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December 04, 2023

Acquisition: Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo, "Banqueros en acción (Bankers in Action)"

Remedios Varo
Banqueros en acción (Bankers in Action), 1962
oil on Masonite
overall: 60.96 x 69.85 cm (24 x 27 1/2 in.)
Gift of Funds from Margot Kelly
2023.48.1

Celebrated for her inventive, painted narratives that combine ideas of the occult, mysticism, alchemy, esotericism, and science, Remedios Varo (1908–1963) is one of the most important surrealists and a major figure among artists working in Mexico during the 20th century. The elaborate worlds she constructed during the 1950s and 1960s blend nature with the built environment, and are filled with levitating human figures, hybrid creatures, uncanny vehicles, and open-ended narratives. Her proto-feminist works frequently center on powerful female protagonists and may comment on contemporary society and her own experience of migration and independence. The National Gallery of Art has acquired the painting Banqueros en acción (Bankers in action) (1962) and will soon accession the painting’s related full-scale preparatory drawing, allowing for a greater understanding of the artist’s creative process.

Banqueros en acción was created during the productive final years of Varo’s life. A woman crouches behind a wall as if fleeing or hiding from four bankers. Wearing top hats and billowing frock coats with a bat-like appearance, these men, one of whom stares directly out at the viewer, fly through a street or corridor. The curved, darkened archways add to the anxiety created by this encounter and the red sky filled with a dense forest of trees. Varo’s meticulously painted and tense scene, like much of her late work, stems from her bold imagination and study of alchemy, science, science fiction, astrology, esotericism, and mythology. It is unclear why Varo focused on bankers in this work, as the 1960s was a period of economic stability and growth in Mexico. The bankers may symbolize power or social conformity, and the fleeing woman, someone who challenges this authority. 

Varo’s oeuvre is full of representations of women as protagonists and creators (weavers, givers of life, alchemists, and goddesses), a role she embodied by creating imagined worlds with their own rules and structures.

Born in Girona, Spain, Varo’s family moved to Madrid, where she later studied drawing at the Academia de San Fernando. Eschewing narrow roles for women, Varo moved with her first husband to Paris and later Barcelona, and embraced Surrealism, an international movement that privileged the unconscious, dreams, and notions of freedom. During the 1930s, she collaborated and exhibited with many leading surrealists, including André Breton, Max Ernst, Esteban Francés, René Magritte, Wolfgang Paalen, and Benjamin Péret. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi occupation of Paris, Varo found refuge in the Americas. Varo moved to Mexico City in 1941, where she befriended British artist Leonora Carrington and continued her associations with other European exiles in Mexico until her death in 1963. By the 1950s, after a brief but impactful commercial career that supported her artistic development, Varo came into her own visual style separate from Parisian surrealism. During this period, Varo also explored the ideas of Russian mystics P. D. Ouspensky and George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, who explored ideas of the fourth dimension and its ties to the supernatural.

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