Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Et le vent du nord les emporte
Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli.
Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié
La chanson que tu me chantais...

The fallen leaves gather at my shovel
Memories and regrets, too
And the Northern wind carries them
Through the cold night of oblivion
You see, I haven’t forgotten
The song you sang to me…

—Jacques Prévert, Les feuilles mortes, 1945

The astounding and intricate visual world created by Remedios Varo stands as one of the most important contributions to the international story of Surrealism. Born in Spain at the beginning of the century and driven to exile in Mexico by the Second World War, Varo’s life story is emblematic of and deeply tied to the painful events of the twentieth century. In her mature paintings, Varo’s biography is always present—yet only obliquely. A prolific lifelong student, her personal iconography is founded in a complex matrix of influences, ranging from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific experimentation, alchemy, nature, music and pagan practices. In Les Feuilles mortes, a tour-de-force of technical skill, she presents a masterful and mournful examination of memory and domesticity.

The central heroine of Les Feuilles mortes is a fiery-haired weaver cloaked in a cascading emerald gown, who sits towards the corner of a decaying French-style parlor shrouded in moss and rendered entirely in grisaille. She grasps a vivid beryl skein of yarn in her left hand, teasing it towards her with her right as it twists through a series of echoing arches at the heart of a shadowy figure before her. Striking crimson and white birds fly out of the arches towards the viewer as the figure leans towards the heroine; the soft diagonal of its hand directs the eye to the upper right corner, where a gust of wind has blown a gentle cascade of bright orange leaves into the room. The heroine gazes fixedly out of the picture, her jade-green eyes locked in an expression of determination and calm.

Varo is unique among the Surrealists in the depth and diversity of her specific pictorial universe. As a child, she was transfixed by the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, visiting their works adoringly during her time as one of few female students at the rigorous Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. In masterworks like Les Feuilles mortes, the full array of her technical expertise incorporating both Old Master and Surrealist techniques is on splendid display; Janet Kaplan describes her creative process:

Like both Bosch and Goya, Varo engages in the creation of a profoundly complex imaginary world, in which the fantastical and the quotidian intertwine in infinitely surprising ways. Varo’s background in engineering and technical drawing is evidenced throughout her work; like these masters, she employs realistic architecture to manipulate mood. Rigorously lifelike architecture and familiar human forms collide with phantasms and hybrid, fantastic creatures; however, where these two painters often uncover darkness at the core of the human soul, Varo encounters hope and innovation.

In this vein, Varo adopts a “strategy of transposition of traditionally male mythic heroes into female form... transferring power across gender lines and conferring heroic authority on women, Varo sets her work in opposition to the circumscribed limits to women’s sphere articulated by orthodox surrealist theory” (Janet A. Kaplan, "Domestic Incantations: Subversion in the Kitchen" in Remedios Varo, Catálogo razonado, Mexico City, 1994, pp. 39-40). Varo’s relocation to Mexico in the wake of the War was marked by the birth of a critical creative friendship with fellow Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who shared her passions for the occult, for Old Master painting, and, critically, her belief in the alchemical power of women—all in the face of an artistic movement that sought at once to idealize and marginalize them. In the 1950s, both artists reclaimed images of traditionally feminine domestic crafts like weaving and cooking as loci of generative, alchemical power. The heroine of Les Feuilles mortes evokes Greek myths about the fabric of time and womens’ power to weave it; she recalls both Penelope, the wife of Odysseus—who used her wit and skill in weaving to maintain her independence and autonomy in the face of a society that sought to marry her off—and Ariadne, whose golden thread guided her love safely through the labyrinth of Minos. Likewise, our heroine seems to pull a bright, living thread out through a cavernous maze of memory and a shadow self.

The work’s title, Les Feuilles mortes, evokes the enduringly popular 1945 French jazz standard of the same title, first popularized by Yves Montand and recorded since by hundreds of artists as Autumn Leaves. Jacques Prévert’s lyrics, likely the version known to Varo, speak of bittersweet memories of a lost love affair through autumnal metaphors, harkening to a lost innocence that speaks not only to a personal narrative, but to the international mood in the immediate years after the war. A decade later, Varo began to process her memories of exile from the home she left as a teenager and the traumatic few years she spent in occupied France, presenting an alternative, reclamatory narrative in the universe of her painting. In Les Feuilles mortes, the lavish home of a bygone era crumbles around the central drama; moss and tenderly rendered foliage grow where a rug once was, as nature reclaims once-vivid memories. The grisaille figure may present the memories and inner life of the heroine herself, who plumbs its depths for the bright thread. Soaring birds, a recurring motif representing rebirth throughout Varo’s oeuvre, offer a hopeful coda to the narrative. In contrast to the umbral greys of the decaying past, Varo’s heroine is present in rich and living color, weaving a path to her own destiny.