Let me suggest before heading to the Giardini and Arsenale, which are hosting the 59th edition of the Biennale, it may be interesting to drop by the exhibition Surrealism and Magic presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. The exhibition addresses some of this year’s Biennale themes, posed to the Surrealist movement, such as the occult, magic, alchemy, the oneiric, gender identity, and the unconscious.
There are 40 works, including some of considerable interest, and unpublished for us because they often come from private collections, those of artists Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Eleonora Carrington, who with a text of her own, taken from a book of fairy tales (published in translation by Adelphi in 2018), offers inspiration for the very title of the Biennale: The Milk of Dreams.
Leonor Fini, Chthonian divinity watching over the sleep of a young man
And we meet Carrington at the Guggenheim to find her with Edith Rimmington, Ithell Colquhoun, Remedios Varo, and Eleanor Fini included together in the capsule “The Witch’s Cradle” at the Giardini in the Central Pavilion, in a series of paintings “populated by hybrid creatures crossing species and states of being.”
Victor Brauner, Helene Smith, Siren of knowledge locks
Powerful at the Guggenheim is Carrington’s signature small vertical canvas (1939), which bears a portrait of fellow artist Max Ernst wearing a long red alchemical cloak, holding a still and proceeding like a shaman-hermit in a white landscape of purifying ice. Also on view here is the Dressing of the Bride, his most famous “response” to her, dated a year later (1940).
Max Ernst, Vestizione della sposa, 1940
In 1936 the two met through a mutual friend, and it was love at first sight. Ernst is one of the movement’s leading exponents, he is forty-six, she nineteen, and with his charm embodies the Surrealist ideal of the femme-enfant. In 1937 Carrington wrote her first short story, “La maison de la peur,” which was published the following year, enhanced by an introduction and seven collages by Ernst.
Leonora Carrington, Ritratto di Max Ernst, 1939
Most of the stories, written in the 1940s, feature female figures with uncertain biological and sexual identities, in whom human and animal traits coexist; they are lonely, transgressive young women who live outside the social context and refuse to submit to its rules, preferring the company of animals to that of their fellow humans. At the Gardens in the central pavilion, among others, the painting with the figure of a woman bird stands out: it is “Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge,” a 1947 panel painting about a meter high.
Leonora Carrington, Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge, 1947. Olio su tela, 100,3 × 69,9 cm
In the summer of 1942, Leonora left New York and moved to Mexico City. Like her, other Surrealists moved to Mexico. Among them are Benjamin Péret and his wife Remedios Varo, who becomes his close friend. Remedios, in Carrington’s company, painted, experimented with magical potions, and shared an interest in esoteric and alchemical themed studies. To the influences of the Surrealist movement, Varo adds great technical accuracy (a skill she had acquired during her studies) and meticulous attention to detail symbolically and pictorially.
At the Guggenheim, she is featured in “Heavenly Nourishment,” the painting on masonite in which a female figure feeds a moon, still hawking stardust.
Remedios Varo, Nutrimento celeste
And at the Gardens the Varo is represented by, among other works, “Simpatía (La rabia del gato),” a large oil on masonite with a figure and a cat in a hypersensitive interior connected to the ceiling-and to another reality-by thin ray of light.
Remedios Varo, Simpatía (La rabia del gato), 1955. Olio su masonite, 95.9 × 85.1 cm
Sure enough, as soon as we leave the central pavilion, we are met with significant impact by Ukraine’s installation with Sacchi’s large pyramid surrounded by fire-burned wooden pillars to the side of Russia’s mute empty pavilion, and the real “new” has the force of a punch in the stomach.
