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拍品專文
“I can see that my life—not only in material or emotional terms, but also my intellectual life—is there in the land I sincerely love with all its faults, shortcomings, and hardships,” Remedios Varo reflected of Mexico, her adopted country, in a letter to her last husband, Walter Gruen, in 1958 (quoted in “Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch” in The Magic of Remedios Varo, exh. cat., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 146). She had fled Europe at the end of 1941, following the German occupation of France, and like fellow émigrés Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Alice Rahon, she became enamored with the land that André Breton once called “the Surrealist place, par excellence.” In the decade before her arrival, Varo had established herself first among the avant-garde in Barcelona, creating cadavres exquis and joining the Logicofobistas, a quasi-Surrealist group, and then in Paris beginning in 1937. “My position was the timid and humble one of a listener,” she recalled of her entrée into the Surrealist circle. “I was not old enough nor did I have the aplomb to face up to them, to a Paul Élouard, a Benjamin Péret, or an André Breton. There I was with my mouth gaping open within this group of brilliant and gifted people” (quoted in J. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, pp. 55-56). Yet if she initially played the passive role of a femme-enfant, Varo soon emerged as a creative force within the movement, participating in its collaborative games (e.g., the Jeu de dessin communiqué) and its deep studies of esoterica and theories of the occult.
A preternatural skeleton of “Homo Rodans,” the fictitious wheeled predecessor of Homo sapiens that Varo describes in an accompanying manuscript, the present work exemplifies the fascination and mistrust with which she approached science and its narrative of human consciousness and evolution. Meticulously constructed from animal bones discarded after a dinner party, Homo Rodans assumes a hybrid humanoid form, its upright carriage implausibly supported by a single spoked wheel. Her pseudo-scientific manuscript De Homo Rodans, signed by the invented German anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, addresses itself with mock pomposity to the scholarly community, reporting on the improbable discovery of moles trained as archaeologists and on the origins of the “First Umbrella,” purportedly descended from the walking cane and the pterodactyl wing:
"This object, currently in the British Museum, gave rise to great controversies and a total of 32 essays have been written trying to clarify its nature and origin. All of them are wrong… The fact that the object was found surrounded by carbon 1⁄3 353 and no fewer than 50 lumbar bones, all belonging to the same individual, is not even mentioned. I think it is time to mention it…
"It is very natural that man, when he decided to walk on his two extremities, would help himself at first with canes. These canes were so important that their hidden transcendental desires were realized little by little since they constituted a third locomotive limb. But when their use was brusquely abandoned the majority [of the canes], attacked by violent frustration, remained petrified. Some, with a stronger transcendental capacity, abandoned the leg as a model and goal and rapidly found other ideals of movement and locomotion.
"The powerful wings of the Pterodactyl were the goal of many canes and so it was for the umbrellaed cane, which was found in Mesopotamia and which in reality was nothing else. The fact that it had continued to transcend beyond the Pterodactyl and had become the First Umbrella caused confusion and discord in the group of anthropologists who dealt with this object” (trans. in J. Caplan, op. cit., p. 213).
Elegantly housed in a glass vitrine, Homo Rodans parodies anthropological museum displays and pontifical pronouncements, warning against what Varo saw as “manipulative abuses of authority, myopic belief in facts, infatuation with gadgetry, and misguided attempts to conquer nature,” as art historian Janet Kaplan explains. “Despite her sarcastic tone in De Homo Rodans, Varo felt that science needed the softening and humanizing that myth, poetry, and the arts could offer” (op. cit., p. 144 and 172). The sole surviving sculpture that Varo created, Homo Rodans belongs within the pantheon of Surrealist objects alongside such works as Man Ray’s flat iron spiked with nails (Cadeau, 1921), Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and saucer (Object, 1936), and Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1938).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
A preternatural skeleton of “Homo Rodans,” the fictitious wheeled predecessor of Homo sapiens that Varo describes in an accompanying manuscript, the present work exemplifies the fascination and mistrust with which she approached science and its narrative of human consciousness and evolution. Meticulously constructed from animal bones discarded after a dinner party, Homo Rodans assumes a hybrid humanoid form, its upright carriage implausibly supported by a single spoked wheel. Her pseudo-scientific manuscript De Homo Rodans, signed by the invented German anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, addresses itself with mock pomposity to the scholarly community, reporting on the improbable discovery of moles trained as archaeologists and on the origins of the “First Umbrella,” purportedly descended from the walking cane and the pterodactyl wing:
"This object, currently in the British Museum, gave rise to great controversies and a total of 32 essays have been written trying to clarify its nature and origin. All of them are wrong… The fact that the object was found surrounded by carbon 1⁄3 353 and no fewer than 50 lumbar bones, all belonging to the same individual, is not even mentioned. I think it is time to mention it…
"It is very natural that man, when he decided to walk on his two extremities, would help himself at first with canes. These canes were so important that their hidden transcendental desires were realized little by little since they constituted a third locomotive limb. But when their use was brusquely abandoned the majority [of the canes], attacked by violent frustration, remained petrified. Some, with a stronger transcendental capacity, abandoned the leg as a model and goal and rapidly found other ideals of movement and locomotion.
"The powerful wings of the Pterodactyl were the goal of many canes and so it was for the umbrellaed cane, which was found in Mesopotamia and which in reality was nothing else. The fact that it had continued to transcend beyond the Pterodactyl and had become the First Umbrella caused confusion and discord in the group of anthropologists who dealt with this object” (trans. in J. Caplan, op. cit., p. 213).
Elegantly housed in a glass vitrine, Homo Rodans parodies anthropological museum displays and pontifical pronouncements, warning against what Varo saw as “manipulative abuses of authority, myopic belief in facts, infatuation with gadgetry, and misguided attempts to conquer nature,” as art historian Janet Kaplan explains. “Despite her sarcastic tone in De Homo Rodans, Varo felt that science needed the softening and humanizing that myth, poetry, and the arts could offer” (op. cit., p. 144 and 172). The sole surviving sculpture that Varo created, Homo Rodans belongs within the pantheon of Surrealist objects alongside such works as Man Ray’s flat iron spiked with nails (Cadeau, 1921), Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and saucer (Object, 1936), and Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone (1938).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park