Remedios Varo

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo Dudes and Dudeens,

                 Once again it is I, with a word to the wiseguy.  With a 
friend, I went to the National Museum for Women In The Arts in Washington 
D.C. over this weekend past.  It was amazing.  I can't be too enthusiastic or 
you would think my praise comes so easily I must have no discerning taste.  
Of course there are some who might say that Remedios Varo has her faults, and 
dwell on those, to which I might answer, "There's no accounting for taste."  
But to my tired old eyes, the exhibit was refreshing eyedrops, the kind that 
get the allergic red out. There are no tape recorded lectures to carry 
around, but they do have a series of informative docents.  I won't go to any 
extreme, like saying she was "the greatest" this or that, or had a seminal 
influence on the young Pynchon; but I will say, the exhibit had a very large 
number of her paintings, and such retrospective exhibits only appear every 
ten or twenty years.  So if you are at all interested, and you live near the 
East Coast, move your butt through space and check it out, soon.  It's worth 
the trip, and it's free.  The exhibit will close at the end of the month of 
May.  After that, only grizzled veterans with experience in the tropics go to 
D.C. anyway.  I might suggest that Varo's work ties in to what Eddins calls 
Pynchon's "Orphic Natrualism," but that might begin a whole other thread.  So 
I'll retract that.  Maybe Paul or Henry, or other intrepid Washingtonians, 
can comment on the exhibit.  I will say, Varo fled the Spanish Civil War and 
went to Paris in 1936 where she hung out with the Dadaists and Surrealists; 
and she fled World War II in 1940, settling in Mexico City until her death in 
1963.  She was a political exile, a category that TRP finds interesting, and 
examples of which TRP mentions or alludes to throughout his oeuvre.  But the 
jury is instructed to disregard the last remarks.  Besides, what do I know?  
I'm only...

                Max