La Hulda
PART 1: THE WITCH
In September of 2021, I came across a painting online. I think I may have been on Twitter — this was before Musk bought it and made the platform inarguably subjective, and at that point of the COVID-19 pandemic where those of us in places where that made a difference* stayed home, and any crevasse of the internet was a place to climb into — when she showed up:
Witch Going to the Sabbath (1957) by Remedios Varo.
A thick conflagration of marmalade hair, brutally parted down the middle like the innnnteresting monster in my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, extending to the floor where it disappeared into shadow like the tail of a coat or the ashen ends of a halo too grand for its own good; an upside-down triangle face, gray-blue, dominated by staring almond eyes and topped by white eyebrows extending out vertically to form wings, thick and feathery as if to take flight and bear the weight of, if not her whole body, then at least her mind; a long neck encased in white lace, buttoned from the chin to the sternum — so modest! — to demarcate her throat and sternum while the rest of it flared out into shoulders of white flame that also reached the floor like a furry middle layer to her concentric aura; within that, folds of blue-gray cloak and sleeves, small hands that held a spiky, golden lantern light (in her right hand, hanging down) and a small brown creature with two long feathers for a tail and a face that looked remarkably like hers (in her left hand, held aloft); and in the very center of her being, breast to stomach, a black chasm in front of which her pet’s tail hung.
The image — I can't explain it, the hold it took of me. I had never heard of the painter, had never seen any of her work. But, as I said, it was in Year Two of the pandemic, the California summerfall in high-heated swing but Halloween on the rise. I had been working from home for more than two years, playing with tarot cards, taking weed gummies, trying (as always) to write. And the all-seeing eyes, tiny silent mouth, the glamorous but unkempt coiffure, and, above (inside) it all, the gaping emptiness at her center all called to me in a way that still, more than four years later, has not let me go. It’s the wallpaper on my phone. I have used it to illustrate blog posts when I don’t have anything else but need something that speaks for me. I wanted to be that witch, headed off into the darkness for a ritual, meeting up with friends at night, with big hair and my mini-me familiar and a little bright light to guide us. I wanted to stay quiet once in a while, taking in all I observed and not worrying so much about who to tell it to and how to tell it.
PART 2: La Pintora y el Aquelarre
I felt all of these things before I looked into who Varo was. Before I knew that she had fled the civil war in her native Spain for Paris, and then, in 1941, fled WWII for Mexico City along with one of her lovers, joining other European expat artists in a bustling creative colony in an already bustling creative city. Before I saw her other paintings, wherein her childhood copying her father’s engineering diagrams is evident in the architectural specificity of the backgrounds, even though those backgrounds help build worlds that have their own specificity, rooted in Varo’s unique imagination. Forests where trees grow baby’s breath that bleeds into a cloudy sky, towers whose stones bear nautilus shell spirals and whose walls are transparent enough to show the cobwebby starbursts holding up their ceilings and extending beyond. And those are just the nature and buildings. The figures are spindly, cloaked, balanced on tiny wheels and carrying things that explain who they are and what they need for their journeys.
Remedios Varo y la máscara (1956) by Kati Horna
I fell in love with all of these things before I knew that Varo, well-known in Mexico toward the end of her short life but not internationally even today, formed a sort-of coven with the better-known English expat artist and writer Leonora Carrington and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. Their shared interest in the mystical in general and the folk traditions of their adopted country drew them together, as, I imagine, the renown their male peers were receiving while theirs was smaller and slower to arrive. Between this tight female friend circle and Varo’s interest in the supernatural and in Jungian psychoanalysis, once I got deep into my research I found myself even more in love with this late visionary than I had been the first time I looked into the eyes of her creation.
PART 3: THE CEMETERY
And now it is December 2024. In August I put my very first pet to sleep. In September I fell off my bicycle, resulting in a concussion and vertigo. A few days later, in the early days of October, I found out that one of my dearest friends and most patient creative collaborator, Michael, had died suddenly. I am 52 and my body has changed immeasurably this year. I don’t feel like myself when I walk down the street at home or abroad. Aside from a good job and a longtime partner, my self-moorings have slipped quite mightily. I am certainly in a more solid place than I was in the last time I suffered a soul-smashing personal tragedy — my mother died when she was about to turn 63 and I was 29, my Saturn returning and my job and small city chafing unbearably. So I moved to Oakland with Michael and some other friends, who will all come back to the Bay Area in January, on the eve of what would have been Michael’s 50th birthday, to celebrate him and the impact he has had on our lives and our art and how we see the world.
When my dog died in August, my spouse, Bean, and I booked a trip to Mexico City. We wanted to take an international trip without worrying about pet care, because we will surely get another dog in 2025 (I do so love a familiar) and I have wanted to go to Mexico City since, well, see above. And then the accident happened. And then Michael died. And so I arrived in CDMX excited but anxious, my joy-meter on low despite this being my first two-week vacation from work in seven years. Bean and I toured the town like crazy the first two days — mercados and mezcal, a trajinera in Xochimilco to the Island of the Dolls (and more mezcal) — and by the time Bean went back to work on the third day I was pretty thoroughly depleted.
And so in the morning on that day, Tuesday, I worked on Michael’s memorial event and wrote. I threw down the bones of a short story based on a dream I’d just had, then I took an Uber to the Los Angeles neighborhood to a cemetery called Panteon Jardin (possibly my first-ever solo adventure in a foreign city) and, after much walking and trial and error, I found La Tumba de Remedios Varo. It wasn’t where the map said it was but it didn’t look like any of the others in this place. It wasn’t stonily Catholic or sleekly modern. It wasn’t plain but it was small, and covered in succulents with a fat patch of tall, grassy weeds, some kind of tree stump growing out of the middle. The headstone says her name and her occupation — pintora — and the footstone bears the name of her friend and patron Eva Sulzer, a Swiss photographer and musician who is either buried with her or paid for the tomb (or both). There were drooping flowers in a few places on the tomb, and I added a bouquet of bright yellow dahlias to the vase near the foot, choosing to leave the others there to return to the earth as best they could. There was also a slender, used paintbrush someone had set atop the headstone.
I sat at the tomb. I talked to Remedios. I thanked her. I asked her to keep an eye out for Michael and to show him around. I do not believe in such things but, like Fox Mulder, I want to. And if anyone is going to meet up in the ether, it will be artmakers with a wide-open third eye like Remedios Varo and Michael Henning. I thanked her for blasting my own third eye more open in 2021, and I sang her a song that Michael and I wrote together 23 years ago. And then I thanked her again and headed home in a rambly sort of way.
PART 4: THE MUSEUM
The next day, Wednesday, I went to Museo de Arte Moderno. The most popular museums in Mexico City are about anthropology and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and I will go to those as well. But first and foremost I am a modern art girly, and I knew this museum held many Varos in its permanent collection. (I had already seen a few in person at a gallery in San Francisco earlier this year, but missed her retrospective in Chicago this summer.) So here I was, in a museum that once held her second-ever retrospective (seven years after her death at age 55), a quarter weed gummy working its way through my bloodstream, listening to Skyminds so that Remedios would more easily recognize Michael, and to Kim Deal because I needed a menopausal icon to keep me company. There was an exhibition of female artists on the second floor, and there I found three works by Varo — Tauro, Paraiso de los Gatos, and Gato Hombre — and nearly cried. I saw a painting of a rabbi by Carrington and a surrealistic photo piece by Horna. I fell in love with a piece by the French poet and painter Alice Rahon, a friend of Kahlo’s who I’d not previously heard of**.
Gato hombre (1943) by Remedios Varo
There was a poster for an exhibition that billed Varo and Kahlo equally. Why is one so famous internationally while the other is not? I do not know enough about visual art to say “it’s because one is better” but I do know about the allure of tragedy (Kahlo had plenty), the power of personal style, and the benefits of association with a famous man (Varo had many husbands and lovers, but none were artists of Diego Roivera’s stature). I also know that Varo was an immigrant, in a colony of fellow European expats, and there is a great justice and sense in that the indigenous Mexican painter is better known — I am staying in a neighborhood full of modern expatriates and foreign restaurants, and I know that I should try and speak as much halting eighth-grade Spanish as possible so that I can hope to be considered “one of the good ones” even though I’m only here for two weeks.
I used this Español mal to ask a guard if there was more Varo on display. He smiled and pointed me to one of the main galleries on the first floor, where Ficciones de la Modernidad traced the four main strands of Mexican modern art. I saw stirring and imaginative photography (luchadoras, AIDS protests), a mural by Rufino Tamayo that I sat in front of for a long time, attempting to still my heart. And then, I found it: walls and walls of Varo, more Carrrington. One Horna, another Rahon. And still more Varo. I took turns with two other smitten females, one younger than me and one a little older, peering at sketches and stepping back to admire fabulous fictions before stepping back in to closely admire her otherdimensional creatures and subtle, magical contraptions. I have thought before of Dalí when looking at Varo’s work — inevitable as he is arguably the most popular and prolific surrealist in the country where I reside. I also went to college in central Florida which, surprisingly to most, has one of the major Dalí museums in the world (with the exception of the Dalí Theater-Museum created by Dalí himself in his hometown of Figueres in Spain, it has the world's largest collections of Dalí's works). I spent many a psychedelic afternoon there in my late teens and early 20s. But Varo’s work is rooted in alchemy, Jung, and architecture rather than Dalí’s sex, food, and the theory of relativity. And she is a woman, and she died young, and and and… as I made my swoony rounds of her works on the walls of Museo de Arte Moderno, my heart expanded nearly to the point of explosion.
El Flautista (1955) by Remedios Varo, as shot on shaky video by me.
My new favorite La hulda (the Escape), El Flautista with its glowing face, Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (her most famous), my other new favorite Roulotte (Carricoche), other paintings, sketches for paintings, Kati Horna’s photo of her — I took photos of them all, came back to see them again and again until I had just enough time to hemorrhage pesos in the small gift shop, where Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst and Paraiso de los Gatos grace tote bags and magnets and postcards and mugs (reader, I got the last one) like Van Gogh at any U.S. MoMA would, and headed back out into the city where she worked and loved and died, my soul so stirred I couldn’t put it into words. (I am putting some below but please check out the instagram post for more images, better presented.)
PART 5: CODA
Then I got a massage. And a facial. Then Bean and I got sushi and churros and I fell into a dreamless sleep, my soul exhausted and patient, waiting for the time to sit down and spill this out all over the keyboard.
I long to tell their stories. I want to make “the three witches” (as their fellow surrealists often called them) into a TV series, a comic book, a song cycle. I want to know how Alice Rohan, who bonded with Frida Kahlo over their physical calamities, felt about her fellow European expatriates. I want to have been them, but mostly I want everyone to know them. Yes, they were much younger than me, but Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, which I read last year, depicts a fantastical retirement home for eccentric, supernatural old women, where they get into trouble and solve crimes of the most magical sort, and the two main characters are meant to be herself and Varo. As we say this century: I want to go to there.
As my body and circumstances change, so do my priorities. Strangely, the adolescent dreamer I once was — put away by decades of adult pleasures and responsibilities — is clambering down from the shelf with creaking bones and hungry blood. In her earliest incarnation, her adventures were imagined and solitary. In her current and future ones, they take color and dimension from the real world and the great minds (fictional and non, friendly and famous). I know I’m only on vacation here, but I have no doubt that these witches will continue to work on my heart for a long time to come.
*Like in California, but not in Florida.
**And possibly part of a throuple with her husband and Eva Selzer.
