unexpected journeys the art and life of remedios varo

Kaplan seeks to give us the larger picture, placing her subject in the context of the cultural and political realities of mid–20th-century Europe. Now, in Unexpected Journeys, the first full-scale critical biography, Janet A.

Varo’s life and work, including paintings and writings, were first brought to North American attention in Whitney Chadwick’s Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, 1985. The Parisian movement, centered on an irrational female Other, attracted a group of women who were de facto others-foreigners: Leonora Carrington and Eileen Agar from England Lee Miller, Kay Sage, and Dorothea Tanning from the United States Meret Oppenheim from Switzerland Toyen from Czechoslovakia and, from Spain, Remedios Varo. Yet the visual, formal, and imaginative permissions of Surrealism, and its sexual and erotic obsessions with Woman, opened a door for women artists. As in the movie Tootsie, in which the best woman is a man, or in Jacques Derrida’s privileging of the feminine position of the reader so long as femininity is not specifically ensconced in a female body, the best madwoman was a sane male Surrealist artist. But this Ophelia unbound took flight only through her impersonation by male artists who, while they valued imagination, could not imagine female subjectivity. SURREALISM, A MOVEMENT THAT valorized a “feminine” position while at the same time defining this position in traditional terms as irrational and unconscious, gave us Woman as no-longer-placid muse.

Unexpected journeys the art and life of remedios varo