Episode #114: Modern Love--Remedios Varo and Gerardo Lizarraga

Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall, peacemakers, risk takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long distance love, for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new, Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. All right friends, it is time once again. It's time to get on the road to travel and make some artsy memories with me. Yup, in case you haven't heard the news, we've got a wonderful 5-day trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, coming up this fall, and you are invited. Please join me November 1st through November 5th to explore this vibrant multicultural city that consistently ranks among the world's top art destinations. Let's enjoy that breathtaking desert landscape, immerse ourselves in the treasures of the southwest, and focus in on one of America's greatest modernists, Georgia O'Keefe, who's works overflow with evidence of her fascination with this, the land of enchantment. This is a small group tour organized by me and my friends at Like Mine's Travel and Limited spots are available. So plan now and register as soon as possible. You can grab all of the details at my website, artcuriouspodcast.com/events or Google Like Mine's Travel and you'll find us there too. I can't wait to meet you this fall and to explore the beautiful southwest with you. Like Mine's Travel, Art Curious, Santa Fe, November 1 through November 5th. The Art Curious podcast is sponsored primarily by Inker Light, artist studios, exhibition space, and more. Please visit InkerLightRolley.com. Sometimes life is boring and average, and that can be wonderful. But sometimes life comes at you in such an epic way that it almost seems false, like a novel or a movie. But it's not. It's real life. And today's story is one of those odd, amazing circumstances. It involves two painters, a world war, exile, a brief love story, the development of a lifelong friendship, and a photograph that coincidentally and miraculously may have saved a life. Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. Art Curious Season 13 is all about modern love, and today's episode features the ever-intertwined lives of remedios borrow and Gerardo Lizaraga, two Spanish artists who never let any circumstance stop them from giving themselves entirely to their art and creating some wonderful works that should be on your art historical radar. This is the Art Curious Podcast. Exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history. I'm Jennifer Dassel. Our story today begins in Spain, with the much hoped-for birth of a daughter in the small town of Angeles in Girona, Catalonia, Northeast Spain, near the border with France. On December 16, 1908, Maria de los Romedios Alicia Rodrigo Varo y Uronga, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, was born to Rodrigo, a hydraulics engineer, and his wife Ignacia. This new little girl was the second of the family's children, but their first child another girl had previously died. In despair, the mother Ignacia made a promise to the Virgin Mary, in the form of the so-called Lady of the Remedies, that if she was blessed with a new daughter, she would celebrate the Virgin's intercession in her daughter's life and with her name. And thus, the little one would grow up to become known by the name Romedios, after our Lady of the Remedies. Like many who grew up to be artists, little Romedios Varo found delight and proficiency in drawing from a very early age. When her father Rodrigo noted her additional proficiency in math, he saw this as the powerhouse move that it is. Art and geometry, lines, shapes. So he took matters into his own hands to make sure that his daughter had the best artistic education available. He also took her to art museums, especially on trips to the Prado in Madrid, where she fell in love with the paintings of Heronymous Bosch, Francisco Goia, and El Greco. At the same time, he introduced her to science fiction novels, and she particularly took a shine to Jules Verne with those visionary machines and things that would later influence her own artwork. All of this made a huge impression on her. As did her cohort, when she began studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Son Fernando in Madrid, where she rubbed elbows with Luis Bounuel, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Salvador Dalí, whom she later noted she found rather annoying. But no one made as much of an impression on her as a fellow painter, Gerardo Lizarraga. Gerardo Lizarraga's stories was born in Pamplona, Spain on October 30, 1905. As the son of the future mayor of Pamplona, Gerardo was exposed to the world of culture and privilege, studying at the best schools in the area, and frequently joining his father on business trips to Paris. He was an accomplished student overall, but none more so than in the visual arts. And by 19, he had decided to pursue a career as a painter, enrolling, also, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. And it was there that remediosvaro caught his eye. Both artists were free spirited, excited about making art, and how they could reflect and affect the worlds around them through their paintings. These young, inspired, and impressionable artists began working, and both of them were slowly gaining prominence, especially in the case of Lizarraga, and competence in the case of Varro, who was younger than her partner, and then sought continual training in Madrid, while Lizarraga was granted both commissions and scholarships in Paris and beyond. But those two crazy kids didn't let careers get in their way of their love, so they got married on September 6, 1930, with Varro a tender 22 years old, and Lizarraga 25. Though remediosvaro had been born into a very loving household, her parents were also rather strict, and she long said that she felt confined in their presence. Marrying Lizarraga, though, introduced her to a new world of freedom, especially including the freedom to follow her own artistic muse. She began working in larger and larger formats, experimenting with that tempting new artistic and cultural direction, surrealism. All while working through many of the inspirations she carried with her from her youth at home, things like her father's interest in intellectualism and literature, and her mother's devout religiosity. We will come back to all of these because they will come into play later. But first, Varro and Lizarraga have to go to Paris. We've already established the importance of Paris during this period as the epicenter of surrealist art and thought, so it was a natural lure for painters like Varro and Lizarraga. But it especially made sense for, and too, Lizarraga, since he had previously spent two years living in the city while enjoying an art scholarship, as well as those previous visits he had made with his father during his youth. He just felt comfortable there, and she did too, and both strove to cement themselves. But it didn't go quite as planned. For her part, Remydeus Varro enrolled in the famed at Col de Bousart, the state-sponsored art school, but she found it really stifling and restrictive. She far preferred to study at her own pace and to follow her own whims, so she soon dropped out after enrolling. And Lizarraga wasn't having the best time either, though he used his painting skills to great advantage during a stint as a scenery designer for ballet and opera back home in Spain, he wasn't able to just hold down a stable job in Paris. So broke, the Lizarraga's had little choice but to return to Barcelona, where they found they had better connections and could better support themselves. Let's sidestepe a little moment here for a look at making a living in the arts. So I can tell you, first hand, that curators and art historians, unless you're a super big name museum person or maybe an art historical novelist, well, we are not rolling in cash. And of course, I can say that art podcasters aren't living large either, but it is what it is. Anyway, though I'm not an artist, I know that many amazing creators really struggle to make a living out of their passions. people's grapple with feeling disappointment that they aren't able to be quoted. "full-time artists" and that seems to have been difficult for both Varo and Liza Raga at this stage. However, they were full-time artists, creating works that were meant for commercial use, and who's to say that that's any less of an art form? Upon their return to Spain, they settled in Barcelona and husband and wife both took jobs with the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm, with Varo as a designer and Liza Raga as an art director. In their off-hours, they both practiced their art for themselves and similarly nurtured their connections to Barcelona's burgeoning contemporary art scene, joining a group known by the acronym "Adlan", which stands for Amix de la Nu, the Catalan phrase meaning "friends of new art". Among Adlan's core group of painters, Remedios Varo fit right in. She was admired for her spirit, her feisty personality, her beauty and her wit. One of her friends, the artist Oscar Dominguez, began calling her "the lioness", which was an affectionate teasing that showcased her strength and fierceness. And it was a fierceness and adherence to her own beliefs and following her own path that led to some difficulties with her husband. Like Lee Miller in our last episode of Art Curious, Remedios Varo didn't want to be tethered to just one sexual or romantic partner. And she found someone new and exciting in the form of Esteban Francis, another painter who was part of the Adlan group. Francis, as Liza Raga had, truly fell head over heels for Remedios, and the two of them became so entwined that they not only became lovers, but moved into an art studio together, where they collaborated on paintings collages, and in true surrealist fashion, exquisite corpse drawings, where one person would draw on a segment of paper before turning it over, hiding their drawing, and allowing the other artist to add to the drawing or to complete it. The result being this incredibly fantastic mishmash of styles and subject matter. Some incredible collage versions of Varo's exquisite corpses still survive today, and they are excellent fun. You can see some examples on my website, artcuriouspodcast.com. Understandably, the more that Remedios meshed together with Esteban, the more her marriage with Gerardo fell apart. They began spending more and more time separate from one another, essentially living separate lives. Until around 1935, Varo fell in love with someone new. The French surrealist poet Benjamin Pere. With the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Varo and Pere fled to safety and Paris, with Esteban Francis, by the way, who was still in love with Varo, following them. The three of them settled into an apartment together. Gerardo Liza Raga was left behind. There's more coming up next right after this quick break. Join us, please, over on Patreon, and get the show "Add Free." Patreon.com/Arcurious Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall, peacemakers, risk takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long-distance love, for introverts, and extroverts, the thinkers, and the doers, for old friends, and new. Coca-Cola for everyone. Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall peacemakers, risk takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long-distance love, for introverts, and extroverts, the thinkers, and the doers, for old friends, and new. Welcome back to our curious. Back in Paris again, Remedios Varo was living her surrealist dream. Through her relationship with Benjamin Pareil, she was introduced to the inner circle of the surrealists, befriending André Breton, Max Ernst, Jean-Miro, and many others, including the woman who would become her bestie, the equally fascinating painter, Leonora Carrington. We mentioned her briefly in our first episode of the season about Max Ernst and Dorothy Attannning, and she was also romantically connected with Ernst, too. Such delicious and international company, so full of ideas and open to such depths of experimentation, was a delight for Varo, and she took it all in, trying new techniques like Fumage, an art technique developed by Varo's friend Wolfgang Palin, using the smoke of a candle or kerosene to create images on a piece of paper or directly on canvas. From the Romanian painter Victor Browner, Varo dove deeply into texts about magic, as a terrorism and alchemy. She studied texts about space and time, fascinated by questions about reality and interdimensionality. All of this percolated in the back of her mind, bubbling up in works like 1938's The Soul of the Mountain, where the forms of women merge with those of mountain/volcanoes towering over a misty landscape below. It's strange, dreamlike, weird, and so wonderful. It's a fascinating piece by a surrealist just beginning to come into her own, but we are still going to have to wait a little while longer before remedios Varo really hit her stride. Gerardo Lizaraga II was having a little bit of difficulty finding equilibrium after his wife left him and moved away to Paris. His resume at this point reveals someone with varied interests and maybe a little bit of trouble holding down a job. Or perhaps he liked it that way, loving that whole freelancers' gig lifestyle. Between 1937 and 39, he became an art professor, founded a film company, worked as a screenwriter, and an art director's assistant. He became a scenery, costume designer, and even acted in at least one film all while Spain was royaling in Civil War. He made motivational posters to support the Basque Army during the war, but after General Francisco Franco's army took control of Catalonia, the Spanish Civil War was declared over. But many, including Lizaraga, didn't feel safe. Alongside half a million others, Lizaraga moved into France to seek refuge. In our earliest episode this season, all about Max Ernst and Dorothy Attanning, I mentioned that Ernst himself had been imprisoned in 1939, seen as a potential spy in the early days of World War II, when suspicion of anyone with German connections, like the German-born Ernst, was considered problematic at minimum, a purported threat to the safety of French citizens. At the same time, the French government acted to imprison around 350,000 Spanish exiles, too, accusing them of being, quote, undesired foreigners. Lizaraga was one such undesired foreigner. He was captured and forced into a concentration camp in Argelé-sur-Mar, which is a tiny village in the south of France, close to the Spanish border. What I find most fascinating about Lizaraga's time as a prisoner in France is that he continued to work on both professional and artistic endeavors. I imagine that this helped him sort out his emotions, just keeping busy, perhaps, and not dwelling despairingly on his lost freedom. During his internment, he not only sent detailed correspondence to his film production company, offering directions and ideas for their latest projects, but he also continued to draw, entertaining himself and his fellow prisoners with little caricatures of the officers and supervisors of the camp. These caricatures are all done with bold color and sharp, swooping lines, humorously exaggerating the size and shapes of various officers. My favorite involves a French lieutenant colonel dressed in wartime khakis and a black and white tie, and the figure is more bowling pin than person. Jorado Lizaraga kept these drawings, later referring to them as "the strongest and most important part of my artistic work." Not that every work was humorous. Other drawings in sparse graphite have survived, like "English" from 1939, which is a presumed self-portrait that morphs Lizaraga's bewiscared face into a moan that perfectly describes the work's title. Another drawing called "Mother Earth Fenced in with Barped Wire" is hard to read. Is the female form at the bottom of the image the personified Earth? And thus, is it her tortured, damned soul rising above and imprisoned behind that barbed wire? But that wire does perfectly place its inspiration in the camp, a reminder to us and to the artist that Lizaraga was trapped, and that his connection to creativity was one of his only means of emotional sustenance. In the midst of one of the darkest periods of his life, art helped save him. But as to his whereabouts, and even whether Jorado Lizaraga was alive or dead, many people like Remedios Varro didn't know. Sure, she cared, but she was also so intermingled with the surrealists, actively working and exhibiting, and she was still romantically connected to Pareix, if not Estabon Francis. So she essentially lost track of her estranged husband for a few years. But in the early 1940s, a single event changed everything, and brought Lizaraga back into her life. One afternoon, Varro and Benjamin Parei were enjoying an afternoon out at a movie theater in Paris. While they waited for the feature to begin, they casually watched the news reel, and on that reel, they happened to catch a report on the Spanish refugees that had crossed the border in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, many of whom were now, they learned, captured and held in internment camps throughout the South of France. Photos of various Spanish exiles flashed across the screen, and all at once, Remedios Varro felt her heart skip a beat, because she recognized one of them. It was none other than her husband. Can you imagine what if Varro and Parei opted to skip the movies that day, or what if this news reel wasn't shown in that particular theater? What if Varro was late to the movies, or happened to look away from the screen at exactly the wrong moment? But none of that happened. In a flash, she learned about the whereabouts and status of one of the people most important in her life, or at least one who used to be. Her husband was alive, and he was in France, trapped in a camp against his will. Before Varro could stop herself, she ran into the cinema's projection booth, exploiting the odd but really fortuitous situation. That was her husband on the screen. Could she please have that single still frame from the news reel? Reluctantly, the projectionist snipped the frame, and Remedios Varro left with this small proof that Gerardo Lizarraga was still alive. For nearly two years, Remedios Varro worked tirelessly, requesting intercession from the French government to release her husband. "I am his family," she declared. "I can vouch for him. I can claim for him as one of us, and I will take care of everything," she begged. And though the French government had a remedial, no pun intended, intercession program in place that allowed exiled prisoners to be released with the assistance of family and friends, it actually proved harder to put in practice than it was to manage on paper. And then, things only got worse. Though Varro attempted to have Lizarraga freed, he was transferred in 1940 to a different concentration camp, this time in the tiny town of Agde, and his estranged wife lost him again. And then, things grew dim in Paris, too, after Hitler's army invaded France. After the occupation began, many of the surrealists including Paris and Varro were arrested, interrogated, and tortured for their known opposition to fascism. Varro herself was imprisoned for several months. Under this continued threat of torture, exile, or even death, Varro made the only decision she felt that she could make at that time. She, alongside many of her friends and acquaintances, fled Paris, slowly making her way to the south of France, toward, she hoped, her captured husband. She was living in hiding, living in fear, and it was only when she reached Marseille and connected with a larger group of international expats attempting to flee Europe that she finally felt a little bit safer. Lizarraga, meanwhile, had coincidentally and finally been freed of his own final place of captivity, a camp at Claremont-Ferrand, and he transferred to Marseille, where he reunited with Remedios Varro, who had spent so long working to secure his freedom. Varro and Lizarraga were still married legally, and though they were no longer in love, or at least not in love in the same way, they felt forever bonded by the trauma of the intervening years since they separated. The Spanish Civil War, the World War, they're status as exiles and Spaniards living abroad. So it makes sense, at least in some ways, that they chose to stick together. They finally received exit papers to depart France in 1941, through the heroic efforts of American journalist Varian Fry and the emergency rescue committee, who secured safe passage for many anti-Nazi refugees in the 1940s, including not only Varro and Lizarraga, but also Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst as just a few examples. Though many of their cohort chose to emigrate to the U.S., Varro and Lizarraga opted instead to move to Mexico, partially due to their built-in knowledge of the Spanish language. And thus, in the early 40s, they found themselves settling again in a new country, supporting each other not as lovers and spouses, but as close friends, still inspired by the same exciting art and ideas that had brought them together decades before. Over the years, as they established their lives and their adopted home, Varro and Lizarraga had multiple opportunities to work together, including for an incredible commission from the Ballet Theater of New York, today known as the American Ballet Theater, where they worked in Mexico City with none other than Marc Chagall to produce the scenery and costumes for a ballet called Aleco, based on the work of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Both artists remarried, but still remained extremely close friends, with Lizarraga's children often visiting remedios Varro's home for extended afternoons filled with drawing kid versions of exquisite corpses and making collages, and even heading to the beach at Occupocal with her. Their families, still and forevermore, stayed entwined. And the families even supported each other's art careers, too. There's one lovely story where Lizarraga's then-wife, nicknamed Icarene, offered advice to a very nervous remedios, who was about to show her paintings in a group exhibition in Mexico City for the very first time. It had been a while since she enjoyed exposure for her artworks, let alone in a large city as part of an exhibition of an artwork collective, and she just didn't know how to price her works for sale. She visited Icarene for help, and worried aloud, "How do I know what my paintings are worth? What if I price them too low? What should I let them go for for what amount?" And Icarene, after a moment, said almost jokingly, "Well, do you think any of your paintings will actually sell?" And remedios Varro was embarrassed, and she said, "No." Icarene then responded, "Well, in that case, put them at a very high price." So Varro did. And guess what? Each and every one of her paintings in that exhibition sold, a coup that shot Varro's name into the stratosphere of the art world in mid-century Mexico City. This led, of course, to more exhibitions, more sales, and more commissions. So let this be a lesson for all of us when it comes to value and our own self-worth. You are worth that high price. You are worth it. To be fair, it shouldn't have been a surprise to remedios, or Icarene, or Gerardo Lizaraga, or anyone in their circle that Varro's works would become so sought after. After remedios Varro married her husband Walter Gruen in 1950, she grew extremely prolific and inspired, creating painting after paintings suffused with folkloric and occult inspired symbols, detailing scenes with seemingly built-in narratives. Prior to the early 1950s, Varro had remained dedicated to her art practice, but still produced commercial work and graphic design to fund her passions and her lifestyle. Her new husband Gruen proved to be an undying supporter, suggesting that Varro stop working commercially and to pursue her own work full time. So she did. And it might be no surprise again to learn that at this point, her paintings grew more interesting, more self-assured. Many of her works feature a female protagonist, many again, in the midst of their own acts of creation or care, such as feeding a crescent moon in 1958's Celestial Pablo, making music out of disparate objects with the help of a strange woman appearing out of some peeling wallpaper in Harmony from 1956. Or one of my other favorites, another 1956 work called The Weaver of Veronica, wherein a lone woman knits another. An angelic red creature hovering in the air, ringing her into existence. The more you look at Varro's works, the more fascinating they become. They are complicated, still within that imaginative surrealist vein, and many championing women as their central protagonists. Sometimes they are difficult to disentangle or to interpret, but in the best way possible. And as the past half-century has progressed, it's exciting to see how much Varro's works have grown in a steam. How much more popular she has become. Today, she's often considered one of the most fascinating artists who lived in mid-summer. century Mexico, often making those best of lists alongside Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and others. I only wish that I could tell you that she lived a little bit longer. Her career had really just begun cresting when she died of a heart attack at the age of 54 in October 1963. But that last half decade or so of her life, wow. That's when she was the most prolific, most inspired, and that she created the vast majority of her surviving works. If anything, looking back, this probably should have been the story of the love of Walter Gruin for Remedios Varo, his emotional and financial backing that truly allowed her to achieve her much-longed-for goals of working full-time as an artist. And while I don't doubt that Varo would not have achieved so much without his love and care, I still feel the same way about her first marriage, too, her connection to fellow artist Gerardo Lizarraga. They came together at an early point in their lives, and when Lizarraga was the more prolific of the two, the promising artist whose career first took them to Paris, the place that Remedios Varo found so much life and meaning as part of the surrealist community. Years later, even after they parted as a romantic couple, their mutual support of each other's works and families carried both, but especially Varo, to feel safe and complete, to be held and understood. Not every romantic pairing or grouping lasts, or should last, but just because they didn't last as a romantic couple doesn't mean that they weren't important and meaningful. Varo, in essence, saved Lizarraga's life, and really, can there ever be truly a greater example of one's love or care for another human being than that? Next time on Art Curious, it's potentially the most collaborative and creative couples that we are featuring this season. I love this episode and both of these artists, and again, you're not going to want to miss it. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Art Curious Podcast. This one was written, produced and narrated by me, Jennifer Dassel, and a huge thanks to Anna Fuentes for her great writing and research help. The Art Curious theme is by Alex Davis at AlexDavisMusic.com, and our logo is by the great folks at Vaulted. Our podcast is co-produced by Kabuki, podcasts, creative video, and more. Subscribe to their show, Subgenra, a podcast about the movies, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at subgenrapodcast.com. Kabuki, leave your mark. The Art Curious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchor Light. Anchor Light is a creative space founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artists, studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space, Anchor Light encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the triangle. Please visit Anchor Light Raleigh.com. The Art Curious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to Art Curious to show your support and join us at Patreon for the price of a cup of coffee. You can swing it. I know you can. Check back with us soon as we explore some of the most unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful modern art lovers in art history. Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short, and the tall, peacemakers, risk-takers, for the optimists, pessimists, for long-distance love, for introverts, and extroverts, the thinkers, and the doers. For old friends, and new, Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.