensome task of adapting her delicate, miniaturist technique to enlarged proportions. Varo did, however, complete several painted studies for the mural. The present work, Microcosmos (Determinismo), is one of those study versions.

In Microcosmos (or Determinismo), Varo reveals the scientific, philosophical and spiritual principles that are central to her thinking. Presenting us with her version of the creation of the universe in the form of a cosmic diagram, she creates a tightly planned narrative where “celestial substances are passed through vessels floating in the sky that represent the zodiacal signs of Scorpio, Sagittarius, and Capricorn” (ibid., p. 141). Varo’s spiritual sensibilities manifest in the logic of spiritual phenomena and celestial harmony, depicting representations of astrological elements of water, fire and earth: Scorpio, Sagittarius, and Capricorn respectively. Drawing upon hermetic beliefs, Varo seems to have deliberately chosen signs that are characterized by determination, idealism, and meticulous order as the arbiters of cosmic regeneration and rebirth. Further, a swirling, cloud dense with gold is siphoned through a monastic-tower, from which humans and animals exit to ocean and forest. Here, Varo draws upon the astrophysical popularizations of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically the 1950 book The Nature of the Universe by her favorite author astrophysicist Fred Hoyle where not only are the origins of the solar system linked to the explosion of a cloud of gas and stardust but so too are we—as Hoyle described, “carbon, nitrogen and oxygen inside ourselves were once deep inside a star” (A. J. Friedman, “The Serenity of Science” in Remedios Varo, Catalogue Raisonné, Mexico City, 2002, p. 78).

Remedios Varo, Hacia la torre, 1960, Sold: Sotheby's, November 24, 2014, lot 26, $4,309,000
Remedios Varo, Embroidering Earth's Mantle, 1961
Remedios Varo, The Escape, 1961

Works by Remedios Varo in Important Museum Collections
  • Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Created with Sketch.
  • The Israel Museum, Jerusalem Created with Sketch.
  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Created with Sketch.
  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Created with Sketch.
  • Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City Created with Sketch.
  • National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Created with Sketch.
  • Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey Created with Sketch.
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Created with Sketch.
  • Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
    Ícono, Oil, gold leaf and mother of pearl on panel, 1945

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  • The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
    Remedios Varo, Insomnia, gouache on paper, 1947

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  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
    Remedios Varo, Alegoría del invierno, Gouache on paper, 1948

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  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
    Remedios Varo, La faim, Gouache and black chalk on paper, 1938

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  • Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
    La Leçon d'anatomie, gouache and collage on paper, 1935

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  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
    Farrell, Eva

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  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
    Farrell, Eva

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  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
    Farrell, Eva

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  • Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
    Farrell, Eva

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  • National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
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  • Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey
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  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
    Farrell, Eva

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  • Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

    Remedios Varo, Simpatía (La rabia del gato), 1955

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