Recently, select visitors have quietly made their way to the light-filled conservation lab at the Museum of Fine Arts. They’ve come to admire the museum’s latest acquisition: a rare, dream-like painting by the Surrealist Remedios Varo, whom Diego Rivera once called “among the most important women artists in the world.”
Varo, a Spanish refugee who produced fewer than 200 oil paintings in her short lifetime, has long been considered a state treasure in Mexico, where she resettled during World War II. Her meticulously crafted works, often allegorical, brim with fantastical figures worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: An owl-like woman who wields a prism of starlight to create the birds, men riding beards like bicycles, a woman who drops a man’s head in a well upon leaving the psychologist’s office, vegetarian vampires.
The MFA’s beguiling new painting, a large-scale work titled “Tailleur pour dames” (1957), is no exception: an otherworldly dress shop where a client, flanked by a pair of spectral doppelgängers, inspects three gowns: one doubles as a sailboat, another transforms into a chair with cocktail tray, the third — for a widow — is effervescent, replete with a vial of poison.
The painting, which goes on view March 17 in the Carol Vance Wall Rotunda, makes the MFA one of just four museums in the United States to boast a major work by Varo in its collection. It also represents a conspicuous step toward diversifying the museum’s Art of the Americas collection, and particularly of 20th century art.
Now, following recent acquisitions of works by modern Latin American masters Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros, curators say “Tailleur pour dames” will help broaden the collection’s focus beyond US borders, while also shedding new light on a 20th century artistic movement long-associated with European men.
“We’ve been chipping away at this aspirational name, the Art of the Americas, since it was given to the department, [but] the collection never reflected that ambition,” said department chair Ethan Lasser. “This makes it feel much less aspirational.”
But the acquisition comes at a hefty price: The MFA plans to sell three important paintings to fund the new purchase: “Abiquiu Trees VII” (1953) and “A Sunflower from Maggie” (1937), both by Georgia O’Keeffe; and “On a Shaker Theme” (1956), by Charles Sheeler.
The museum quietly removed the three works in December. It sold the Sheeler earlier this month through a private sale and consigned the O’Keeffes to Christie’s in New York, which estimates they’ll fetch as much as $9 million collectively at separate auctions this spring.
The MFA declined to say what it paid for the new painting, though a comparable work by the artist sold for a record $6.2 million (twice the high estimate) at Sotheby’s in 2020.
Museum of Fine Arts director Matthew Teitelbaum emphasized that all proceeds from the sale will go toward acquisitions, adding the Varo painting “figuratively and literally opens up new worlds.”
“There’s a lot of excitement about how many stories this work tells,” said Teitelbaum, who added that it “complicates the idea of the Americas.” “There are other expressions of culture and tradition and history that exist in the Americas that need to be acknowledged.”
Born in 1908, Varo attended a strict all-girls Catholic school — a recurring theme in her work — later graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. She was also a frequent visitor to the Prado Museum, where she soaked in works by El Greco, Francisco Goya, and, especially, Bosch, whose triptych masterpiece “The Garden of Earthly Delights” arrived in 1933.
Varo moved to France during the Spanish Civil War, where she was a member of the Parisian avant-garde and romantically involved with the poet Benjamin Péret.
But her situation became increasingly tenuous with the outbreak of World War II. She and Péret were arrested in France in 1940. Varo could not return to Franco’s Spain, and the pair embarked for Mexico the following year.
Varo had an enduring interest in mysticism, alchemy, and the writings of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But while she’d often worked with collage in Europe, she began to forge her own distinctive style in Mexico — otherworldly figurative work with a technique reminiscent of Renaissance panel paintings.
“She has a real period of development,” said Layla Bermeo, curator of American paintings at the MFA. “Bosch was sort of always in her head, but it’s really in Mexico, where there is so much emphasis on folklore, on dreams, and on spiritual experiences being as important as what we might consider ‘real experiences,’ that it sort of clicks.”
Péret eventually returned to France, but by then Varo was deeply ensconced in a circle of European artists living in Mexico City, including the British-born Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and the Hungarian-born Surrealist photographer Kati Horna — known collectively as “the three witches.”
The Surrealists were not always embraced by Mexico’s own artists, among them Frida Kahlo, who’d complained bitterly in 1939 after meeting André Breton and others in Paris, calling them “coocoo lunatic son[s] of bitches.”
“They make me vomit,” wrote Kahlo. “They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore……I’d rather sit on the floor in the market at Toluca and sell tortillas.”
Bermeo noted the striking contrast between many post-revolutionary Mexican artists, whose socially conscious work addressed themes of race and class, and Europeans such as Varo, whose lifelong interest in the occult blossomed in her adopted home.
“We’re seeing someone who is a refugee, who is living in exile,” said Bermeo. “Rather than envisioning the world that is around her, [Varo] is thinking of something completely different, inventing a new type of world.”
But Varo’s best-known work came after her involvement with the Austrian refugee Walter Gruen. While Varo had previously earned her living with various jobs — producing technical illustrations of disease-carrying insects, designing costumes for theater — Gruen’s support freed her to concentrate exclusively on her artwork.
“Her strongest works were made roughly during this last 10-year period,” said Bermeo. “She [had] the time to begin to develop this mature phase of her career.”
Starting around 1949, Varo began to refine her visual language and technique, transferring detailed drawings onto a thick gesso ground, which she then built up with layer upon layer of translucent brushstrokes. The result is a luminous, highly finished surface reminiscent of Renaissance panel paintings.
These features are on full display in “Tailleur pour dames,” which channels many of the themes Varo returned to throughout her career, the transformative power of sewing among them. The client, who inspects the three dresses from a bench, is flanked by a pair of phantom-like doubles — her doubts, as the artist would have it — which Varo crafted by scratching into the painting’s surface. A dress flutters in the window, while a stream of pins seems attracted to a magnet on the web-like floor.
Meanwhile, the tailor, a pair of scissors standing in for his glasses and nose, recedes into the background, while the painting’s central figure balances on a wheel — a recurrent figure in Varo’s work.
“Travel is always a big theme in her work, and escape, escape, escape,” said Bermeo, pointing out the widow’s vial of poison. “This is really a moment when all of these influences are coming together.”
It was paintings like this that fueled Varo’s popularity in Mexico, where in 1956 her first major solo exhibition prompted would-be collectors to join a waitlist.
Then, in 1963 at the height of her fame, Varo died suddenly of a heart attack. She was 54.
The new MFA painting was acquired by a US-based collector in the 1980s, which is one reason the MFA was able to purchase the work now: The majority of Varo’s paintings remain in Mexico, where their export is strictly regulated.
But while the museum used general acquisition funds to acquire its paintings by Kahlo and Siqueiros, it here opted to sell the artworks by Sheeler and O’Keeffe — a sometimes controversial practice known as deaccessioning.
Teitelbaum, who called the museum’s collection “a living thing,” said the transaction adheres to the MFA’s deaccessioning policy, describing the process as a tool to help shape the collection when used “responsibly, thoughtfully.”
“If we only had two Georgia O’Keeffe paintings, I can assure you we wouldn’t be looking to deaccession them,” said Teitelbaum, who added the museum maintains “canonical” works by the artist. “Collections are built and should be built by a combination of strategy and opportunities: Always follow a strategy, but be prepared in an extraordinary circumstance to respond to opportunity.”
The Varo painting presented just such a moment, said Art of the Americas chair Lasser.
“We had to move really quickly,” he said, the sales accelerating the transaction. “As you can imagine, there are other museums who would be interested.”
Now, curators say the Varo painting will play a critical role in the museum’s upcoming 3rd floor re-installation of 20th century artworks in the Americas wing, which will include a gallery of figurative work by Latin American artists.
Erica Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings, said “Tailleur pour dames” would not only help better tell the story of modern art across the Americas, but it would also bolster the museum’s modern holdings, which she described as “not everything it could or should be.”
“Surrealism is not at all well represented,” she said. “Why not represent this whole other artistic tradition, for which our department is responsible, with a masterpiece?”
Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com.