Making Myths: The Writings of Remedios Varo

Tatiana Marcel

Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Abstract

            From Surrealism’s European inception in 1924, its founders had relegated women to the rigid role of muse within their universe. Seen as sources of inspiration, women were represented as literary and visual archetypes including the “femme enfant” and “femme fatale.” Notably absent was the “femme artiste,” the idea of woman as artist. Not until the surrealist migration to Mexico in the late 1930s did women enter the mainstream discourse as creators. However, even at this juncture, they were not integrated into the movement at the behest of their male peers.

            Instead, these women artists had to forge a space for themselves within the confines of a constrictive world they had only ever been invited to passively observe and influence, not actively shape and define. Remedios Varo, a prominent member of this Mexican sphere, paradoxically drew on the visual language of Surrealism to subvert its representations in her own work, which resulted in the creation of a multimedia universe that reimagines the movement from a woman’s perspective. While best known as a visual artist, Varo was also a talented writer whose texts serve as essential declarations of artistic autonomy that concretized the myths developed in both her artistic oeuvre and her professional legacy. She attains this critical sense of self-determination by supplanting the notions of “femme enfant” and “femme fatale” with heroic female protagonists.

            Varo’s writings include letters, ideas for a play, examples of automatic writing, and dream journal entries. She wrote these texts for pleasure and shared them with friends, none of which were intended to be published for public perusal. It was not until 1994, more than thirty years after her death, that some of these writings were first collected from family and friends and published in Mexico, and then finally in 2018 translated into English and published in their entirety. These writings have proven invaluable as primary sources that elucidate Varo’s fictional worldbuilding process and preoccupations as an artist.

Making Myths: The Writings of Remedios Varo

From Surrealism’s European inception in 1924, its founders relegated women within the movement to the restrictive role of muse. Women were seen as sources of artistic inspiration, with literary and visual representations abound of archetypes such as the “femme fatale” and “femme enfant.”[1] Notably absent was the trope of the “femme artiste,” the idea of woman as artist. It was not until the surrealist migration to Mexico in the late 1930s that women entered the mainstream discourse as creators who distributed, exhibited, and sold works within the commercial art world. However, even at this juncture, they were not integrated into the artistic movement at the behest of their male peers.

These women artists had to forge a space for themselves within the confines of a constrictive world they had only ever been invited to passively observe and influence, not actively shape and define. Remedios Varo, a prominent member of this Mexican sphere, paradoxically drew on the visual language of Surrealism to subvert its representations in her own work, which resulted in the creation of a multimedia universe that reimagines the movement from a woman’s perspective. While best known as a visual artist, Varo was also a talented writer whose texts serve as essential declarations of artistic autonomy that concretized the myths developed in both her artistic oeuvre and her professional legacy. She attains this critical sense of self-determination by supplanting the notions of “femme enfant” and “femme fatale” with heroic female protagonists.

Varo’s writings include letters, ideas for a play, examples of automatic writing, and dream journal entries. She wrote these texts for pleasure and shared them with friends, none of which were intended to be published for public perusal. It was not until 1994, more than thirty years after her death, that some of these writings were first collected from family and friends and published in Mexico, and then finally in 2018 translated into English in their entirety.[2] These writings have proven invaluable as primary sources that elucidate Varo’s fictional worldbuilding process and preoccupations as an artist. In the inaugural issue of the first surrealist journal, La Révolution surréaliste, artist and writer Max Morise claimed, “stream of thought cannot be viewed statically,” which positioned writing over painting as the preferred vehicle for automatism, and in turn laid the foundations for the dialectic between the two mediums that would come to preoccupy surrealist critical theory.[3] Given Surrealism’s origins as a literary movement that initially considered painting an afterthought, the textual aspects of Varo’s practice place her firmly within the surrealist canon by crafting allegorical interpretations of myths which serve as sketches to her artworks.

While impossible to define a singular surrealist aesthetic, the defamiliarization of the familiar has become one of the movement’s hallmark themes. The human body, specifically in the nude female form, was often the subject used to explore this concept. A work such as Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres (Ingres’ Violin) from 1924 (Figure 1) captures the second-class position imposed on women through surrealist visual language. The model in the photograph is Alice Prin, also known as Kiki de Montparnasse, who at the time was Man Ray’s lover. The photograph depicts Prin’s backside with her arms hidden, head tilted to the left with her face mostly out of view, and f-holes placed on her lower back, which conjures the image of a violin. The work’s title is a double entendre: a reference to the French idiom which means “hobby,” and to the Neoclassical painter, and avid violinist, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ famous work The Valpinçon Bather from 1808. The transmogrification of Prin’s body into one of Ingres’ violins implies that “playing” her is one of Ray’s favorite pastimes.

The objectification of a woman’s body through crude artistic representations exemplifies the reductive surrealist attitude towards women as fetishized figures of admiration and desire. Prin, a preeminent figure in the surrealist circle, was herself a painter, author, and performer. Despite her undeniable influence on the early years of Surrealism, her legacy as a creative counterpart to her male peers was diluted, mainly remembered today as Man Ray’s romantic partner and muse. The stifling parameters of Surrealism that undermined women’s artistic output would be fundamentally altered at the onset of the Second World War.

Similarly to Prin, Varo became affiliated with the surrealist movement in Europe due to her romantic relationship with poet Benjamin Péret in the late 1930’s.[4] While both women were introduced to the surrealist circle through their relationships with canonical male members of the movement, Varo eventually succeeded in transcending this initial affiliation to become a core member of the movement in her own right. When World War II broke out in 1939, many European surrealists fled to Mexico because of its government’s lenient asylum policies that did not require extensive political background checks for newcomers. This group of political refugees included Remedios Varo, who arrived in 1941.[5] Upon arrival to Mexico, Varo was still with her surrealist partner Péret. While their home on Calle Gabino Barreda was a surrealist social hub (Leonora Carrington lived there with them for a time,) Varo herself did not create any surrealist work until after she and Péret ended their relationship.[6]

While Varo’s connection to the movement was once intertwined to her romantic partner, when those ties severed, Varo was free to reinvent Surrealism in Mexico from her own perspective as an autonomous woman. As art historian Masayo Nonaka observes, “In the early 1940s Varo did not produce much, owing partly to the practical demands of making a living with Péret …but a turning point came with her separation from…Péret.”[7] Eventually, Varo married the wealthy businessman Walter Gruen who was notably not a member of the surrealist movement. Gruen “was impressed by Varo’s work and offered her both support and an opportunity to devote herself to painting. Varo’s decision to accept his offer changed the course of her life.”[8] Varo quit her job as an illustrator, and from that point on she began to pursue her artistic practice in earnest, making her most significant works from 1953 to 1963.

Upon first reading Varo’s letters, it is immediately striking how her writings conjure the same motifs one would have already been familiar with from seeing her paintings. When asked in an unpublished interview whether she was a writer as well as a painter, Varo responded “I sometimes write as if I were making a sketch,” which precisely conveys the experience of reading her texts that explore ideas she had also rendered visually.[9] In a letter entitled “Tribulations of an Adept of ‘The Observers of the Interdependence of Household Objects and of their Influence Over Everyday Life,’” Varo discusses her participation in an occult group that believes their arrangement of everyday household items had an effect on the outcomes of their lived realities. She refers to her arrangements of quotidian items as “solar system[s],” which instantly recalls the 1963 painting Still Life Reviving (Figure 2.)[10] As a surrealist interpretation of a still life, this work’s subjects are far from unmoving. Apples, lemons, pomegranates, and strawberries levitate off blue plates, concentrically whirling around a candle in a dimly lit dining room. This whimsical image is reminiscent of the solar system, with fruit that circles around the candle’s orbit much in the same way planets revolve around the sun. The visual interpretation of an animated domestic “solar system” provides a glimpse into Varo’s thought process, how a personal practice described in words gets reimagined as a painting that befits Varo’s artistic universe. Still Life Reviving beautifully captures a supernatural transfiguration inside a home and highlights Varo’s interests in astrology, alchemy, tarot, and the occult.

The local Mexican markets where Varo would have shopped for the fruit she portrayed and her home kitchen where she prepared food were both sites of occult exploration. These traditionally female-dominated spaces integral to Mexican society imparted Varo with immense inspiration, having remarked in a letter about potion ingredients that, “in this country there is great activity in the realm of witchcraft.”[11] The markets’ ties to the past fascinated her, cultural spaces of exchange where one could travel through time by finding goods and practices dating back to antiquity. Of particular interest to her were the healers who sold items such as herbs, seeds, chameleons, seashells, and candles to be used for medicine and witchcraft.[12]

Using items sourced from the markets, Varo spent a lot of her time concocting culinary experiments which converted her kitchen into an occult laboratory. As art historian Janet Kaplan observed in her book Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys, “using cooking as a metaphor for hermetic pursuits…established an association between women’s traditional roles and magical acts of transformation. They had…been interested in the occult, stimulated by the surrealist belief in ‘occultation of the Marvelous.’”[13] The creation of magical recipes with objects from everyday life was a way to subvert the dismissive ideas male surrealists associated with gendered domestic spaces by elevating the abode into an alchemical site of mystical experimentation.

In addition to the insights of daily life, Varo’s writings provide a glimpse into her interior world of thoughts and concerns. During a moment of reflection about her occult activities Varo questions her sanity when she asks herself, “Is it a sudden folly of my subconscious that, in an attempt at freedom, has impelled me to act chaotically concerning the very important factors that make up my practical-domestic universe? Or instead, am I simply a madman?”[14] A recurring theme that preoccupies Varo in several letters is the anxiety of whether to see a therapist because she thinks other people consider her habits and actions too outlandish. In one letter, she tells of an incident in which she spilled tomato sauce on her pants and found the stain to be so meaningful that she decided to cut the fabric and frame it. In recounting this memory Varo confesses, “I’ve felt obligated…to lead a near clandestine life, afraid that my people, finding me out, would have me examined by a psychiatrist.”[15] In another letter to a psychiatrist, she admits, “…I’m interested in seeing a psychiatrist because I suffer greatly from a permanent sense of guilt.”[16] Varo asserts a defined sense of self in acknowledgement of her pleasures, shortcomings, and range of varying emotions.

Varo’s 1960 painting Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (Figure 3) envisions what the experience of going to a therapist would look like. In this painting, a woman clad in a green cloak is seen leaving her psychologist’s office with a determined yet surreptitious visage. While part of her face remains concealed, she has removed her mask which now hangs at her neck. She holds a basket of trinkets in one hand and in the other, her father’s decapitated head which she is about to drop into the well. In an unpublished interview, Varo spoke about “dropping the father” within a context meant to challenge male surrealist authority.[17] She did so by overtly critiquing surrealist theory to create an alternative version of the movement that allows for women to contend for their creative independence.

This image confronts the surrealist fixation on hysteria, a mental state they originally thought to be only attributable to women which made them more capable of accessing their unconscious minds. Here, Varo upends the typical association by portraying what that agitation looks like from a woman’s perspective. The recurring consternation about the fear of being perceived as hysterical in her writings becomes an energizing source which ruptures the values that had previously suppressed surrealist women into a state of passivity. Varo addresses the issue directly in her painting wherein she interprets convulsive beauty, “Surrealism’s dedication to exhibiting disturbing upheavals in psychological coherence at the level of the individual mind or social body,” to mean a woman taking ownership of her sense of self during this psychological break by wryly tossing the head of an agitating authoritative male figure.[18] This moment of self-discovery burgeons into an act of resistance. The dignified visualization stands in stark contrast to the stereotypical portrayals of convulsive beauty by male surrealists that depict women experiencing hypersexualized moments of helpless mania.

The subject of Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst allegorizes the protagonist that Varo’s artistic universe centers around: the furtive, independent woman on a quest. Instrumentalized as an important mythmaking tool, her writings lay the groundwork for understanding the world from which these intrepid women emerge. In an untitled project for a theater piece, she wrote a scene in which a woman named Milagra wakes up in the middle of the night to a stranger applying lipstick at her boudoir. In what will become a signature setup, Varo develops intrigue by introducing the audience to the protagonist during a defining moment in her expedition. When the stranger notices the woman is awake in the reflection of the mirror, they adjure, “Go and see Randolph, tell him the following on my behalf: ‘wheat, olives, and oranges. Protect yourself from the cold with sheep’s wool.’”[19] Having been tasked with relaying this message, Milagra dutifully and valiantly begins on a frigid and dark journey to her teacher Randolph’s office.

Indicative of Varo’s pervasive sense of mischievous humor, a droll twist assuages the frightening break-in that opens the play. Milagra describes to Randolph the person she spoke with as a woman in her late forties with a mustache, inappropriately dressed for her age in a pleated short plaid skirt, sneakers, and ankle socks. In response, Randolph informs Milagra that due to her room being dimly lit she mistook his Scottish grandfather Frederic dressed in national garb for a scantily clad female stranger. As for the message delivered, Randolph knows exactly what it means, taking it as a prescriptive order to eat only wheat, olives, and oranges and to wear only wool for the next fifteen days as a means of protection against malicious people who are out to steal his energy. The scene’s happenstance nature with a plot that incorporates Varo’s mystical practices and beliefs in the spiritual qualities of everyday objects sets the parameters for her fictional anagogic world at large.

Varo’s texts put into words the auras captured within her paintings, interweaving the literary and the visual to comment and expand on each other. Varo’s previous mention of feeling compelled to live a “near clandestine life” characterizes the notion of deep mystery and fierce wonder conveyed in the expressions of her heroines. In the 1959 painting Exploring the Sources of the Orinoco River (Figure 4) an enigmatic lone adventurer traverses the foggy depths of the Orinoco River in a coral-colored sailboat. The woman radiates a sense of mystique dressed like a detective wearing a trench coat and a bowler hat that covers the top half of her face. Seated in three-quarter profile, her resolute gaze focuses straight ahead to the right corner of the canvas at an overflowing goblet which appears to be the main water source for the river. The playful shape of the boat, an aerodynamic basket that has pink wings for sails, undercuts the seriousness of her pursuit. The circumstances under which she has embarked on this journey or why she has done so by herself are unclear, which heightens the scene’s allure.

Varo’s most elaborate pictorial epic comes in the form of a triptych which comprises Towards the Tower (Figure 5) from 1960, Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (Figure 6) from 1961, and The Escape (Figure 7) also from 1961. The first painting in the series, Towards the Tower, takes place on a cold winter day with a cloudy sky overtaking the background. While six of the young women look straight at the path ahead, there is one at the center of the composition with eyes slightly askance who stares outside the pictorial plane. In a conversation with her partner Walter Gruen, Varo once said, “I imbibed Catholicism along with my mother’s milk. I should find answers by travelling down my own path, and by my own efforts.”[20] In this autobiographical work, the woman who deviously looks away represents Varo herself. In a clear rebuke of her Catholic upbringing and the authoritative control imposed on her by the monastic system, her distant look affirms her position as an outsider who intends to orchestrate an escape from the subordinate group to change course and seek freedom.

In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, the same group of women works in a studio late into the night, where the grey sky persists. The story’s heroine features prominently to the left of center, where she sneaks a glance over at her masked lover who stands in the center of the room while she embroiders his image onto the mantle. Embroidery, a craft traditionally seen as a domestic hobby taken up by docile women, becomes exalted into a laborious, metaphysical act of creation with the women all drawing from the same spool to bring the outside world to life. They impart their world view and knowledge into this alternative cosmology, wherein, a far cry from the surrealist “femme enfant,” Varo reimagines women as unfettered “femmes artistes,” magna maters of Surrealism who harness their domestic skills into creative powers that belong well within their domain as originators.

The Escape, the final painting in the triptych, captures the fearless heroine as she flees with her beloved accomplice on a furry, inverted umbrella-shaped boat. This peculiar vessel brings to mind Object (Figure 8,) a fur-lined teacup made in 1936 by the prolific artist Méret Oppenheim, a woman who adeptly pioneered the surrealist landscape with her groundbreaking work that came to be emblematic of the movement’s aesthetic. The undeniable allusion pays homage to one of the original surrealists who paved the way for future women in the movement, aligning Varo with the likes of Oppenheim as a historical successor in the surrealist canon. While the prospect of navigating the lava-like sea looks perilous, the inclusion of a reference to Object, a triumphant attestation to what can happen when one forges their own path, serves as a fitting talisman to transport the newly liberated protagonist as she sets sail on her voyage into the unknown.

The magic in these paintings stems in part from the protagonists’ knowing looks that activate the viewer, making one complicit in their journeys and privy to their secrets. The opportunity to read Varo’s texts reifies this sensation because the audience now categorically understands the fears and anxieties that kept her captive, and the desires that motivated her to escape. The characters all inhabit the same grey and sienna colored universe, a Borgesian space with uniformly medieval architecture blanketed by a perpetual fog. While the scenarios vary, they share the same implicit revulsions to groupthink and to societal expectations. There is an overarching desire for individual freedom that propels these impounded women to break away.

The effectiveness of Varo’s paintings to impart a consistent message also mirrored in her writings speaks to the strength of her storytelling capabilities. Art historian Estella Lauter posits in Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women that as a narrative form, “myth [is a] structure that mediates between language and the unknown…. [it is] part of an ongoing process of constructing a livable world instead of being records of a completed process.”[21] Varo upholds this mythical structure regardless of the medium because her female quester’s final form is always a woman still emerging rather than one who has already entirely actualized. Varo constructs a clearly defined myth throughout her oeuvre, both visual and literary, that seamlessly entwines the liminal junctures of the characters’ suspended narrative arcs. The lore of a tenacious woman on a journey of liberation translates coherently from writing to painting, from painting to painting, and from painting to writing because the myth serves as a fulcrum between the unspoken stories conveyed visually and the text from which these ideas germinate to reinforce the comprehensive legend of Varo’s artistic universe.

Varo’s writings not only sustain the myth of her fictional heroines but also establish her own myth of professional legacy. They provide a trove of archival material that chronicle her artistic practice and surrealist activities, cementing her status as a bona fide surrealist. In one letter, she details her painting process:

With great enthusiasm I was painting a canvas in which you could see a pleasant meadow, with cows and sheep serenely meandering around. I confess I felt satisfied with my painting, but lo and behold! an irresistible force suddenly compelled me to paint, on the back of each sheep, a small flight of stairs, at whose highest end was an image of the woman who lives across from me; on the cows I felt obligated to place, not without anguish, some well-folded handkerchiefs. You can imagine my surprise and dismay. I hid these paintings and began others, but I always found myself compelled to introduce strange elements into them…[22]

This fascinating first-hand account sheds light on how Varo’s aesthetic decisions organically devolve from carefully considered portrayals of realism into the frenzied nonsensical choices that ultimately give her works their surrealist flair. She describes the experience as an otherworldly psychosomatic event of which she had no control over, as if possessed by a higher power to unwillingly act against her rational judgment.

In doing so, Varo establishes the grounds for her work style to be known as one of manic genius, which perpetuates an enthralling artistic reputation and breaks sexist surrealist mores along the way. She attributes this artistic genius to herself, a bold declaration of self-determination given that male surrealists generally reserved this persona for themselves. In a letter to an unidentified painter, she furthers the perception of herself as a feverish painter when she writes, “Regarding the maniacal activity called Painting…what can I tell you? I don’t know if you’ve persisted in this odd form of perversion, I have, alas! and feel more and more ashamed of such great silliness.”[23] In writing to another artist, she asserts herself as an occupational peer to the letter’s recipient and reminds the reader that for her, painting is a crazed experience. She reappropriates the surrealist notion of female hysteria by channeling it through her own means of productive creative output instead of being depicted as passively afflicted by the condition as a forlorn muse to someone else’s work.

Readers also glean a vulnerable side of Varo the artist who cares deeply about her work yet suffers from debilitating shame and anxiety about her creative pursuits. Her recollection of the range of emotional responses she had throughout making the painting of cows and sheep candidly discloses the tumultuous relationship she had to her creative process. Her admission that she felt compelled to hide these works when she first added the unorthodox elements demonstrates the sense of guilt she constantly references in her letters, a self-doubt that impels her to approach her practice clandestinely, like a closely kept secret. In her self-deprecating letter to the unidentified painter, she belittles her work when she claims to be embarrassed by her continued pursuit of something as silly as painting. These anecdotes exemplify how Varo’s abstract feelings of ignominy, as manifested in the visual language of her paintings, took form in her daily life, rooted in the fear that her creations would be deemed too strange to be taken seriously. Despite her diffidence, these letters leave important historical records of the existence of her practice.  

Many of Varo’s writings can be interpreted as standalone surrealist texts, art forms in their own rights used as modes of interrogation meant to break through conventional thoughts and to question conceptions of identity. Two quintessential surrealist themes used to develop these probing ideas in Varo’s writings are ludic chance encounters and convulsive identity. She wrote one particularly impish letter to a stranger that encapsulates the sense of play surrealists applied to their everyday lives. In this letter, she tells the recipient that she selected their name at random from a phone book and invites them to attend her friend’s New Year’s Eve party. She provides her friend’s name and home address but warns the stranger that she has not told her friend about this invitation. She also does not disclose any personal information, telling the stranger if they decide to show up that they will have to guess who at the party invited them. Lastly, she makes it known she has sent this invitation to one other stranger selected at random from the phonebook.

The structural foundation and application of this letter relies entirely on the principle of chance encounter. It begins with the random selection of the people chosen to receive the letter, then proceeds to the uncertainty of whether they would even attend the party, and then lastly, if they did choose to attend, the determination of who in the crowd sent the letter in the first place. As art historian Susan Laxton notes, surrealist games, “shared two goals: to systematically disrupt the expectations of the players and to make that sensation of disruption and juxtaposition available to the widest possible range of people.”[24] Varo achieves this level of disorder in her self-proclaimed “psycho-humorous experiment” by challenging socially accepted party etiquette, wherein invitations are determined ahead of time, and turning it into a game of fate which ensures no predictable or repeatable outcomes.[25] This tension builds upon the surrealist interest which breaks with rational expectations of reality and gives credence to playfulness as a throughline of the movement.

Another implementation of surrealist praxis in Varo’s writings is the introspective exploration of the various identities found within oneself. In a letter written to someone named Dr. Alberca, Varo opens the correspondence from the perspective of herself as a professional artist, granting Dr. Alberca permission to use photographs and comments she has previously made about her works in one of his upcoming lectures. She then demonstrates another instance in which she takes on the administrative duties necessitated by her active studio in coordinating the dates she would be able to mail out the requested photographs to the doctor. At the end of the letter, she makes a point of signing it with her name, Remedios Varo.

In a curious follow up immediately beneath her signature, she then adds a second page which contains a new letter written from a version of herself presented as an anxious psychiatric patient. It reads:

After writing the attached letter…I’ve added this page, which you should regard as written by my double. It’s the first time I’ve written to a psychiatrist in an open and unmasked fashion, for I’ve already done so in a veiled and mysterious fashion three times, without getting any results…I signed the mysterious letters with the somewhat pretentious yet Machiavellian name of Gradiva…Naturally, all this written by my double, you can calmly ignore it, in the understanding that I know full well that you’re extremely busy…but don’t, just because I’ve dared to write you so boldly and freely, leave the matters of the photographs unanswered.[26]

There is a notable shift in tone between the confident and capable persona of Varo the artist who skillfully handles her business affairs that contrasts sharply with the frantic and helpless Varo the patient who desperately seeks medical attention. We know Varo inhabits both personas given she acknowledges when she writes as her double and explicitly delineates the conversations ascribed to each. In doing so, she participates in the surrealist examination of identity through depictions of disrupted, convulsed selves that unsettle notions of perceived subjectivity. This activity places Varo squarely in the company of fellow surrealists who were also questioning the self, as seen in “Marcel Duchamp’s alter-ego experiments, Claude Cahun’s self-portraits, the collage novels of Max Ernst…and the early short stories of Leonora Carrington.”[27]

The material application of Varo’s writings is twofold: to serve as sketches for her paintings and to archive the surrealist activities of her practice. Upon interpretation, it must be acknowledged that Varo did not intend for the public to read her work. However, an artist’s writings always beg the question of why they felt compelled to record certain details in the first place? Historically, artists have written letters to friends and colleagues as a method of informal record keeping. Whether Varo had her legacy in mind or not, her writings provide a palimpsest upon which to build the mythology of both her artistic universe and professional legacy.

Illustrations

Bibliography

Arcq, Tere. “In the Land of Convulsive Beauty: Mexico.” In In Wonderland: The Surrealist         Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, edited by Ilene Susan Fort      and Tere Arcq, 64-87. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012.

Arcq, Tere. “Mexico City.” In Surrealism Beyond Borders, by Stephanie D’Alessandro and          Matthew Gale, 92-101. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.

Belton, Robert J. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Surrealists’ Image of Women.” Woman’s Art Journal            8, no. 1 (1987): 8–12.

Chadwick, Whitney. “Masson’s Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth.” The Art        Bulletin 52, no. 4 (1970): 415–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/3048768.

Gruen, Walter. “Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch.” In Remedios Varo: Catálogo    Razonado, by Ricardo Ovalle, Walter Gruen, and Remedios Varo, 41-49. México, D.F.,           Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1994.

Lauter, Estella. Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women.      Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Kaplan, Janet. “Domestic Incantations: Subversion in the Kitchen.” In Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado, by Ricardo Ovalle, Walter Gruen, and Remedios Varo, 31-40. México, D.F.,           Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1994.

Kaplan, Janet A. Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys. Abbeville Press, 2000.

Laxton, Susan. “Play, Games and Chance.” In The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, edited    by Kirsten Strom, 20-27. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.

Nonaka, Masayo. Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years. 3rd ed. Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial    RM, 2020.

Parkinson, Gavin. “Convulsive Beauty and Mad Love.” In The Routledge Companion to   Surrealism, edited by Kirsten Strom, 37-45. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.

Varo, Remedios. Letters, Dreams & Other Writings. Translated by Margaret Carson. Cambridge,            MA: Wakefield Press, 2018.

Watz, Anna. “Identity convulsed: Leonora Carrington’s The House of Fear and The Oval Lady.” In Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration, 42-67. Manchester, UK:            Manchester University Press, 2020.

Endnotes

[1] Robert J. Belton, “Edgar Allan Poe and the Surrealists’ Image of Women,” Woman’s Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1987): 8.

[2] Remedios Varo, Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, trans. Margaret Carson (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2018), ix.

[3] Max Morise, “Les Yeux enchantés,” La Révolution surréaliste 1 (December 1, 1924): 27.

[4] Masayo Nonaka, Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years (3rd ed. Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial RM, 2020), 10.

[5] Ibid., 9.

[6] Tere Arcq, “Mexico City,” In Surrealism Beyond Borders, by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, 92-101 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 93.

[7] Masayo Nonaka, Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years (3rd ed. Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial RM, 2020), 9.

[8] Ibid., 12.

[9] Varo, Letters, Dreams, 4.

[10] Ibid., 19.

[11] Ibid., 23.

[12] Janet A. Kaplan, Remedios Varo: Unexpected Journeys (Abbeville Press, 2000), 82.

[13] Ibid., 95.

[14] Varo, Letters, Dreams, 21.

[15] Ibid., 19.

[16] Ibid., 15.

[17] Janet Kaplan, “Domestic Incantations: Subversion in the Kitchen,” in Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado, by Ricardo Ovalle, Walter Gruen, and Remedios Varo (México, D.F., Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1994), 34. 

[18] Gavin Parkinson, “Convulsive Beauty and Mad Love,” in The Routledge Companion to Surrealism. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023), 41.

[19] Varo, Letters, Dreams, 45.

[20] Walter Gruen, “Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch,” in Remedios Varo: Catálogo Razonado, by Ricardo Ovalle, Walter Gruen, and Remedios Varo (México, D.F., Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1994), 49.

[21] Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 3.

[22] Varo, Letters, Dreams, 18-19.

[23] Ibid., 12.

[24] Susan Laxton, “Play, Games and Chance,” in The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, ed. Kirsten Strom (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023), 24.

[25] Varo, Letters, Dreams, 17.

[26] Ibid., 15.

[27] Anna Watz, “Identity convulsed: Leonora Carrington’s The House of Fear and The Oval Lady,” in Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020), 42.

Author Bio

Tatiana Marcel is Assistant Curator of Art at Americas Society, and a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Department of Art History. She focuses on Latin American and Latinx art, with interests in performance, sculpture, and time-based media. Her writing has been published in the International Journal of Surrealism and Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art. Tatiana previously worked at David Zwirner, and holds an M.A. in the History of Art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and a B.A. in Art History and Anthropology from Columbia College, Columbia University.