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Lot Essay
Delightfully macabre, wickedly humorous and yet also touched with a hint of melancholy, Vampiros vegetarianos is representative of Remedios Varo at the height of her powers and career. In 1962 she had her second one-woman show at the Galería Juan Martín in Mexico City and received so much positive attention that she became overwhelmed with requests for her work. As Janet Kaplan has noted[1], this long-awaited success was tempered with increasing anxiety about her health and aging and indeed, Varo passed away of a heart attack in October of 1963.
The scene is situated in a windowless medieval looking chamber, as in many of her paintings, and is illuminated by starlight from an oculus replete with a delicate silvery balustrade. Three emaciated characters sit around a bistro-style table eagerly sipping liquid from long thin straws. Looking more like skeletons, or even the Calaveras made for the Mexican Día de los Muertos celebrations, they seem to be gaining in vitality before our very eyes. Their robes, made in the surrealist decalcomania technique so favored by Varo, take on a fiery glow with their tattered threads springing up like plants newly watered.
Another visually arresting aspect of these vampires is their headgear, a play on Mercury’s winged helmet—but here those of bats have replaced the birds’ wings. Birds, bats, wings, flying creatures of all sorts are a staple in Varo’s work, often hinting at flights of fancy and mystical ascendancy. Like in a stereotypical Parisian café, two pampered pets on gossamer-thin leashes patiently sit under the chairs. These whimsical creatures, half rooster and half cat, are pictorial relatives of the many hybrid creatures featured in the paintings of the surrealist Leonora Carrington, Varo’s closest friend in Mexico.
The focus of the work and locus of the title’s pun is the meal on the table, a scattering of red fruits so meticulously rendered and brilliantly hued that they glow like embers. A number of scholars have noted the impact that viewing Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado Museum had on the youthful Varo studying art in Madrid. The many strawberries, cherries and other red fruits in the central panel of Bosch’s triptych, gleefully hinting at man’s sensuous and sinful nature, are perhaps distant relatives of the watermelon, tomatoes and rose-carved fruit in Varo’s work.[2] Both Varo and Carrington loved animals but were not strict vegetarians and if this painting had any peripheral relationship to actual food, it would most likely refer to the vital energies existing in all living entities, a key belief in most esoteric philosophies. But on the more entertaining side, the tomatoes on the table are the main ingredients in a popular cocktail mixer used in Mexico known as sangrita. Drinks made with tequila and sangrita are known as Vampiros Mexicanos. A favorite cocktail of Carrington, one can imagine her and Varo drinking Vampiros Mexicanos as they merrily planned one of their many naughty hijinks.
Susan Aberth, Ph.D, Associate Professor, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
1 Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988, 223.
2 This correlation is mentioned in the Master’s Thesis of Valentina Amaral, Esoteric Humorous Subversion in the Mature Work of Remedios Varo, 2013, Christie’s Education, New York, 25-28.
The scene is situated in a windowless medieval looking chamber, as in many of her paintings, and is illuminated by starlight from an oculus replete with a delicate silvery balustrade. Three emaciated characters sit around a bistro-style table eagerly sipping liquid from long thin straws. Looking more like skeletons, or even the Calaveras made for the Mexican Día de los Muertos celebrations, they seem to be gaining in vitality before our very eyes. Their robes, made in the surrealist decalcomania technique so favored by Varo, take on a fiery glow with their tattered threads springing up like plants newly watered.
Another visually arresting aspect of these vampires is their headgear, a play on Mercury’s winged helmet—but here those of bats have replaced the birds’ wings. Birds, bats, wings, flying creatures of all sorts are a staple in Varo’s work, often hinting at flights of fancy and mystical ascendancy. Like in a stereotypical Parisian café, two pampered pets on gossamer-thin leashes patiently sit under the chairs. These whimsical creatures, half rooster and half cat, are pictorial relatives of the many hybrid creatures featured in the paintings of the surrealist Leonora Carrington, Varo’s closest friend in Mexico.
The focus of the work and locus of the title’s pun is the meal on the table, a scattering of red fruits so meticulously rendered and brilliantly hued that they glow like embers. A number of scholars have noted the impact that viewing Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado Museum had on the youthful Varo studying art in Madrid. The many strawberries, cherries and other red fruits in the central panel of Bosch’s triptych, gleefully hinting at man’s sensuous and sinful nature, are perhaps distant relatives of the watermelon, tomatoes and rose-carved fruit in Varo’s work.[2] Both Varo and Carrington loved animals but were not strict vegetarians and if this painting had any peripheral relationship to actual food, it would most likely refer to the vital energies existing in all living entities, a key belief in most esoteric philosophies. But on the more entertaining side, the tomatoes on the table are the main ingredients in a popular cocktail mixer used in Mexico known as sangrita. Drinks made with tequila and sangrita are known as Vampiros Mexicanos. A favorite cocktail of Carrington, one can imagine her and Varo drinking Vampiros Mexicanos as they merrily planned one of their many naughty hijinks.
Susan Aberth, Ph.D, Associate Professor, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
1 Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988, 223.
2 This correlation is mentioned in the Master’s Thesis of Valentina Amaral, Esoteric Humorous Subversion in the Mature Work of Remedios Varo, 2013, Christie’s Education, New York, 25-28.