Remedios Varo

[Mark Harris]

< At the end of Chapter One of Lot 49
he mentions "the
    beautiful Spanish exile [painter] Remedios Varo."
This is one of the
    unfamiliar names he expects us to pursue if we
want to understand things
    more clearly. It turns out that the standard
library references do not yield
    much information about Varo. There was an
historical Remedios Varo
    whose paintings were reproduced by a Mexican press
(Mexico, DF,
    Ediciones Era, 1966). 

AND 

       Why should Pynchon choose to mention a painting
by this
    particularly obscure painter when there are many
other "Rapunzel"
    paintings that might have served his thematic ends
as well? >

I am not reading COL49 along with you, but I had to
jump in on this one point. Remedios Varo is hardly a
"particularly obscure painter"; she is a major
surrealist and one of the great artists of the 20th
century. Last year I saw a major touring retrospective
of her work at The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in
Chicago, and it was a revelation. (I'm trying to
remember if the Rapunzel painting was included - I
think so - certainly there were other surreal
reinterpretations of fairy tales.) Unfortunately, a
fine web exhibition of her work that I would have
pointed you to has been dismantled, but here is a key
reference in English:

Unexpected Journeys : The Art and Life of Remedios
Varo. Janet Kaplan. Abbeville Press. New York, 1988. 

And that's just in English, mind; the materials
available in Spanish are voluminous. I'm not saying
that the proposed Varo/Varro connection is
meaningless, only that it is hardly necessary. Before
we look at *Varro*, we might fully explore the 
import of Pynchon's reference to the actual Remedios
Varo, an artist whose work may very well have appealed
to him enormously on many grounds. I've seldom seen
museum-goers so palpably impressed by an exhibition as
I did at the Varo show, and I talked about it with
enthusiastic friends for months. Possibly ol' Tom had
a similar reaction to seeing her knock-out paintings.

Mark R. Harris


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