Her style was reminiscent of Renaissance art in its exquisite precision, but her dreamlike paintings were otherworldly in tone.Īt 8, after her family had moved to Madrid, María was sent to a strict Catholic school for girls, where she escaped into adventure books by Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. In elaborately detailed, often allegorical paintings, Varo depicted convent schoolgirls embarking on strange adventures androgynous, ascetic figures absorbed in scientific, musical or artistic discovery and solitary women - some of whom resembled the slender, striking Varo herself - having a transcendent experience. The scene is fictional but the piece is not: It is “ Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle” (1961), by Remedios Varo, a Spanish painter who emigrated to Mexico City during World War II. In the opening of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel “The Crying of Lot 49” (1965), tears stream down the face of his protagonist, Oedipa Maas, as she takes in a Surrealist painting of “a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces” who appear to be “prisoners in the top room of a circular tower.” The girls are embroidering a kind of tapestry that streams out of the windows. This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
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