María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga (known as Remei or Remedios Varo, 16 December 1908 – 8 October 1963) was a Spanish surrealist painter, writer, and graphic artist. Her work features Surrealist worlds, where science, mysticism, and magic mix together. One of the first women to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, she went on to establish herself in Barcelona in 1932. While there, she worked as a graphic designer and joined the Surrealist group Logicofobista. In 1937, Remedios moved to Paris with French poet Benjamin Péret. With the Nazis arrival in Paris in 1941, she self exiled to Mexico. Varo never returned to Spain. Despite widespread belief, Remedios Varo never became a Mexican citizen. Though she never returned to her homeland, she kept her Spanish citizenship, unlike her friend Leonora Carrington, who was naturalized as a United States citizen.
Early life and education María de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga was born on 16 December 1908 in Anglès, a small town in the province of Girona, in Catalonia. Remedios was named in honor of the Virgen de los Remedios ("Virgin of Remedies") as a 'remedy' for an older sister's death. She had two surviving siblings: an older brother Rodrigo, and a younger brother Luis. Her mother, Ignacia Uranga y Bergareche, was born in Argentina to Basque parents and her father, Rodrigo Varo y Zajalvo, was from Córdoba in Andalusia. When Varo was a young child, her family moved frequently throughout Spain and North Africa to follow her father's work as a hydraulic engineer. While her father was a somewhat agnostic liberal who studied Esperanto, her mother was a devout Catholic and enrolled her in a strict convent school at the age of eight. Varo's father encouraged her artistic endeavors, taking her to museums and having her meticulously copy his diagrams. While in school, Varo was somewhat rebellious. She read authors such as Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as mystical literature and Eastern spiritual works. As a teenager she became interested in dreams, writing stories which developed fantastical themes she would later explore in her art. In 1924, Varo enrolled at the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, a school known for rigid and exacting training. Aside from the required classes, she took an elective class in scientific drawing. One of her instructors was Realist painter Manuel Benedito, from whom she learned traditional oil painting techniques. Much of the work she created from 1926–1935, particularly her academic paintings, has been lost; it is unknown what happened to those artworks. In the 1920s, the Surrealist movement was becoming popular with the Madrid art scene; the city hosted avant-garde intellectuals and artists such as Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Rafael Alberti, and Salvador Dalí. Varo became attracted to the surreal, finding inspiration in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco Goya, and El Greco which she visited at the Museo del Prado.
Career Varo graduated from the Academia in 1930. Soon after, she married former classmate Gerardo Lizárraga in San Sebastián. Lizárraga was a fellow Surrealist who worked in both visual arts and filmmaking; he was also an anarchist. Following an outbreak of violence in Madrid resulting from the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic, Varo and Lizárraga moved to Paris. In Paris, Varo enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and quickly dropped out, realizing she did not want to remain within the confines of formal education. Working odd jobs and engaging with the Parisian art scene, the couple stayed in the city for a year before moving to Barcelona in 1932.
By the early 1930s, Barcelona had become the liberal and avant-garde artistic center of Spain, more so than Madrid. Soon after arriving, Varo started a romantic relationship with fellow artist Esteban Francés, although still living with Lizárraga; this was the first of multiple open relationships she would have. While in Barcelona, Varo and Lizárraga worked for an advertising firm. Varo became part of a circle of other avant-garde artists, including José Luis Florit and Óscar Domínguez, and with Francés she came into contact with French Surrealists. While sharing an art studio on the Plaça de Lesseps with Francés, Varo began creating her first artworks after graduating from the Academia. Her work of the mid-1930s indicates familiarity with contemporary Spanish and French Surrealist imagery. Varo often played the popular Surrealist game cadavre exquis with her friends, and sent works she had made via the game to fellow artist and friend Marcel Jean for circulation in Paris. By the summer of 1935, the tension and violence which had caused Varo and Lizárraga to leave Madrid had spread throughout Spain; the Spanish Civil War began the next year. Varo's brother Luis enlisted in the Francoist army and died of typhoid fever soon thereafter, a course of events which would come as a shock to Varo. It was in this context that Domínguez introduced Varo to French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, who had arrived in Barcelona in August 1936 to volunteer with the Republican faction. Péret was highly politically active; he was a member of the Trotskyist POUM and staunchly anti-clerical. Varo and Péret soon became romantically involved; his 1936 volume of love poetry, Je sublime, was dedicated to her.
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