Remedios Varo’s Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitando)

Varo’s work will likely be familiar to members as the subject of the recent exhibition Remedios Varo: Science Fictions. That exhibition, the largest showing of Varo’s paintings and drawings in the US since 2000, gave many visitors their first opportunity to see her work in person.

As is occasionally the case with exhibitions of loaned works, the Art Institute was not able to borrow everything we had hoped to feature, including Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitando). Its then-owners, based in Europe, very rarely lent it out; they had only allowed it to be shown twice in the Americas—once in Mexico and once in the US. And so the curatorial team—ourselves and guest curator Tere Arcq—made the choice instead to include Varo’s drawing for the work, which is in the collection of our exhibition partners at the Museo de Arte Moderno.

What makes this painting so significant? For one, it held a pride of place in early exhibitions and literature on Varo following her death in 1963. Around this time, it was used to illustrate the writings of André Breton and Octavio Paz, among others. At the close of her Mexico City memorial exhibition in 1964, Varo’s partner, Walter Gruen, selected Still Life Reviving as the one painting he felt should be given to Varo’s mother in remembrance of her daughter. It was an ideal choice for those mourning Varo because, in addition to being the last painting the artist created, its message is one of regeneration and new life.

Due to its place at the culmination of Varo’s career, the work also allows us to look back across the full scope of what she achieved as a painter. Remedios Varo—whose full name was María de los Remedios Alicia y Rodriga Varo y Uranga—was born in Catalonia in 1908. Her father, who taught her to draw, was an engineer, and his work took the family all across southern Spain and also into Morocco. But ultimately they chose to settle in Madrid. The city was an important setting for Varo, particularly because of the art that she could see in the Prado. As we demonstrated in Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, she was unique among 20th-century artists for blending early panel painting techniques and surrealist automatic methods. 

Varo arrived in Mexico in December 1941 as an artist seeking refuge from both the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and her passage was aided by the Emergency Rescue Committee. Upon her arrival in Mexico City, she was fortunate to enter into an extremely vibrant community of artists, many of whom are represented in our collections. In 1944, she was depicted by Gunther Gerzso in the painting The Days of Gabino Barreda Street (Los días de la calle Gabino Barreda), as one of the artists at the heart of this community. She was also in close conversation with Leonora Carrington, who modeled characters in her fiction after Varo. Together they developed imagery with shared symbolism, often drawing esoteric practices and alluding to alchemy.

Varo herself did not have an opportunity to exhibit work in Mexico until 1955. In the intervening years, she held a number of perhaps surprising jobs. These included working as an illustrator for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, depicting maladies with great imagination. She also created images for the Ministry of Public Health in Venezuela, particularly for their antimalaria messaging. These prior roles may not seem especially significant until you look closely at Still Life Reviving and see the mosquitoes hovering above the still life. As they explore the fruits, they are the only part of the composition that is not absorbed into the swirling vortex around the candlestick. 

With her first solo exhibition in 1956, Varo’s work was immediately lauded by critics as “art saturated with mystery … [with] an amazing clarity … a true revelation.” Many of these works seem to exist out of time, bridging a distant past with a technologically enhanced future. This is particularly true of Still Life Reviving, with its juxtaposition of gothic architecture and invisible cosmic forces.

At the center, a circular table spins around a candlestick, the tablecloth swirling while eight place settings hover above. Overhead, fruits such as strawberries, pomegranates, lemons, peaches, apples, and oranges rotate around the candle flame as if planets in a solar system. As the fruits collide in orbit, their seeds fall to the ground and send up new life. There is also a strong sense of supernatural animation in the tablecloth itself.

You may recall that we concluded our Varo exhibition with her late triptych, the middle panel of which is called Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle. The Novices who work on this cloth stitched a new world into creation. In Still Life Reviving, there is a sense that its magical cloth has cosmic potential as well.

The acquisition of Still Life Reviving has been the culmination of many years of work in which the Art Institute was at the forefront of research on Varo, advocating for her importance as a singular artist who for too long had been overlooked by museums in the US and Europe. Today the excitement comes in seeing Still Life Reviving exhibited in the context of our celebrated collections of international modern art. It now hangs in our Surrealism galleries, on the third floor of the Modern Wing, alongside works by Varo’s European and American peers, such as Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Oscar Domínguez, among others. It is an immense honor to be the new stewards of this painting, which meant so much to Varo’s family. We hope you will make time to see it and welcome Varo’s work into its new home at the Art Institute.

—Caitlin Haskell, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator and Director, Ray Johnson Collection and Research, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Alivé Piliado, research associate, Modern and Contemporary Art

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