Birds and Birthdays

by Christopher Barzak

  Three of those women were Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning.

  2. Three Who Re-membered

  Remedios Varo is little known or remembered outside of art circles. The worldwide fame of artists like Frida Kahlo never found her. Born in Spain, she left home in her early twenties to live in Paris in the 1930s, when that city was alive with experimentation amid the arts and intellectual circuits. Varo grew up in a strict Catholic household, mostly due to her mother, but together her parents from childhood encouraged her creativity and intuitive passion for painting and sketching. Although her father wasn’t an artist but a mechanical engineer, he taught Remedios the rigors of mechanical drawing. In her adult paintings, the precision and demanding construction of the architecture of her fantasy worlds seem almost more real than our own boulevards and cityscapes, most likely due to her father’s early influence.

  In Varo’s paintings, a fabulist world akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional town of Macondo or Angela Carter’s surreal, off-kilter fairytale worlds takes form. It is somehow consistent and absurd at the same time: inspired by flights of fantasy, yet limned with an inner logic. Men and women take on characteristics of animals. A woman leaves her psychoanalyst’s office with her father’s (or possibly her psychoanalyst’s) head in her hands. Stars and moons become commodities, and the source of the Orinoco River turns out to be a cup of ever-flowing water sitting on a table hidden within the trunk of a tree. These are the sorts of specific details Varo brings to what might easily be a hazy dreamlike world in lesser hands.

  Varo’s streets teem with strange yet somehow familiar people, and these characters become the focal point in her paintings, which in turn offer extended narratives beyond the moment in which we find them. Within the context of first-wave Surrealism produced mostly by men, the idea of exhibiting character and narrative is truly revolutionary. In so much Surreal art, bodies have either been stretched to their limits so as to be unrecognizable, or they have been dissected, dismembered, or even disappeared altogether. A sense of something so traditional as story rarely becomes an element in those paintings dead set on taking character and story apart, as they are the amber that freezes the world in place, according to Surrealist thought. Varo, though, remembered the inescapability of the body, the worth of character (and how one can push at cultural limitations of identity without doing away with the idea of character altogether). She “re-membered” these ideas, putting them back together within the context of Surrealism, much like Isis re-membered the body of Osiris within the narrative of Egyptian mythology.

  In the United States, we generally know very little of Remedios Varo, who left her native Spain for Paris in the 1930s and then fled Paris during the Nazi occupation, for Mexico. Her name, like those of many other Surrealists, was included on the Nazis’ list of Parisian dissidents. Varo settled in Mexico with other Surrealist exiles. Unlike many of them, though, she chose not to return to Europe after the war. Like her closest friend, Leonora Carrington, she had found a home in Mexico. Inspired by the undercurrent of folk magic in that place, and also inspired by the creative freedom outside the strictures of a male-dominated European Surrealism, Varo produced her mature work in Mexico. Outside the tightly knit circle of Surrealism, no longer subject to the idea of Woman as a femme-enfant, pure and magical as a child, Varo forged her own vision.

  Varo’s “Creation of the Birds” is a painting in which a creature — half woman, half owl — sits at a desk, sketching birds that come to life as she filters starlight through an optic lens onto her drawing paper. The pencil used by the Bird Woman to draw her birds is literally connected to either a violin or a cello-like instrument that hangs about her neck. Her color pallet has been blended within a mechanical contraption shaped like two eggs. In response to this painting, Varo’s biographer, Janet Kaplan, writes, “Again the interaction of science, art, mysticism, and nature; again the figure of an artist creating universal harmony with the elements at hand” (179), as a description of a motif that Varo continually returned to in many of her paintings.

  Viewing Varo’s paintings, a sense that each vision belongs to the same world begins to emerge. Often this is true of many artists. We recognize a Van Gogh due to his style, and this is true of Varo as well. But Varo’s paintings not only have a distinctive style made from Surrealist techniques, they also display another world, whole, with rules and a logic of its own, much like J.R.R. Tolkein did with Middle Earth. The language and style differ, of course — Varo’s vernacular is decidedly fabulist, rather than that of the somewhat academic language of Tolkein — but her people’s mores and dynamics are communicated without much effort on the viewer’s part. In many ways, it is a secret history of our inner lives. Specifically, Varo’s inner life. But generally her images reach into universal experiences like birth, death, marriage, heartbreak, journeys and discoveries, aging.

  Although Varo’s work is surreal, it does not exclude a sense of naturalism. Each figure is drawn specifically, with a personality and a sense of history; each setting that her “personages” (as Varo called them) inhabit is recognizable, not only as a setting we might find in dreams, but in reality. Walled cities, spiral-shaped islands, and the clockwork mechanisms that click and clack throughout her paintings echo back to the Medieval and Renaissance architectures of Western Europe. Varo never fails to include details such as tablecloths, silverware, needles and spindles, the flow of a dress or the curve of a neckline. Her paintings are meditations on reality, refracted through the lens of fantasy. And her fantasies are never the sort to tear apart the bodies of her personages, which often share facial features that are similar to her own: the heart-shaped face with large curious eyes and long flowing hair regularly surface on the characters in her paintings, which seem most likely to be stand-ins for Varo herself. These stand-ins interact with other characters in her paintings, but rarely look out at the viewer. They are caught up in their daily lives, completing mundane tasks like shopping or sewing, as citizens within the fabulist world Varo has created for them.

  Leonora Carrington’s early life was similar to Remedios Varo’s. Both grew up in upper-class households, and both were subjected to a strict Catholicism. Carrington left home early, though, in what has become an almost legendary story within Surrealist lore, as well as in the lore of women artists in general. After meeting the famous Surrealist painter Max Ernst at a dinner party, she ran away to Paris on her own, where she lived with Ernst and joined, as an attachment to him, the Surrealist movement. Unfortunately, for a long time, Carrington’s progress and reputation as an artist were hindered by her relationship with Ernst. Other artists, gallery owners, and critics saw her as Ernst’s muse, rather than as an artist in her own right.

  Carrington’s paintings are large and broad, gigantic in comparison to the small precise canvases that Varo often used. Both women shared a deep affection for magical lore, which made its way into their paintings, albeit through different sensibilities. Georgiana M. M. Colville writes that “…Carrington used her art to create a potential metamorphosis of the world according to the female and animal principle of the Goddess…”(170). This metamorphosis manifests itself in both Varo and Carrington’s paintings, but through different lenses. Varo’s encounters with the magical become internalized, and thus in Varo’s paintings we find more personal journeys of escape through magic that arises from within the self. Carrington’s vision of magic is one in which her female subjects transform the mundane world around them, an externalized release of power on a cultural level. Her worlds are populated with female figures that confront the prosaic worlds they live within. They are not quiet or uniform visions. They are like fireworks, bright and opening up like umbrellas on the night sky, larger and larger.

  One of Carrington’s most famous paintings is known by various names. “The Giantess,” “The Baby Giant,” and (my personal favorite) “The Guardian of the Egg.” In the painting, a giantess with a cherubic face shrouded in golden wheat stands withi
n the confines of a rustic village with the ocean tumbling behind her, Viking boats riding the waves. She appears to have just arrived on the scene, and within the cup of her comparatively small hands she holds an egg. Below her, villagers have arrived to combat her with pitchforks and guns. She’s clearly seen as a threat to their way of life, though she bears life itself — the egg that she holds — as its guardian spirit. The painting demonstrates the wealth of metaphoric imagery that Carrington used to explore her own upbringing in an upper-class industrialist’s household, where her father frustrated her path to becoming an artist, which Carrington would always see as an obstruction particular to her being a woman who wanted to pursue a career that would lead her away from the manners and mores of her family’s way of life. But the painting also represents a broader concern with old-fashioned, rural village life that holds fast to traditional roles for men and women. The appearance of the giantess on the village shores is a perceived threat to their lifestyle, which has surely prepared them more to expect the appearance of a god rather than a goddess. But there she is, unable to be ignored, larger than life, right in front of them.

  Dorothea Tanning grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tanning left her small town for New York City after finishing high school. There she met Max Ernst. Between Tanning’s and Carrington’s stories, a pattern begins to appear, a pattern of women artists who could only access the Surrealist community primarily through their attachments to the men who made up Surrealism’s inner circle. Varo, too, lived for many years with Benjamin Peret, a noted Surrealist poet. A romantic attachment of some kind seems to have been one of the only ways women could access that community, and even then they were initially excluded from exhibitions and critical attention.

  Max Ernst was the person who actually named one of Tanning’s famous early paintings: “Birthday.” Tanning herself hadn’t given it a name, even while it hung in a showing of Surrealist paintings at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1941. In it, a bare-breasted woman — Tanning herself — clothed in a sort of Renaissance bodice, unbuttoned and wrapped in a dark skirt, vines clinging to it from her waist downward, stands in an empty room of doorways, peering out at the viewer. A very courageous stance. Her face shows no shame at being looked at, but perhaps warns the viewer of something: the gaze of the viewer will never define her. Her body is her own, and she displays it, bare breasted, without a hint of the distorted sexualized image male surrealists made of women.

  In essence, Ernst named the painting correctly. This is an image of birth, of coming out, unafraid, of bringing the entire mystery of one’s existence into being, yet refusing to be pinned down to any one identity. The doorways behind her reveal that she has her options. The strange, winged creature beside her itself cannot be categorized, cannot be understood as any particular variant in either the real world or fantasy literature. It is an unstable signifier. What does the creature signify? Placed alongside Tanning’s self-portrait, the question parallels her own image. What does she signify? Do representations of identity need to be so fixed? For Tanning, especially in her early work, identity is a protean thing, capable of changing in a moment, capable of opening a door onto a new vista of possibility. And that idea of new vistas and possibility represents the difference of these women’s art from so much of the art produced by their male colleagues: their worlds and images open doors, ask questions, relate, include, and incorporate, rather than closing doors on the past or potential futures, rather than proclaiming one thing or another, alienating, excluding, dismembering.

  3. What I Learned, When I Looked

  and Listened

  I was twenty-five years old when I began looking at Surrealist art with a critical eye. I had always enjoyed it before that. In high school, I bought pop poster prints of surreal art by the likes of Dali, Ernst, and Magritte. The images moved me both intellectually and emotionally, and they fascinated me precisely because they juxtaposed images and ideas that aren’t normally seen together, as Breton defined Surrealism’s main essence. This youthful love affair didn’t exactly end when I began looking at this mode of art with a more critical awareness, though; in fact, my love for it was probably made into a more realistic affection for this aesthetic, because I had reached a threshold of consciousness about what I was seeing and had begun to see some of the warts in the Surrealist movement. And love, if it is to be true, must also be a love of the warts, as the old saw goes.

  I arrived at that place of awareness after I’d read Leonora Carrington’s surreal novel, The Hearing Trumpet, the cover of which displayed a detail of her painting “The Guardian of the Egg.” I was immediately caught up in the magic of the painting, and when I noticed that the cover art was attributed to the author, it led me to seek out more of her work, more of her history, which in turn led to my discovery of Remedios Varo, since they were both expatriates in Mexico and shared so much of their time and work as artists with one another. Likewise, as I discovered more about Carrington, I learned about Dorothea Tanning, since Tanning also had a romantic relationship with Max Ernst. I was seeing, for the first time, a network of connections between these three artists and the Surrealist movement from which their art emerged, although their work appeared radically different (to my eye) than the still better known work produced by the men who inhabited the center of Surrealism.

  The further in I got, the bigger and more complex their worlds grew. The more I learned about the context of their histories, the more I was able to look back at the famous art the men had produced and see the differences in how the women used surrealistic technique, as well as the differences in their worldviews. The contrast in feeling, concept and execution was absolutely stunning.

  Because I cannot paint, I became a writer. As long as I can remember, I’ve always thought in images and scenes. But my inability to make my hands render the things my mind’s eye sees has been made up for by my ability to work with words to produce those images, or at least an approximation of those images. With writing, readers are invited into the narrative. They have their own associations with words, and those associations will inevitably lead them to have an approximate experience of the one the writer has experienced as the arranger of those words. With visual art, there is an almost direct transference in the act of seeing. The image appears in the mind because the materials of the image are not abstract, as words are. The images are concrete, appearing right before us in those long, brightly lit museum hallways, or in the pixels of our computer screens. Interpretation still occurs, but the route is more direct. I must read an entire story or novel until its conclusion before I can judge it with any acuity. A painting pushes its way into my mind with more immediacy. The act of looking at an image for longer periods allows me to see it more clearly, of course, but the processes of sight and insight feel as if they move at the speed of light compared to the process of reading narratives in language. If I were a visual artist, I’d have begun painting in response to Varo’s, Carrington’s, and Tanning’s work, reflecting on canvas. Because I cannot paint, though, I began writing stories.

  In poetry, writing the ekphrastic poem is an old tradition. In Greek, the term ekphrasis literally means “to call out,” which in literary tradition translates into the act of literary art attempting to represent a work of visual art. The general goal is for the literary work to illuminate or to convey the spirit of what the eye has seen in the visual art. Since I’m also not a poet, my main course for engaging in this process was to write stories and, through that process, to engage with and reflect on Surrealism as an art, as a movement, and as a community that, like all art, all movements, and all communities, contains flaws and absences that are not necessarily visible at first sight. The stories in this volume (“The Creation of Birds,” “The Guardian of the Egg,” and “Birthday”) are not only my attempts to translate the essence of Varo’s, Carrington’s, and Tanning’s art but also attempts to translate the essence of their exclusion and limitations within the initially male-dominated
Surrealist community, as well as their reconstruction of the female form within Surrealism.

  I realized a long time ago that this project is complicated by my own gender. Being a man, I wondered, haven’t I only accomplished what the male Surrealists of Modernism did: to cut Woman open and look inside? I considered abandoning my desire to reflect and converse. I didn’t want to do a disservice to the artists or the art. I didn’t want to unintentionally offend. I’d done extensive research, had looked and looked and looked again at their paintings, had thought about their personal histories, their own writing on their work, had read their own scholarship about what it was they were doing — all the sources of their own creations. If nothing else, I eventually told myself, I’ve looked at their own concepts of Self in earnest contemplation. After arriving at the threshold of abandonment, though, I realized that I might have done what the male Surrealists of that particular moment in time hadn’t. I’d listened.

  The fictions I’ve made from this looking and listening represent the internalized conversations I’ve had with these women through their art, which is something different from opening them up with surgical precision. My subject is not Woman, but women’s self-representations in Surrealism.

  I offer back what I’ve seen and heard and tried to interpret. The mirror is a male one, my perceptions obviously partial, my word (without doubt) not the last. If I could have one wish granted, a question answered, I would ask them this: Did I hear you right?

  Author’s Note

  A great deal of research went into informing myself about the world of the Surrealists and the art they produced. To the authors of these books and articles I owe a great deal for the rewards of their scholarship and insight into a complex mode of art and a complex community of artists.