REMEDIOS VARO (1908-1963) WITH POSSIBLE ADDITIONS BY ÓSCAR DOMÍNGUEZ (1906–1957) & ESTEBAN FRANCÉS (1913–1976)

Composition surréaliste (tableau collaboratif)

Footnotes

We are grateful to Dr. Salomon Grimberg for his assistance in cataloguing this work, with regards to the artistic input of Remedios Varo. We would also like to thank the Asociación en Defensa de Óscar Domínguez, including Mélodie Bonnat, and Josefina Alix for their assistance cataloguing this work.

Provenance
Private collection, Paris; their sale, Blanchet & Associés, Paris, 19 October 2022, lot 43.
Acquired at the above sale by the previous owner.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.


On a warm August evening in a Montparnasse studio, a lively gathering of artists was taking place. The year was 1938 and the studio belonged to Óscar Domínguez, an exuberant young painter from Tenerife. He and his guests were acolytes of a vanguard cultural movement known as Surrealism. Its tenets promoted the omnipotence of dreams, the sovereignty of collaborative experimentation, and sexual freedom as a precondition to unbridled artistic expression. In attendance were the artists Yves Tanguy and Georges Hugnet, as well as the writers Paul Éluard and Benjamin Péret. The centre of the group's attention had turned to the vivacious and attractive Remedios Varo, a vigorously talented Spanish artist who lived an openly polyamorous lifestyle. Somewhat unsurprisingly for a strong-willed woman in a predominantly male setting, her romantic and sexual life became the topic of debate. The antagonist was Esteban Francés, a Catalan artist six years her junior, whose adoration of Varo was sometimes marred by his complicated and jealous persona. He openly criticised her for her multiple relationships, despite the fact that he was part of one such ongoing tryst. Domínguez - another of Varo's lovers - rose gallantly to defend her, but he swiftly lost control and flew into a towering rage. Suddenly concerned, their friends intervened in the ensuing tussle. Victor Brauner - a Romanian artist with whom Varo would later reside – restrained Francés' arms. The strong and thickset Domínguez twisted free from his own captors, grabbing a glass and launching it at Francés. But in the chaos, the glass struck the face of the unfortunate Brauner and ripped his eye straight from its socket.

The complex layers of this group dynamic form a necessary backdrop to understanding the total enigma which is the present work. Spontaneous, disturbing and eerily auspicious, Composition surréaliste (tableau collaboratif) is a painting partially authored by Varo, and for which one can surmise possible contributions from both Francés and Domínguez. Completed around two years before the shocking incident in Montparnasse, this small painting on copper is psychically charged, foreshadowing the love, violence and strife that would descend upon its creators. Indeed, the artists of the Surrealist milieu possessed an uncanny knack for artistic divination. Domínguez had, around seven years prior to the brawl, completed a disturbing self-portrait in which his hand was mutilated, his arm veins severed. Twenty-seven years later, after an unsuccessful exhibition, he was discovered in the bathtub of his Montparnasse studio, having slit his wrists. (Brauner, too, completed a captivating and gruesome self-portrait around seven years prior to his injury, with a gaping hole in place of his right eye. This was one of his many artistic explorations of one-eyedness from the early 1930s).

Varo believed wholeheartedly in such premonitions. She approached her art and her life constantly attuned to magic and mysticism, with a dash of psychoanalysis mixed into the heady cauldron of her stimuli. For Varo and her friends, the spontaneity and surprise of collaborative compositions conjured up the magic of the unexpected, resulting in fascinating works that are iconic to the story of Surrealism. The present work is key in this regard. Upon the shifting tectonic folds of a barren volcanic landscape, distorted, nude, puppet-like figures engage in sexual and sadistic behaviour. Their jagged, jaunty stances and smiling faces generate a sinister hue of contradictions - the true elixir of Surrealism. Blood-red biomorphic gourds menstruate and sprout wriggling, sperm-like, sinuous roots, evoking a twisted mix of gore and desire. To the centre, a nude woman, possibly pregnant, is showered in droplets of white liquid, the bars of her figurative prison cell suspending her over a gaping abyss. At the base of the scene, an embryonic form within a drop of liquid rises from a seashell like a child of Venus, cowering in anguish at the terrifying realm it has entered. In the foreground, the severed head of Gerardo Lizarraga, Varo's husband, looks on passively, encased in a perilously hanging box.

Although the scene lacks a cohesive narrative, its vignettes generate the rhythm and flow of a hallucinatory vision, one that gains its vitality through its juxtapositions. This engrossing disjointedness arises in part from the work's collaborative nature. Collective creativity was core to the Surrealists' toolkit, as they believed such collaborations could release the individual from the biases of conscious thought, thereby accessing a shared subconscious realm. This ideal came to fruition in the summer of 1935 in Barcelona, a critical chapter in the story of Surrealism and a catalyst for the present work. During that time, Varo, Francés, Domínguez and their fellow Surrealist Marcel Jean devoted themselves to the game of cadavre exquis ('exquisite corpse'). A game of words that the Surrealists transformed into a visual exercise, cadavre exquis involved one player creating a collage or drawing, obscuring their design and passing the paper to the next player, who would add their own image. This resulted in a fascinating series of works, many of which were composed vertically so as to generate the head, body and limbs of a quasi-humanoid form.

The vitality of these spontaneous works led the group to evolve related exercises allowing for fuller, more cohesive compositions that were still grounded in hasard objectif ('objective chance'). Thence grew the jeu de dessin communiqué ('game of shared drawing'), whereby a player would draw an image and show it to the next participant for a brief instant, who would then interpret it in their own spontaneous composition, inviting contributions from the ensuing players. The imagery that Varo and her friends thus conjured would often comprise biomorphic entities with zoological and humanoid features, sometimes in erotic or tortuous positions, who were somehow connected to the features and objects of their surrounding terrain. On rare occasions, paintings would be created in this fashion, started by one artist and then re-worked or even partially erased by the ensuing collaborators. The present work is a unique token of this fervent period, offering a privileged glimpse into this captivating artistic methodology. Many of the group's paintings and drawings from this time have been lost, due in part to the surrounding turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, as well as their free circulation among other artists by post and itinerant friends – a mode of distribution Varo and her group actively encouraged, keen for the recognition and support of their Surrealist peers.

By engaging in this practice - arguably a form of active communal meditation - Varo and her compatriots reckoned with the dynamics of their own relationships. In the present work, this leads to a deep visual catharsis, as though the participants are consorting, arguing and laying bare their emotions by fusing their subconscious visions with symbols of the uncanny. As such, the painting presents itself as a shared autobiography of love, fear, destruction and violence. Few such works were signed, with signatures seemingly reserved for the most 'finished' compositions, ones that bear the most discernible narratives and themes. However, the 'signatures' that appear here may be Surreal exercises in themselves, obscuring the true nature of the work's authorship, rendering the existence of a single creator to be a fallacy. The only legible inscription is the 'O. Domínguez. 35' to the lower left. An historical inscription reading 'Esteban F 36' to the upper right is now erased, and one further inscription reading 'Francés' to the lower left has also been removed. Varo's metaphorical 'signature' can be discerned in the precise execution of her husband Lizarraga's head – the painting's clearest indicator of her involvement.

One possible reading is that the painting was started by Francés, but then Domínguez or Varo (or both) reworked the entire composition, thereby erasing his signatures. Similarly, Francés could have revisited the painting and saw that his contributions had been changed so irrevocably that he deemed it necessary to scrub away any sign of his authorship. Perhaps he saw his role in the group, or his position as Varo's lover, as fleeting. However, the whispers of his potential involvement live on, their traces in the copper having recently been elucidated under microscope by the restorer Mélodie Bonnat. In any case, though it is impossible to fully understand the circumstances of the work's creation, the twice erasure of Francés' signature could signify a significant emotional upheaval. Indeed, accounts of the later incident at Domínguez' studio in Montparnasse paint Francés as a sometimes Machiavellian figure, ominously haunting the backstage of this pseudo-narrative.

Further obfuscating the work's authorship, Varo and her possible two collaborators constantly drew upon the styles and motifs of one another and of their wider Surrealist cohort. Indeed, by 1935, Varo had earned a great degree of technical skill, having been taught mechanical drawing by her father and rigorously trained at the Academia San Fernando in Madrid. She sought to free herself from the strictures of her education, and, together with Francés and Domínguez, borrowed a new array of techniques and imagery then in vogue among the Spanish Surrealists. The three experimented with the visual forms of biomorphism, a style that shaped the bulbous, abstract, shifting organic forms of Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Antoni Gaudí. Varo and Domínguez' chameleonic abilities even led them to paint convincing forgeries of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings in the late 1930s, which they peddled in Paris at a time of acute financial desperation. (As befits the nonconformist nature of Surrealist authorship, de Chirico himself was known to 'forge' his earlier paintings and inscribe them with falsely early dates).

Another critical aspect to Varo's practice - and attempting to understand the present work - is her constant fusion of fantasy and autobiography. Throughout her oeuvre, Varo renders her Surreal characters with thick, dark hair, strong eyebrows, long noses and heart-shaped visages. These self-portraits, mediated through the lens of fantasy, seem to be apparent in Composition surréaliste (tableau collaboratif). Lizarraga's portrait, which is naturalistically rendered in contrast to its carnivalesque counterparts, is also key in this regard. At the age of twenty-one, Varo married Lizarraga, a top student of the Academia who captured her with his artistic skill, sense of humour and commitment to radical politics. Though their marriage was relatively short lived, he remained a loyal friend until the close of Varo's life. For the young Varo, marrying Lizarraga was a mark of her independence and a critical step in her journey toward becoming a self-defined artist. His decapitation and confinement in the present work could signify Varo's evolution away from the needs she once prescribed to the relationship.

Of the significance of Varo's relationships, Luis-Martín Lozano has remarked: 'Just as Lizarraga had been the accomplice of her escape from the family enclave, Francés was the prisoner with whom she fled toward the promising autonomy of Surrealism. With this also young artist, Remedios explored the limits of a sexual and intellectual freedom such as she had, perhaps, never known before' (L-M. Lozano, 'Remedios Varo: A Reflection on the Work and Days of a Painter', in R. Ovalle & W. Gruen, Remedios Varo, Catálogo Razonado, Mexico City, 2008, p. 53). Francés, with whom Varo shared a studio on the Plaza de Lesseps in Barcelona, shared her Surrealist ambitions and her drive for a creative, bohemian lifestyle. He became her lover even while she resided with Lizarraga and also remained close to her throughout her life.

Against the influences of these vigorous male partners, and possibly of her domineering father, Varo's work from this period appears to purposefully subvert the expectations of women in her society and in the male-centric Surrealist consciousness, formulating them as active subjects rather than as objects or muses. This appears as a reaction against the Surrealist idolisation of the femme-enfant, a trope in which the desirability and creativity of a woman lies in her naïveté and innocence. Indeed, feminist theorists have observed that the doctrines of Surrealism were largely formulated in the absence of women, and that André Breton did not consider his female peers to be at the core of the movement. Varo's transmutation of feminine bodies, attire and objects could thereby be interpreted as a symbolic iconoclasm and an exorcising of herself from essentialisation. Her repeated exploration of escape from confinement, as evidenced by the prison bars that appear throughout her oeuvre, seems inextricable from this goal. In the present work, androgynous figures with full breasts could convey a transition away from the preconceptions of one's sex. The thick, white raindrops – a motif that appears throughout her work – imbue the scene with hints of a post-orgasmic trance. They could signify the smothering force of male desire, or, paradoxically, a form of liberation through sexual autonomy. The enveloping subterranean void – itself a repeated visual framework for Varo, Francés and Domínguez – seems a fitting backdrop for this ambivalent iconography.

The violent tension of the scene is further elucidated in light of the burgeoning Spanish Revolution and Civil War, events that paralysed Spanish society, wherein dead and wounded bodies on the street were a frequent horror. The present work's dismembered and distorted figures may allude to the victims of the civilian massacres, the bombings and the shootings that obliterated previous dreams of peace and stability that were ushered in by the new Spanish Republic. Indeed, soon after the completion of the present work, Varo fled to Paris with Francés and her new love, Benjamin Péret, who had been introduced to her by Domínguez. Varo's public debut as an accomplished Surrealist would then take place in 1936, when her painting Le désir was reproduced in the Surrealist journal Minotaure.