THE JUGGLER (THE MAGICIAN)
REMEDIOS VARO, 1956
Count the faces in the crowd. They're all the same face. Twenty-one figures in gray cloaks. Twenty-one identical heads of curly hair. Duplicated, or reduced to the same thing. Either way, the crowd has already been worked on. The man in the red cape and pointed hat is calling himself a juggler. Now look at his face. He doesn't have one. Where a face should be, there's a pentagram — a five-pointed star set in mother-of-pearl. His face has been replaced by a sign. Power. Knowledge. Control. You're looking at a man whose identity is already abstraction. Now look at how old this painting wants to seem. The buildings are medieval. The robes are medieval. The gold ground, the ochres, the terracottas — the whole thing looks like a panel painting from the fifteenth century. And Varo made it that way on purpose. Gessoed panel. Drawings transferred to the surface. Not just the old style. The old method. That matters because Bosch painted a juggler like this five hundred years earlier. In Bosch's version, the crowd gets robbed while it watches the trick. Same trick. Different century. Look at the wagon on the left. A traveling stage. Curtains. Wheels. Its own sealed little interior. Somebody peers out from inside. There's an owl. The whole apparatus of performance is right there in the picture. And Varo knew what performance could do. She left Spain under Franco. She left Paris when the Nazis arrived. She had seen men step in front of crowds and turn spectacle into control. So when she painted this in Mexico City in 1956, the man in the hat was never just a magician. He's a type. He calls himself a juggler. And the crowd — what's left of it — watches the bubbles.