'Portrait of Henry Miller' by Jean Varda, 1971, Millerania, Tropic of Cancer, Big Sur, Paris, Anaïs Nin

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Portrait of Henry Miller and friends painted by Jean (Yanko) Varda (American, 1893-1971) in 1970 as a gift for Henry … Read more Portrait of Henry Miller and friends painted by Jean (Yanko) Varda (American, 1893-1971) in 1970 as a gift for Henry Miller on the occasion of his 79th birthday.

Dedicated lower right, 'To Henry, from Varda, '79''. This is the only recorded portrait of Henry Miller painted by Jean Varda. The work contains additional figures and, also, portraits of their intimate circle including, at lower left, Miller's last wife, Hoki.

Henry Miller's long-time friend, Jean Varda, was both an accomplished artist and an influential figure in the author's life. It was Varda who first introduced Miller to painting and Varda who persuaded him to move to Big Sur in the 1940's.

Jean "Yanko" Varda was a Turkish-born American artist, best known for his groundbreaking collage and mosaic work. He was the subject of the documentary, Uncle Yanco (1967), made by his cousin, the director, Agnès Varda. He was also one of the first adopters of the bohemian Sausalito houseboat lifestyle that became popular in the 1960s.

At age 19, Varda moved to Paris, where he met Picasso and Braque and lost all interest in the academic style of painting he had, until then, been pursuing. He moved to London during World War I, became a ballet dancer, and made friends with members of the avant-garde in London.

By 1922, Varda had returned to Paris and to painting. From 1923, he spent his summers in Cassis, in the south of France, sharing Roland Penrose's home Villa Les Mimosas, where they welcomed many prominent artists including Braque, Miró, Derain, Max Ernst, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, among others. By the mid-1920s, Varda was spending most of his winters in London. During the 1930s, he developed a novel mosaic construction style involving incising designs into the backs of mirror fragments. Bright pigments were then painted into the scratches so the color could show through to the front of the mirror. To create the final composition, these mirror pieces would be arranged on a board prepared with a gritty gesso mixture to hold the design.

Varda held successful exhibitions of his works 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, subsequently, to Monterey. In late 1943, he persuaded the writer Henry Miller to move to Big Sur and, in 1944, Miller wrote an admiring profile of Varda called 'Varda the Master Builder'. This was published by Circle, an avant-garde art literary magazine published in Berkeley by George Leite. Through Miller, Varda met the writer Anaïs Nin with whom he became close friends. She would write about Varda frequently including in her novel, "Collages" which includes a lightly fictionalized profile of Varda. Nin's also decorated her Silver Lake home with the artist's collages. By 1943, Varda was moving towards collage construction from his earlier mirror mosaics. 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. During the war years, Varda's house in Monterey became a hub for artists, writers, and other creative people.

In 1947, Varda and British-born artist Gordon Onslow Ford acquired an old ferryboat called the 'Vallejo'.  They permanently moored the Vallejo in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Using materials scavenged from a closed-down wartime shipbuilding operation, they remodeled the ferryboat into a studio for Onslow-Ford and a studio and living quarters for Varda. The writer and Zen Buddhist popularizer Alan Watts took over Onslow-Ford's space on the ferryboat in 1961. Varda turned the Vallejo ferry boat into an artist salon and would regale his guests with stories at his notorious dinner parties. His costume parties were also justly famous. On Sunday afternoons, he would take friends out on one of his homemade sailboats.

We are pleased to offer this unique piece of 'Milleriana' that memorializes the close relationship between these two celebrated artists. See less