JEAN VARDA (TURKISH/AMERICAN, 1893-1971)

Footnote
Jean 'Yanko' Varda was a Turkish born American artist of mixed Greek and French descent. At the age of 19 he moved to Paris where he met Picasso and Braque, before moving to London during the First world War, becoming a ballet dancer, and then returning to Paris by 1922. He subsequently spent many summers in Cassis in the South of France, sharing Roland Penrose's home Villa Les Mimosas, where they hosted many creative guests including Braque, Miro, Derain, Max Ernst, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and others. He spent most of his winters in this period in London.

During the 1930s Varda developed a type of mosaic using pieces of broken mirrors, which he would scratch and then paint in bright colours. He exhibited work in London and Paris and, once he had moved to The United States in 1939, in New York, at the Neumann-Willard Gallery. He later moved from New York to Big Sur and Monterey, his home in the latter becoming a haven for artists and writers during the Second World War. In the 1940s Varda developed his style, moving from mosaics to collage, usually combining scraps of cloth and paper with paint on board. 

In the late 1940s Varda and the British artist Gordon Onslow Ford acquired an old ferry boat, the Vallejo, permanently mooring it in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and adapting it for their artist's studios and also providing living quarters. Varda continued to create art, mostly collages, throughout his life before he died in 1971 from a heart attack in Mexico City.