Remedios Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician)
Daniel Barbiero
December 2023
Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956
The recent show at the Art Institute of Chicago of works by painter Remedios Varo provides the occasion for an examination of one of her late paintings, 1956’s The Juggler (The Magician).
We might start off by saying that the meaning is in the cards, or rather the card. But this would be to get the painting to divulge too much, too soon. The painting is Remedios Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician) of 1956, (El juglar [el malabarista]) an enigmatic work that contains images that hint at an underlying esoteric meaning. This wasn’t unusual for her; she was a painter of works whose iconography frequently reflected her interest in various occult and spiritual traditions.
The Painter
Varo (1908-1963) was born in the town of Anglès in Catalonia, Spain. Her father, an engineer, encouraged her to copy technical drawings, an exercise that helped hone her talents as a draftsman early on. After attending convent school she began studying art and went on to the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where in 1930 she obtained a degree qualifying her as a teacher of drawing. The training she received in Madrid focused on traditional technical skills, and helped realize to its fullest the aptitude she had already shown in reproducing what she could see or imagine. During her time in Madrid she was able to explore her interest in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, many of which she saw in the Prado Museum. She also became aware of Surrealism, which was beginning to have an influence on Spanish art. By the mid-1930s she was in Barcelona with her first husband, from whom she soon separated; while in Barcelona she formed what would become lasting friendships with the artists Esteban Frances and Oscar Dominguez and joined an artists’ collective oriented toward Surrealism.
In the late 1930s, Varo moved to Paris. While in Barcelona she had met and become involved with the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, who had gone to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side; when he returned to France, she accompanied him. In Paris Péret introduced her to the Surrealist group around André Breton. Varo’s biographer Janet A. Kaplan notes that although she took part in many of their activities she was intimidated by the group, partly because of her youth, and partly because intimidation, particularly on the part of Breton, was just one of the daily facts of psychological life as a Surrealist. Beyond that, the Surrealist cult of the femme-enfant, which provided the conceptual lens through which Varo inevitably was seen, would have limited her role within the group in any event (Kaplan, p. 55). Nevertheless, Surrealism was an important influence on her even if she ultimately rejected the label. While in Paris she also cultivated an artistic group of her own, which included Frances, who left Spain for Paris when she and Péret did; Dominguez; and Victor Brauner. She also met Leonora Carrington, who would become a close lifelong friend, particularly when both eventually settled in Mexico. After France fell to the German invasion in 1940 she and Péret, after some delay in Marseilles, left Europe for Mexico in 1942, where they took up residence. Although Péret returned to France after the war, Varo chose to stay in Mexico, where she lived until her death in 1963. Unlike her time in Paris, where she produced little work, her years in Mexico saw her flourish as an artist, and it is in Mexico that her work remains best known. The Juggler (The Magician) is one of the many paintings she created there.
The Painting
In its overall setting as well as its depiction of its figures, The Juggler (The Magician) presents us with a scene of fantastic realism. It is meticulously composed and reflects Varo’s skill at drawing. As with many of her paintings, the architecture, costumes, and activities it portrays evoke Northern Renaissance painting. If we don’t look too closely at what seems to be a group of quaintly dressed people gathered together and framed by a number of smooth-faced, arcaded buildings in muted pink, terra cotta, pale brown, and olive, we might think we were looking at a street scene painted in the fifteenth century.
The painting’s foreground divides in two. On the left-hand side the focus of attention is on the titular figure of the juggler. He is dressed in a theatrical red robe and a pointed, broad-brimmed hat like the stage conjurer he appears to be. He has a long beard sharply parted in the middle. The peak and brim of his hat, along with the two ends of his beard, form a pentangular star framing his face. He stands on a stage projecting from the back of a vaguely Romanesque, faceted cylindrical structure with a conical roof and lantern, which is mounted on a tricycle. Inside this odd caravan are a lion, an owl, and a goat; a person peeks out from behind a curtain. On the stage behind him a pair of eyes looks out from a trunk whose lid is ajar – an unsettling, Boschian touch. The juggler is shown in the middle of his act as he juggles a set of bright white balls that arc above his head; at the top of the arc the balls defy gravity by magically turning in a loop. Seven of the balls – or possibly one ball depicted at seven different points in time – form the corners of a three-dimensional projection of a cube. (This latter may embed a dim memory of the technical drawings Varo made in her youth.) All the while the juggler keeps his eyes on his audience; his expression suggests anxiousness disguised in nonchalance and seems to indicate that he’s sizing up the effect his performance is having. Is it working? Does he have their attention? The audience in turn dominates the right half of the painting, which consists of a tightly grouped assembly of twenty-one women of indiscernible age draped in a single encompassing gray robe. The implicit anonymity of the group is emphasized by the fact that Varo has given them nearly uniform faces and hairstyles.
Something dramatic seems to be going on here; what can it be?
Kaplan draws a connection between Bosch’s painting The Conjurer and Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician), both of which she suggests are concerned with the role of the magician in society. Both paintings do set out a similar scenario of a street performer playing to a group of onlookers. Beyond this general similarity, Kaplan identifies some of the iconographical parallels between Bosch’s picture and Varo’s. Bosch shows the magician with an owl, as does Varo, whereas the dog in Bosch’s picture is replaced by the lion in Varo’s (Kaplan, p. 193). Despite their similarities, though, there seems to be a noticeable difference in tone dividing them. While Bosch’s scene emphasizes the disreputability of the conjurer – he distracts his audience while a man who probably is working with him picks the pocket of a fascinated onlooker – Varo’s juggler, at least on the surface, appears simply to be engaged in a benign entertainment. And while we know that Varo was interested in Bosch’s work, it may be that we can find another, complementary source for her painting in another one of her interests – the tarot deck.
The Card
The lowest numbered card in the tarot deck’s trump suit is variously known in Italian as Il Bagatto, Il Bagatello, or the Pagat; in French as Le Bateleur; in Spanish as El Cubiletero; and in English, as the Juggler or the Magician. Although it is the lowest ranking trump card, in trick-taking games it has a high point value, since it’s easily lost. In some games there is even a bonus when it takes the final trick. Along with The Fool and The World (or in some games, The Angel), it counts as one of the three high-value cards known as the Honors. With its low status and high value, it is a paradoxical card occupying two seemingly contradictory positions in the deck’s hierarchy.
The iconography of the card differs from deck to deck but contains some elements common to all or most. The figure on the card is a man standing behind a table containing various objects. He appears this way in the earliest tarots, which date to the mid-15th century: in the Visconti-Sforza Tarot he is well-dressed, holds a rod or wand in his hand, and his table contains a hat, a glass, a knife, and other objects; in the d’Este Tarot from this same period he is shown demonstrating something to two boys standing by his table. In the later and more-or-less standardized traditional decks of France and the Italian mainland the man has one arm raised and wears a hat of some sort, often one with a broad brim. His raised hand holds a rod or a glass or cup of wine; the objects on the table may include a rod, a knife, and some coins or balls and cups and dice. In addition to representing the tarot deck’s regular suits of clubs, swords, coins, and cups, these items constitute the tools of his trade. What he is is a street performer or itinerant magician of a type familiar in the Northern Italian cities of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, where the tarot deck originated.*
The Italian name for the card tells us much about the character it illustrates. As Andrea Vitali documents in his essay on the history and meaning of the card, the man depicted was a bagattegliere, or purveyor of bagatelle – a word that can refer to “things of little value,” “games of sleight-of-hand,” or simply “frauds.” At the time the tarot deck was created the bagattegliere was a frequently encountered character who entertained people with prestidigitation and games like bussolotti – balls-and-cups, which could be played simply to entertain an audience or as a confidence game for swindling gullible bettors. He also performed tricks like juggling. Like his trivial entertainments, the bagattegliere was considered something of low value – a base person whose games and tricks sometimes got him banned from cities because of his reputed dishonesty or because Church authorities thought that his tricks were produced by pagan magic (O’Neill). In the tarot deck the bagattegliere’s low social status is communicated by the Bagatto card’s position in the trump suit – he is at the bottom of a series of cards depicting stations within the social hierarchy. In short, the card traditionally depicts a sleight-of-hand artist, a confidence man, a trickster of a disreputable kind, much like Bosch’s conjurer. It is only after the invention of the myth of the occult tarot in late 18th century France that this shady street performer was turned into a magus.
Varo’s juggler combines elements of both the conventional and occult meanings of the card. Like the bagattegliere, Varo’s juggler is a street performer whose caravan indicates that he’s an itinerant. He has a table set up on stage with him, but unlike the large, rectangular table usually shown on the card, his is small and circular. It contains bottles and cups and at its feet is a cloth containing another bottle and what look like piles of herbs of some sort; this can be read as an allusion to the bagattegliere’s side profession as an occasional seller of medicines and elixirs. Unlike the bagattegliere, Varo’s juggler appears to be a genuine magician, as the fantastic trajectory of the balls would seem to indicate, and as reinforced by her romanticized portrayal of the figure as being surrounded by an aura of white light. To that extent, he is more like the true magicians of the occult tarot decks than the sleight-of-hand conjurers of the more traditional, game-playing decks. We know that Varo was interested in a number of elements of what we now would call New Age spirituality as well as the tarot, and given this, it would make sense that it was the occult tarot that was of most interest to her and that this would be reflected in her interpretation of the Bagatto card. Further evidence that she may have had the tarot in mind when painting the picture is the close resemblance between the five-pointed star framing the juggler’s face and the five-pointed star that frames the face of the figure in her 1957 painting Carta de Tarot (Tarot Card). It also is notable that the juggler’s caravan, a version of which appears in her 1956 painting Roulotte, recalls the chariot depicted on the seventh card in the trump suit.
What the painting doesn’t do is literally recreate the trump card by faithfully reproducing its iconographic details. Instead, Varo seems to prefer to evoke, rather than mimic. (By contrast, her friend Victor Brauner’s self-portrait as the juggler in his 1947 painting The Surrealist closely resembles the figure on the Bateleur card of the Marseille deck, with some occult symbols thrown in for good measure.) For example, the table by the juggler’s feet is small and round and contains items not portrayed in standard decks; he stands in front of it rather than behind it. The caravan is also not a part of the card’s usual icongraphy; neither are the animals or the juggler’s companion. It’s worth pointing out, however, that variations in the card’s iconography were a part of its history from its inception, and became particularly marked when its design was deliberately modified to carry occult symbols and significance. Seen from this broader perspective, Varo’s juggler represents just another creative variation on the theme of the bagatelliere and one that, precisely because of its creative variation, elegantly and effectively captures the spirit of the card if not the letter of its traditional imagery. All told her painting’s allusions to the card, from its title to the character it portrays and the way it portrays him, track closely enough to be more than coincidental. This isn’t to say that the card exhausts the meaning of the painting. It is only to say that the card is an important point of reference. And as we will see, the archaeology of its meaning introduces a layer of ambiguity into the meaning of the painting.
What of the group of women on the right half of the canvas, the group to whom the juggler is playing? Nothing like them appears on any version of the tarot card, but they may hold the key to interpreting the scene and the juggler’s role in it.
The Teacher (The Trickster)
The women are in a procession approaching the juggler, with their heads turned toward him. Their expressions are hard to read, but seem to fall somewhere between impassive and expectant. What is the meaning of this literally gray, virtually anonymous group? First off, there are twenty-one of them, which represents the number of cards remaining in the trump suit once the Bagatto is substracted (Arcq et al.) Further, in a MoMA online interview curatorial staff member Cara Manes, who worked to acquire the painting for the museum, cites a letter from Varo in which the painter described the women as an “undifferentiated mass of unenlightened figures…waiting for a transference of enlightenment from the magician so that they can ‘wake up.’” In her interview, Manes notes that the idea of the metaphorically sleeping, unenlightened being needing to be awakened came from the teachings of George Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian spiritual philosopher. This is to say that Gurdjieff, just as much as the tarot card, is an important point of reference for the painting.
We know that Varo was interested in Gurdjieff’s teachings when she was in Mexico. She may have been introduced to them as early as her time in Paris in the late 1930s, since some of the people she associated with there, such as René Daumal, were studying them; Kaplan sees both Varo and Daumal as having drawn from this “common source” (Kaplan, p. 171). Varo seems to have known of Gurdjieff’s philosophy primarily through the writings of his student and systematizer P. D. Ouspensky. As Ricki O’Rawe has shown in his study of Gurdjieff’s presence in Varo’s art, her personal library contained a number of volumes by Ouspensky as well as by other Gurdjieff followers. She may or may not have been a member of a Gurdjieff group in Mexico; there is disagreement over whether or not, and if to so to what extent, she was formally involved. What does seem clear is that Varo’s engagement with Gurdjieff’s philosophy was serious and of great importance to her, especially in later years.
Although it would be overly simple to claim that The Juggler (The Magician) is merely an illustration of Gurdjieff’s philosophy, its meaning does seem directly derived from Gurdjieff’s fundamental idea, which is that people go through life as virtual sleepwalkers captive to the superficial traits they’ve acquired, and hence are ignorant of their true, underlying being. In effect, they need to “wake up” to themselves. We might see the gray cloak covering the women as a metaphor for the anonymous and unthinking quasi-personality these traits enclose them in, and the juggler as using his magic trick as a means of getting their attention and startling them out of their collective somnambulance – much as Gurdjieff used a variety of tricks and techniques to force his students to “wake up” to themselves. Yet whereas Varo’s juggler appears to rely on a harmless display of magic, Gurdjieff notoriously employed capricious and often cruel tactics that could include compelling students to perform hard and pointless physical labor, inducing emotional stress in them, and fomenting personal conflict. Despite this difference between them, in a functional sense the juggler and Gurdjieff can be identified with each other. Both are goads to self-discovery, both rely on tricks to accomplish the task.** And both have a dubious element about them. The juggler may be there to effect a transference of enlightenment, but some shadow surrounds him. Given his prehistory as the disreputable figure of the bagatteliere, the juggler/magician is equally known for the fantastic and the fraudulent, the insightful and the duplicitous. He ultimately is a Janus-faced symbol who is both wonder-worker and deceiver, carrier of insight and charlatan, all at once. By most accounts, most notably including Ouspensky’s, this is what Gurdjieff was as well. Separating fact from fiction about him was nearly impossible; he had woven an opaque web of myth about himself and his early life. Even a former student as well-disposed toward Gurdjieff as Paul Beekman Taylor could describe him as “at once the exemplar and the denying example of everything he said…one who reveals truth by displaying the false…[a] man who reveals himself capable to reach as high as low he can stoop.” Ouspensky himself, while maintaining adherence to Gurdjieff’s teachings, distrusted and broke off relations with Gurdjieff the man. In Gurdjieff the teacher and the trickster were inextricably intertwined. Depending on which side of himself he was showing and to whom, Gurdjieff could be either magus or bagatelliere.
At that point where Gurdjieff and the juggler become identified, a seam opens up through which the painting’s possible meaning may be seen to overflow the artist’s intention. If we are to see Varo’s juggler as associated with Gurdjieff – or by extension with any other person purporting to provide a path to enlightenment – we could understand The Juggler (The Magician) to be reaching beyond itself and in the process turning an allegory about waking up to oneself into a warning about gullibility. In that case the image of the juggler says more than it means, as his history as a bagatelliere comes back to haunt him. It reveals itself to be a complex symbol in a complex picture that hints at the complexities and contradictions inherent not only in the will to be fully human, but in the character of the people who promise to help us realize that will. These latter may turn out to be miracle-workers or they may be bagatellieri of a kind – or both at the same time. In either case, handle with care. What Varo told her last husband, Walter Gruen, may be more to the point (quoted in O’Rawe, p. 3): “I should find answers by traveling down my own path, and by my own efforts.”
*Parenthetically, there is an alternative Italian icongraphical tradition that depicts the figure on the Bagatto card as a cobbler or craftsman rather than a street performer. This has been attributed to the resemblance of “bagatello” to the Milanese dialect word for cobbler; the corresponding iconography is thought to derive from the Artisan card in the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi.
** Among the tricks – “methods,” “techniques,” if a more neutral description is to be preferred – Gurdjieff is reported to have used on his students was hypnosis. With this in mind, the painting takes on another nuance of meaning: the dazzlingly white array of balls the juggler throws into the air begin to look like props intended to induce hypnosis in the women watching him. And that would constitute a neat, Gurdjieffian trick indeed: waking the sleeping women by putting them into a hypnotic trance.
Sources and references:
Tere Arcq, Lara Balikci, Caitlin Haskell, and Alivé Piliado, Witchy Worlds: Summoning Remedios Varo on All Hallows Eve, Art Institute of Chicago Inside the Exhibition, 31 Oct 2023, accessed at www.artic.edu/articles/1094/witchy-worlds-summoning-remedios-varo-on-all-hallows-eve
Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970 (London: Duckworth, 2002).
Janet A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys (New York: Abbeville Press, 2000). Internal cites to Kaplan.
MoMA Magazine, Remedios Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician), 18 Jan 2019, accessed at www.moma.org/magazine/articles/27
Robert O’Neill, Tarot Bagatto Cards: The Iconology from 15th/16th Century accessed at www.tarot.com/tarot/robert-oneill/bagatto-cards. Internal cite to O’Neill.
Ricki O’Rawe, Ruedas metafísicas: ‘Personality’ and ‘Essence’ in Remedios Varo’s Paintings. Hispanic Research Journal, 15(5), 445-462. Internal cites to O’Rawe.
Paul Beekman Taylor, What Did Gurdjieff Give to Me? What Did He Ask of Me? accessed at www.gurdjieff.org/taylor3.htm
Andrea Vitali, “The Bagatto,” tr. Michael Howard, accessed at www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=113&lng=ENG
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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