"Not a Painting But a Vision"

Last weekend the annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art at the National Gallery of Art was "Not a Painting But a Vision."   Andreas Henning, curator from Dresden, Germany, spoke about The Sistine Madonna, a magnificent altarpiece Raphael painted in 1512 which is now in the Dresden State Art Museum.   I have written about it in a previous blog, comparing the Mary of this painting to the  Raphael's lovely image of inner and outer beauty in La Donna Velata.

However, as the title suggested, it is painting of a vision and that Mary is not of this world.  She has facial features of that generic beauty similar to those of the Donna Velata, but she is more ethereal and otherworldly.  As much as we may want to reach out and hug the baby Jesus, we can't. The Madonna also carries a tinge of sadness in this image, a practice artists used to reveal Mary recognition that her Son will die someday. 

However, two saints, Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara have brighter colors and lead the transition to the audience on earth.  The curator explained that they represent a reconciliation of opposites, as we often find in Raphael's paintings.  They are male and female, old and young, the active life and the contemplative life.  But the truth is that they, too, are in heaven.

When the Sistine Madonna was completed and set as an altarpiece in a monastery church in Piacenza, we must imagine curtains framing the Mary, her veil blowing in a wind, as separating one world from  another.  The drama is in the relationship of the audience to the vision in the work of art.  Only the saturated green curtains and a balustrade on bottom are meant to be part of the material world. In fact, in this visionary painting, Raphael has gone behind the Renaissance perspective which aims for imitation of reality.  He anticipated the triumphant late Renaissance artist Correggio and the visionary art of Baroque, such as Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

I've never seen this painting, but was thrilled to view the new slides since the painting's cleaning. In the background, the clouds reveal the faces of many more cherubs.  There are 42 faces in the clouds.  (These faces are mainly visible in first image on the upper left side.) What glorious illusion!

The curator also pointed out that these sweet and precious angels, who look upward in observation and wonder, were an afterthought which Raphael  felt the composition needed them for completion.  What impeccable images of innocence, charm and love!

Día de los Muertos

Nicolás de Jésus and students, October 2012, NVCC, Annandale, VA, right side

The day of the Dead ( Día de los Muertos) is a starting point for Mexican artist Nicolás de Jésus, who visited and demonstrated his work in my Art Appreciation Class on October 17th. Since today is Halloween, it's a good time to explore how Nicolás de Jésus uses this theme. A mural he completed with students has been hung on the second floor of the CM Building.Is it a coincidence or not to discover this past weekend that someone near and dear to me turned out to be in an art exhibition on the El Dia de los Muertos theme?

Nicolás de Jésus, Fiesta de los Muertos, etching and aquatint

Nicolás de Jésus mesmerized the class as he explained his prints, impressive for their beauty, meaning and the textures. The skeletons of his prints are very animated and life-like. His art dips into memories of his childhood in the Amayaltepec region, where he learned to make art at a very young age and his father was among the most notable folk artists.  At first his art seems immersed in imagery of Día de los Muertos, but closer examination reveals that the holiday becomes a means to an end. His meanings go much deeper, because the subjects of the vernacular, folkloric tradition apply as well to other themes.

Dia de la Muerta, etching, aquatint

The celebration of the Day of the Dead recalls our own Halloween, but it is celebrated on November 1 (for deceased infants and children) and November 2 (for elders) in Mexico. Typically families go the cemeteries where deceased members of their families are buried.  In some parts of the country they dance in the graveyards. They build altars to the deceased and present offerings of food, like sugared skulls, and decorations such as trinkets or flowers, preferably orange marigolds.  They bring toys to the children, essentially blurring the boundaries between life and death.  The celebration combines aspects of an ancient Aztec celebration with the Catholic feast days. The lines between the living and the dead become blurred, as I had recently witnessed in an exhibition at the National Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago, where there were installations with food offerings to the dead, Hanan Pixal.  Art is life and the art of this theme is for both the living and the deceased.

But in the art of Nicolás de Jésus, the skeletons can be powerful metaphors for the living.  The skeletons dance and celebrate, taking on the qualities of living people. They act out the human comedy, or, at times they partake in the human tragedy and satirize human behavior. His meanings can be critical and provocative. He is concerned with the lives of Mexicans on both sides of the border.

Left side detail with skeleton in NVCC/Annandale's new mural

Maicidio refers to the death of corn, a gift

from Mexico, through modification

Nicolás de Jésus prints his works from amate bark, native to his Guerrero region of Mexico, which is west of the Yucatan peninsula. Though he did not demonstrate in our class how to do his  technique, it is a combination of etching and aquatints.  In etching, the artist sketches the lines of an image into a waxy substance over the metal plate.  For broad areas of shading, aquatint is used. Aquatint is a printmaking process that uses rosin, a natural lubricant produced by from tree sap, melted on a zinc plate to give a grainy quality to the tones. A acid bath 'bites' the images into the metal plate in both etching and aquatint, before the scene can be inked and printed in reverse of the drawn image. De Jesús uses the aquatint process frequently to create the grainy, textural backgrounds of many works. 


One print that really strikes me is Maicidio, suggesting death to corn, one of Mexico's great gifts to the world. The United States has now changed the nature of corn, overproducing it and turning it into cattle feed or high fructose corn syrup, things it was never meant to be. Its by-products become additives in almost all processed food. With American corn now is 85% genetically modified, it's no wonder the skeletons attack and pull it apart.  Let us remember this fact next Tuesday, when Californians go to the polls and vote on Proposition 37 which will require labeling for genetically-modified food (GMOs).   As our industrialized US agricultural system is dominating and killing corn, people in the US become increasingly disconnected to land.

En El Tran recalls when the artist lived in Chicago. 

Nicolás de Jésus lived in Chicago from 1989-1994, and he has at least 60 works of art in the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. En el Tran brings his familiar skeletons into the elevated train of Chicago's mass transit system, while skyscrapers are seen out the window behind. He implies a deeper truth behind the scene, the fate that awaits all of us in the end. Although not mentioned, Mexico has a tradition of Surrealism and de Jésus also seems to be connected to Surrealists.


In many ways his prints follow in the tradition of socially and politically active artists from Mexico in first half of the twentieth century: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.  A full-blooded Nahua Indian from a small village in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, he is an advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples. Themes of struggle meet the themes of celebration in his work.  Though he is critical of much in society, he is above all a humanist who recognizes our foibles but understands our humanity.

 

A Grand Vision: Cézanne's Large Bathers

Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1898-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Cézanne worked on The Large Bathers, now owned by the Philadelphia Art Museum, during the last 8 years of his life.  He did about 200 paintings of bathers, and another one in the National Gallery of London is also called Large Bathers. Its French name, Les grandes baigneuses, pays homages to the grandest of Cézanne's compositions of this subject, which may be his final statement of the theme as well.  To me it seems truest of an Arcadian dream, as witnessed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent exhibition.

The composition was clearly important to Cézanne in the search to find his truth. Through making art, he explored, subjectively, that which is true and everlasting in nature and in human existence.  In his early paintings he used heavy brushwork, but as time went on he thinned the paint and applied it tentatively, as if his vision was changing. Planes of various colors overlap, but outlining shapes brought transient visions back to clarity. Cézanne worked with the Impressionists in the 1870s and had painted with them near Paris, but returned to his hometown, Aix-en-Provence in the early 1880s.  In Aix, he mixed modernism and classicism, searching to add something solid and permanent to an Impressionist vision of color, while painting some of the same scenes over and over again. 

Cézanne, Riverbank, c. 1895 National Gallery of Art, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection

Location is imprecise, but it is the type of river scene which inspired him
The Roman name for Aix-en-Provence implied natural baths or springs

Of course truth to Cézanne was tied to nature, where he sought refuge. Cézanne was equally tied to Virgil, whom he regularly quoted in Latin while painting among the rocks, trees, waters and paths that still contained vestiges of ancient Roman pastoral life. Romans founded Aix-en-Provence, called Aquae Sixtiae Silluviorum, in 123 BC, at the site of natural baths or springs, and fought a battle at the site of Mont Saint-Victoire 20 years later.  Cézanne grew up with a very classical education of Latin and Greek at the École Bourbon in Aix.  We note that this painting and others are modern but seem as classical as paintings by Poussin, who also often included landscapes similar to Mont Saint-Victoire is his compositions.

In Cézanne's The Large Bathers, the nude women stand, kneel or sit, almost in symmetric formation, creating several triangles within the larger triangle of trees. They are enclosed within the trees just as an altar is enclosed within a church.  The curved roof of a Gothic church could provide a sacred space, but here it is nature's roof, the trees.  The women seem to be performing a ritual, as if making a picnic, but we can't tell what they do.   A river and two patches of scorched brown earth run horizontally, suggesting true-to-life distance. Further back, trees and church steeple point upward.

Usually a church is the highest point, the center of a composition, but here it is subordinated to nature. Note, that in the background that the shape of the church and the trees is the same.   The larger trees, the foreground trees which frame the women, don't join at the top, and a central tree in the distance points to an opening, very suggestive of the upward ascent to the divine.  The church is within this framework and a part of this ritual space where these women play a role and act out a ritual, but not the means to an end. The trees, i.e.nature, have replaced the church as the shelter and the vessel to carry them to divinity.

One woman's finger points to the water where there is a swimmer, a detail too deliberate to be ignored and obviously something Cézanne wished to emphasize. The painting may suggest death, as the artist himself knew he was approaching the end.  (In Greek and Etruscan paintings, swimmers diving into the water are thought to represent the diving into the afterlife, although I'm not sure if Cézanne was familiar with such paintings.)  Beyond the swimmer, two figures have reached the other side.  When we get back to main scene, we see that two or three women on the right will be diving soon. The other nymphs are acting, making preparations or staging a dress rehearsal, without clothes, for their ultimate transformation, the passing from earth to afterlife.  Note they are calm and at peace, which makes me think Cézanne must have been at peace when he died.

Cézanne worked on this painting for about 8 years and it is the culmination of so many studies of bathers he did. (I was told that his models were actually bathing men, but he made them into women.) He lacks interest in correct anatomy and sensuality, but was deeply interested in meaning which he explored by connecting the relationship of the parts to the whole. Their nude forms take on geometric constructions, and motifs of the circle, triangle and cone are present, even in outline, here. He left open patches on parts of their bodies, as he sometimes did, but it's also possible the painting is unfinished. This painting  represents Cézanne as an artist on a quest to understand humankind in the order of things, whose place in strong, but humbled next to the greatness of nature.                 Detail photos come from this website:            http://www.artble.com/artists/paul_cezanne/paintings/the_large_bathers

We note that in painting and others by Cézanne, there is balance of verticals and horizontals, warm and cool tones, sky and earth -- the heavens and the earth. Cezanne is also both classical and modern in style and composition, as he takes from the past to point to the future.  Again, that pointing finger reminds us of the journey from the world of the past to the world of  the future, just as it reminds us that death is a natural process of life.

Though Cézanne may not have been pleased with much of his art while here on earth, he has received an immortality in the end.  Picasso, Matisse and others said he was the single greatest inspiration on the course of 20th century art, perhaps because of his ability to capture the essence over detail.  The Grand Bathers is the essence of living life attuned to nature.

Dreaming of Arcadia in the Modern World

One of the first 'pastoral' paintings(not in the exhibition) was
The Pastoral Concert, 1509, by Titian and/or 
Giorgione, originator of  the pastoral, where landscape is on par with figures. Shepherds and musicians are frequent in this theme.

Good things always end, including summer and a chance to see how the greatest modern artists painted themes of leisure as Arcadian Visions: Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, ends Labor Day.
The exhibition highlights 3 large paintings:  Gauguin's frieze-like Where do We Come From?..., 1898, Cézanne's Large Bathers, 1898-1905 and Matisse's Bathers by a River, 1907-17.

Each painting was crucial to the goals of the artists, and crucial to the transitioning from the art and life of the past into the 20th century. These modernist visions actually are part of a much older theme descended from Greece and written about in Virgil's Eclogues. Nineteenth-century masters were very familiar with this tradition from the 16th-century painting in the Louvre, The Pastoral Concert, by Giorgione and/or Titian.  Édouard Manet's infamous Luncheon on the Grass of 1863 was probably painted to fulfill that artist's stated desire to modernize The Pastoral Concert.   Those who think artists throw away tradition, think again; the greatest artists of the modern age did not.       

    

Arcadia was originally thought to be in the mountains of central Greece. Virgil described a place where shepherds, nymphs and minor gods who lived on milk and honey, made music and were shielded from the vicissitudes of life.  With its promise of calm simplicity, Arcadia was a place of refuge. Renaissance scholars writers and painters re-descovered it; Baroque painters developed the theme further, and 19th century artists glorified it because the Industrial created yearnings for a simpler life. (Musée d'Orsay in Paris has a small focused exhibit on Arcadia at the moment.) Stéphane Mallarmé's poem of 1876, An Afternoon of the Faun, had this theme, too, and was followed by Claude Debussy's musical interpretation after that poem.

But, even Virgil had warned, that things are not always as they seem.  The exhibition's signature pieces by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse reflect harmonious relationships between humans and nature, but tinged with loss. The best of Arcadian visions give equal importance to figures and landscape, as these artists do.  Other 19th century painters, whose work is shown for comparison, include Corot, Millet, Signac, Seurat, and Puvis da Chavannes.  It is interesting that the museum did not include Auguste Renoir's Large Bathers, 1887, in the PMA's own collection, probably because that idealized scene does not have anything foreboding.

   

 Paul Gauguin, Where do we come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?(detail of left side), 1898
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is so large that it must be seen in real life.

Artist Paul Gauguin escaped France and settled in the the south seas, Tahiti, where he searched for his version of Arcadia.  It was the first time I had seen Gauguin's Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?  No reproduction does justice to its color, details and beauty. Twelve five feet wide and four feet high, it must be seen in person to adequately "read the painting."  Composed of figures familiar from other Gauguin paintings, this allegory makes us think deeply about the meaning of life via Gauguin's favorite figural types, the women of Tahiti.  He depicts youth, adulthood and old age and treats each phase as a moment of discovery and passing to the next, but we may end up with more questions than answers. 
  

Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1898-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the

culminations of many studies he had been doing of bathers since the 1870s.

The acoustical guide to the exhibition quotes Paul Gauguin who said that Paul Cézanne spent days on mountaintop reading Virgil. Cézanne's soul was always in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence and the connection to that past was in his blood, coming from a very classical childhood education of Latin and Greek and hiking through old Roman paths with friend and future novelist, Émile Zola. Even though the bathers have no sensuality, Cézanne's Large Bathers is a painting which gives exquisite beauty to its concept.  To me, it stands out as the most important painting in the show.  An article links Cézanne to thoughts of death, Poussin and several poets who wrote of the territory surrounding Aix as Arcadia. This painting is perhaps the most Arcadian modern painting of the exhibition, although there are no shepherds, no musicians and no men. While it picks up the dream of humankind living simply in nature, under its beauty and its bounty, one woman points to the river, suggesting a place where these complacent bathers will ultimately go.         

The design of The Large Bathers perfectly balances traditional space and compositional structure with the goals of modern art. I always knew how much I loved this painting, but now I know why. The exhibition gave me much new insight and appreciation to fill an entire blog about this painting.   Matisse's painting is in the same large room of the exhibition, but the message is less subtle.     

Matisse spent ten years revising this painting, 8'7" by 12'10"  Art Institute of Chicago

He completed Bathers by a River around 1917 

Bathers by a River is also very large and, as expected, even more abstract.  Matisse worked on the painting for 10 years and changed it, as his ideas and conceptions changed. Noticeable is the lack of color and empty features of the faces.   He paints verticals, a suitable balance to the curves, but a snake appears in front and in the center, which can be seen as a dire warning.  World War I was happening at the time he finished it. His earlier paintings of bathers were far more joyful and colorful.

Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

 is approximately 6'8" x 9'9"

It was a complete surprise to see Henri Rousseau's The Dream, also a very large painting.  The tropical landscape with an elephant and lions is included in the same room of monumental paintings. Rousseau drew exotic plants in the botanical gardens of Paris and he painted them in a simplistic style with unexpected, evocative juxtapositions.  He was a visionary before the Surrealists.  His woman reclines in a traditional pose on a seat-less sofa, as a dark-skinned horn player and jungle animals appears.  Music, repose, luxury of nature are typical Arcadian themes, and it is a joy to see it in the same room with the three signature paintings of the exhibition. 

Nicolas Poussin, The Grande Bacchanal, c. 1627, from the Louvre, Paris


To understand all these connections, the curator included a painting by the most representative painter of the Arcadian tradition, Nicolas Poussin. (New York's Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, 4 years ago.)  Poussin was a Baroque artist who was thoroughly engrossed in a classical style with themes taken from ancient writers. His painting The Grande Bacchanal, 1627, on loan from the Louvre, has beautiful women, musicians, a Silenus and even baby revelers, with darkess approaching the landscape. Each of the early modern artists featured in the exhibition were familiar with Poussin's style and sources, as well as Watteau and Boucher who painted pastoral themes in the 18th century.

Matisse's early Fauvist paintings, Music and The Dance, are abstract and modern but thoroughly a part of the pastoral tradition.  Athough the exhibition does not show any of the colorful compositions Matisse did in the first decade of the 20th century, those paintings have tons of color and are steeped in the pastoral tradition.   (I'll need to take trip to Philadelphia to see the Barnes Collection with another large version of Cézanne's Bathers and Matisse's famous The Joy of Life.)

A sketch of "Music" from MoMA  links back to Poussin's The Andrians, with dancers, a lounging woman and a violinist.  This painting is not in the exhibition..

Quotes from the poet Virgil's pastoral literature line the walls.  We witness how various artists of the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted his poetry in drawings, paintings, etchings and illustrated books.  The exhibition ends with Picasso, Cubists, Expressionists and little-known Russian painters of the 20th century.  Although not always inspired by Virgil or Ovid, these paintings can be linked to the desire for a bucolic life of simplicity and harmony in nature.  

I was awed to see the Robert Delaunay's City of Paris, 1910-12.  Delaunay famously painted the Eiffel Tower in a Cubist jumble of colors and shifting perspectives.  That symbol of modernism was only a little more than 20 years old at this time.  This giant canvas of Paris also has three large nudes.  They are the Three Graces, just as Botticelli and Raphael had painted them.  Delaunay's vision of Paris includes the past and the present, but the nudes of the past are actually seem more central to this composition of shifting triangles, circles and planes of colors.  If anything, Cubism reminds us of life's impermanence. 

Robert Delaunay, City of Paris, 1910-12, is 8'9" x 13'4"

Finally, at the end we see Franz Marc's Deer in Forest, II, from the Phillips Collection.  Here the humans are gone and only animals are in the forest.   The exhibition is very thoughtful and reflective, and I thank Curator Joseph Rishel for giving us so much to ponder.  It is one designed not only to make us only look art more closely, but we must also think more deeply.  

Celebrating African-American Art and Life in the 20th century

Sam Gilliam, The Petition, 1990, mixed media

Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Era and Beyond gives a broad overview of 43 artists whose work spanned 8 decades of the 20th century.  Over 40 photographs, as well as paintings, give a provocative picture of urban and rural life during the Depression, the age of segregation and the Civil Rights and later.  Although there is some overlap with other 20th century art movements, the exhibition is mainly art focused on African-Americans and their lives.  Both abstract and figural paintings are included, but also sculpture by Richard Hunt, Sam Gilliam, an important recent figure in the art scene of Washington, DC.   The artists come from the South and North, with a large number from urban areas of Detroit, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore and Washington, DC.

Detroit artist Tony Gleaton recorded his travels to Nicaraguain in Family of the Sea, 1988,  from the series Tengo Casi 500 Anos: Africa's Legacy in Central America, above.   Roy De Carava was a New Yorker whose photos capture aspects of city life  as in Two Women Manikan's Hand, 1950, printed  1982, on right.  (gelatin silver prints)

The portraits give impressive concentrated views of individual personalities, particularly by Tony Gleaton and Earlie Hudnall, Jr. I especially liked the photographs of Ray DeCarava, for the artistic compositions with interesting value contrasts. Although the portrait photography is very interesting, I'm partial to DeCarava's staged compositions which look like film stills.

Ray DeCarava, Lingerie, New York, 1950, printed 1982, gelatin silver print, left.

Gleaton's works are part of series photos, such as Africa's legacy in Central America.   But there is also a series from the WPA (Works Project Administration of the 1930s, part of the New Deal.   Robert McNeill 's several photographs include those from his project entitled, The Negro in Virginia which has both interesting portraits and slices of life.  The art of photojournalism really began at this time, during the 1930s.

The contrast of black and white photography works well exhibited next to bold, colorful works of art by the Harlem Renaissance artists, such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, who worked with collages.  Bearden, Lawrence, as well as Lois Mailou Jones and Norman Lewis, are among the most important painters who contributed to the artistic life of Harlem in the 20s and 30s.  The Harlem Renaissance also produced writers, musicians and poets such as Langston Hughes. 

Community, by Jacob Lawrence is a gouache of 1986.

It is a study for the mural of the same name in Jamaica, New York

Lawrence lived until 2000 and spent his last 30 years as a professor at the University of Washingon in Seattle.  The exhibition has both an early and a late work.   Lawrence maintained a similar style in the   later work, always influenced by colors in Harlem which he said inspired him.  Lawrence's most famous works are the series paintings, The Migration Series, half of which is in Washington's Phillips collection, and the Harriet Tubman series and the Frederick Douglas series at the Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, where another large collection of African-American art is kept.

Charles Searles' Celebration is an acrylic study for a mural painting

in the William H Green Building, Philadelphia, made in 1975

Charles Searles was from Philadelphia and the Smithsonian's Celebration is actually a study for a mural done in the William H Green Federal Building in Philadelphia.   Likewise, Community is a study for a mural Lawrence did in Jamaica, New York, 1986.  It evokes a spirit of togetherness and cooperation.

Norman Lewis, Evening Rendezvous, 1962

Abstract works may actually be visualizations with other meanings.  Norman Lewis's Evening Rendezvous of 1962, is an abstract medley of red white and blue, but the white refers to hoods of the KluKluxKlan and red to fires and burnings.  Not all is innocent fun, but Enchanted Rider, done by Bob Thompson in 1961 is more optimistic.  The rider may actually be a vision of St. George who triumphed over evil and is a traditional symbol of Christian art.

Enchanted Rider by Bob Thompson, 1961

Though the exhibition is somewhat historical, it wants the viewer to judge each piece on its own merit, and to see it as a unique expression of the individual artists.  There is not a heavy emphasis on chronology or history.   Lois Mailou Jones is one such personal, but symbolic artist who picked up ideas from living in Haiti and traveling to 11 African countries.  In Moon Masque, 1971, pattern, fabric design and African rituals are evoked.  I like the color in most of these paintings and the celebration of life so vividly expressed in these works.

Lois Mailou Jones, Moon Masque, 1971

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has the largest collection of African-American Art in any one location, but this exhibition is only a portion of their collection.  Some modern masters, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Faith Ringgold and Perry James Marshall, are not included in this showing.  After the exhibition closes in Washington September 3, it will travel to museums in Williamsburg, Orlando, Salem, MA, Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Sacramento and Syracuse for the next 2-1/2 years.

The Magic or Remedios Varo

Since going to the Miró exhibition recently, I've been reminded of Remedios Varo.  In 2000, I discovered this marvelous Surrealist in an exhibition devoted to her at Chicago's Mexican Fine Arts Museum. Called The Magic or Remedios Varo, the exhibition had been organized by Washington's National Museum of Women in the Arts and shown there. At the moment of this writing there is an exhibition at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderne de Mexico, entitled Remedios Varo: 50 Keys.  It includes 50 works of art and a single sculpture.

Certainly Frida Kahlo is much better known, but I find Varo, who knew both Kahlo and Diego Rivera, more evocative and interesting as an artist. Varo also uses a female subject as her chief descriptive vehicle, but she is less self-absorbed than Kahlo and more concerned with the larger world.

Varo was a Surrealist born in Spain in 1908, but exiled to Mexico after 1941. Like Gaudi, Miró and Dalí, she was Catalan, originally from Angles, near Girona and close to the French border.  Some of the literature I read of her suggested she was a scientist with a dedication to nature close to that of Leonardo da Vinci. She learned much through her father, an engineer, and lived part of her childhood in Morocco. Varo is certainly a detail artist and paints more in the style of a tempera painter than an oil painter. Yet I hardly see a deep devotion to science; her art taps into more of a spiritual quest for understanding the world.  Perhaps, to other observers, she bridges the gap between science and the mystical.

Varo's people are tall and thin, elongated like Sienese or Catalan figures from around 1400.   Her perspective is also similar, somewhat long and exaggerated, also. She has a delicate touch and is able to find connections unexpectedly.  As a woman spins in The Alchemist, above, the checkerboard of her cloak turns into tile patten of the floor  beneath her.  Or is it opposite?  She could be weaving the tile floor into her clothing.  Some kind of contraption behind her is the machinery that connecting what's inside with the outdoors.  The perspective is like Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo.

Throughout her work I'm reminded of creativity, where it comes from and where it goes.  Her artwork evokes these connections again and again.  There something mystical in how it comes about.  While The Flutist, above, plays next to a mountain, the stones magically rise and form a tower, while a schematic mathematical drawing holds the tower in place.  Stairs of the tower are rising, going up to heaven like a Tower of Babel.  However, some sources cite the the periodic table of chemistry, though I don't quite see that connection.   There are fossils on these stones, so a connection to the ancient past, present and future come together in one place.

Creation of the Birds, left, dates to 1957.  As a wise woman in owl's clothing paints birds, the birds fly out the window, She also holds a magnifying glass lit by a star out the window which, in turn, illuminates her creation.   The brush comes out in her center, the heart source of creativity, which is really a guitar strung around her neck.  There are egg-shaped contraptions on the floor and out another window.  In fact, this machine mixes her paint, while a bird eats on the floor.  Art, music, inspiration, heart, mind, and inspiration flow together, while birds fly in and out.  The artist's work is to connect inner and outer worlds.

Varo's connection to Surrealists in Paris and Barcelona was strong.  She attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, the same art school as Salvador Dalí had attended. We know little of her work in Europe before she went to Mexico, but we know she admired the paintings of Heironymous Bosch at the Prado and philosophical writings of the hermetic tradition.  Most of the work that can be seen is comes from the 1950s up to her death in 1963.  Her association with the Surrealism made her unacceptable to either the Spanish government after the Civil War or a France during Nazi occupation.  She and her French husband fled to Mexico where they met other artists such as English-born Leonora Carrington, perhaps the artist closest to her in style.

We can't always know what was on her mind, as in the case of much Surrealism, but there seems to be a desire to tap into the origin of creativity and to connect the self (herself) to the larger universe.  Her last painting, before she unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 53, was Revolving Still Life.   Pieces of fruit spin off plates as the planets orbit the sun. How interesting the many ways she can connect the small and ordinary with the big, cosmic implications!  She has many online followers and fans of her work.  There was an exhibition in Los Angeles last Spring which featured 10 of her paintings.