Jean Varda
Encyclopedia
Jean Varda (11 September 1893, in Smyrna
(now İzmir
) - 10 January 1971) was an artist. He was of mixed Greek and French descent. As a child he was known as a prodigy, and received commissions to paint portraits of prominent Athenians.
At 19, Varda moved to Paris
where he met Picasso and Braque and lost all interest in the academic style of painting he had been pursuing until that time. He moved to London during World War I
, became a ballet dancer, and began to make friends with members of the avant garde in London.
By 1922 Varda was back in Paris and had returned to painting. Beginning in 1923 Varda spent most of his summers in Cassis, in the south of France
, where he welcomed a number of well-known people to his homes including, in addition to Braque and Miró
, Derain, Max Ernst
, Roger Fry
, Clive Bell
, Duncan Grant
, Gerald Brenan
and others. By the mid 1920s he was spending most of his winters in London.
During the 1930s Varda developed a type of mosaic
that involved the use of pieces of broken mirrors. He would scratch the backs of the pieces of mirror, then paint bright colors in the scratches so the paint showed through to the front of the mirror. He would then glue the pieces of mirror to a board, which he had prepared with a gritty gesso mixture.
Varda exhibited his work in London and Paris before leaving for New York in 1939, where his work was exhibited at the Neumann-Willard Gallery. In 1940 he moved to Anderson Creek, in Big Sur
, California
, and after that to Monterey, about 40 miles north of Big Sur. In late 1943 he persuaded the writer Henry Miller
to move to Big Sur. In 1947 Miller wrote an admiring profile of Varda called Varda the Master Builder, which was published by Circle Magazine
, an avant garde art and literary magazine produced in Berkeley
by George Leite
. During the war years Varda’s house in Monterey became a virtual salon for artists, writers and other creative people. Through Henry Miller Varda met the writer Anaïs Nin
. Varda and Nin became close friends and Nin would write about Varda frequently. In addition, her novel "Collages" includes a slightly fictionalized profile of Varda.
By 1943 Varda was shifting over to collage
s from his earlier mosaic/mirror pictures. The collage, which would typically combine scraps of cloth and bits of paper with paint on a board, would remain his favored medium for the rest of his life.
In 1946 Varda taught in the art department at a Summer Institute at Black Mountain College, an experimental school in rural North Carolina. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Varda taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).
In approximately 1948 Varda and British-born artist Gordon Onslow Ford
acquired an old ferryboat, called the Vallejo
. They permanently moored the Vallejo in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge
from San Francisco, and remodeled it into a studio for Onslow-Ford and a studio and living quarters for Varda, using materials scavenged from a closed-down wartime shipbuilding operation. The writer and Zen
Buddhist
popularizer Alan Watts
took over Onslow-Ford’s space on the ferryboat in 1961.
Varda turned the Vallejo into a kind of salon - he was an excellent cook, and would regale guests with stories at dinners. His costume parties were famous. On Sunday afternoons he would take friends out on one of his homemade sailboats. Throughout his life he continued to create collages.
In 1967 he was the subject of a short documentary film by his niece, the filmmaker Agnès Varda
, entitled "Uncle Yanco."
Varda died after suffering a heart attack upon arriving by plane in Mexico City
, where he had gone to visit a friend.
Varda was married three times: to Dorothy Varda during the 1920s; to Virginia Barclay Varda from 1940 until approximately 1947; and to Chryssa Vardea Mavromichali
, from 1955 until 1958. He is survived by a daughter, Vagadu, who was born to Varda and his wife Virginia in 1946, and by a granddaughter, Joui Turandot.
Smyrna
Smyrna was an ancient city located at a central and strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Thanks to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence. The ancient city is located at two sites within modern İzmir, Turkey...
(now İzmir
Izmir
Izmir is a large metropolis in the western extremity of Anatolia. The metropolitan area in the entire Izmir Province had a population of 3.35 million as of 2010, making the city third most populous in Turkey...
) - 10 January 1971) was an artist. He was of mixed Greek and French descent. As a child he was known as a prodigy, and received commissions to paint portraits of prominent Athenians.
At 19, Varda moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
where he met Picasso and Braque and lost all interest in the academic style of painting he had been pursuing until that time. He moved to London during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, became a ballet dancer, and began to make friends with members of the avant garde in London.
By 1922 Varda was back in Paris and had returned to painting. Beginning in 1923 Varda spent most of his summers in Cassis, in the south of France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, where he welcomed a number of well-known people to his homes including, in addition to Braque and Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Derain, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
, Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
, Clive Bell
Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.- Origins :Clive Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881...
, Duncan Grant
Duncan Grant
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a British painter and designer of textiles, potterty and theatre sets and costumes...
, Gerald Brenan
Gerald Brenan
Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE was a British writer and Hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain.He is best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, a historical work on the background to the Spanish Civil War, and for South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village...
and others. By the mid 1920s he was spending most of his winters in London.
During the 1930s Varda developed a type of mosaic
Mosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...
that involved the use of pieces of broken mirrors. He would scratch the backs of the pieces of mirror, then paint bright colors in the scratches so the paint showed through to the front of the mirror. He would then glue the pieces of mirror to a board, which he had prepared with a gritty gesso mixture.
Varda exhibited his work in London and Paris before leaving for New York in 1939, where his work was exhibited at the Neumann-Willard Gallery. In 1940 he moved to Anderson Creek, in Big Sur
Big Sur
Big Sur is a sparsely populated region of the Central Coast of California where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. The name "Big Sur" is derived from the original Spanish-language "el sur grande", meaning "the big south", or from "el país grande del sur", "the big...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, and after that to Monterey, about 40 miles north of Big Sur. In late 1943 he persuaded the writer Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
to move to Big Sur. In 1947 Miller wrote an admiring profile of Varda called Varda the Master Builder, which was published by Circle Magazine
Circle Magazine
Circle Magazine was published from 1945 to 1951 by George Leite, initially with poet Bern Porter. Produced at Leite's Berkeley, California bookstore, Daliel's , it featured poetry, prose, criticism and art from many of those whose creative works and their successors would later come to called the...
, an avant garde art and literary magazine produced in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
by George Leite
George Leite
George Leite was a California author, poet, publisher and bookstore owner active in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1920, he was raised in the then Portuguese-American enclave of San Leandro, California and died in 1985 in Walnut Creek,...
. During the war years Varda’s house in Monterey became a virtual salon for artists, writers and other creative people. Through Henry Miller Varda met the writer Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
. Varda and Nin became close friends and Nin would write about Varda frequently. In addition, her novel "Collages" includes a slightly fictionalized profile of Varda.
By 1943 Varda was shifting over to collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
s from his earlier mosaic/mirror pictures. The collage, which would typically combine scraps of cloth and bits of paper with paint on a board, would remain his favored medium for the rest of his life.
In 1946 Varda taught in the art department at a Summer Institute at Black Mountain College, an experimental school in rural North Carolina. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Varda taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).
In approximately 1948 Varda and British-born artist Gordon Onslow Ford
Gordon Onslow Ford
Gordon Onslow Ford was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton....
acquired an old ferryboat, called the Vallejo
Vallejo (ferry)
The Vallejo, originally known as the O&CRR Ferry No. 2, is a houseboat in Sausalito, California, United States. It previously served as a passenger ferry in Portland, Oregon, in the late 19th century, and in Vallejo, California, for the first half of the 20th century.The Oregon & California...
. They permanently moored the Vallejo in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay into the Pacific Ocean. As part of both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1, the structure links the city of San Francisco, on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, to...
from San Francisco, and remodeled it into a studio for Onslow-Ford and a studio and living quarters for Varda, using materials scavenged from a closed-down wartime shipbuilding operation. The writer and Zen
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
Buddhist
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
popularizer Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
took over Onslow-Ford’s space on the ferryboat in 1961.
Varda turned the Vallejo into a kind of salon - he was an excellent cook, and would regale guests with stories at dinners. His costume parties were famous. On Sunday afternoons he would take friends out on one of his homemade sailboats. Throughout his life he continued to create collages.
In 1967 he was the subject of a short documentary film by his niece, the filmmaker Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....
, entitled "Uncle Yanco."
Varda died after suffering a heart attack upon arriving by plane in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, where he had gone to visit a friend.
Varda was married three times: to Dorothy Varda during the 1920s; to Virginia Barclay Varda from 1940 until approximately 1947; and to Chryssa Vardea Mavromichali
Chryssa
Chryssa Vardea Mavromichali is a Greek American artist who works in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture widely known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she has always used the mononym Chryssa professionally...
, from 1955 until 1958. He is survived by a daughter, Vagadu, who was born to Varda and his wife Virginia in 1946, and by a granddaughter, Joui Turandot.
External links
- http://www.varda.to/timeline.htm
- http://www.anthonypowell.org.uk/reflib/nl27.pdf
- http://www.artnet.com/artist/425759046/jean-varda.html
- http://www.vallejo.to/artists/varda_monterey02.htm
- http://www.experiencevagadu.com/
- http://www.jeanyankovarda.com
- http://mubi.com/films/25421