In A Visit to the Plastic Surgeon, an ethereal female figure in a rippling silver dress, her long peaked nose cloaked in a gossamer drape, furtively rings the doorbell of a plastic surgeon’s office. This fortress-like gothic edifice boasts a department store-style window, where a voluptuous mannequin boasting three cascading sets of breasts and shimmering golden locks gazes pensively at the woman. On the window, the doctor advertises: “We surpass nature! In our glorious plastic-nylon era there are no limits / boldness / good taste / elegance and turgidity / is our motto. We speak French.” Painted with the unparalleled technical rigor for which she is celebrated, from the lush decalomania facade of the office to the astonishingly fine details of the woman’s glittering drapery, A Visit to the Plastic Surgeon is not only an embodiment of the best of Varo’s skill, but an icon of her oeuvre. One of her most explicitly political paintings, it contains a dense network of references that range from ancient mythology to contemporary feminism—intricately intertwined with the artist’s biography and ambivalent relationship to her own body.

Born in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century, Remedios Varo’s early childhood was spent in the rigorous environment of a convent school, where her early rebellions ranged from collecting magical plants to conducting a long-distance correspondence with a Hindu cleric. Her prodigious artistic skill, fostered in great part by her architect father, led the artist to Madrid on a scholarship at the prestigious Academia San Fernando. The influences absorbed during these years proved critical in her later painting; the fantastical imagery, dark whimsy and unparalleled fineness of Bosch and Goya’s masterpieces in the Prado, as well as the occult fascinations of the burgeoning Spanish Surrealist movement (in particular her fellow pupil Salvador Dalí), called to Varo. Swept up amongst the Spanish Surrealists and the Republican resistance during the Spanish Civil War, she met the poet Benjamin Péret, who would be one of the great loves of her life. Shortly thereafter in 1936, both were exiled to Paris, where Péret brought Varo into the inner circle of the Parisian Surrealists—however, after a brief and traumatic period in occupied France, the couple found themselves in exile once again. Unable to flee to New York with the majority of the group due to Péret’s Communist sympathies, the couple finally landed in Mexico City in 1941. As Varo turned her focus to writing and sought work as a commercial artist to support the couple, they became immersed in the vibrant, motley community of European exiles in Mexico.

Varo’s arrival in Mexico was marked by the birth of a lifelong friendship with fellow Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who shared her passions for the occult, for Old Master painting, and, critically, her belief in the alchemical power of women—all in the context of an artistic movement that sought at once to idealize and marginalize them. Janet Kaplan describes “Carrington, recently released from a Spanish asylum, and Varo, not long out of French detention, built a strong emotional and spiritual connection based on a deep sense of mutual trust, a sense that the pain and despair each had known would be understood by the other. Varo thought herself an eccentric that others couldn’t understand and looked to Carrington as a soul mate who would need no explanations, an ally who would not try to explain away her anxieties with facile logic or undermine her visions with common sense” (Janet Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, New York, 1988, p. 93). Both began writing furiously; freed from the rigid gender roles and orthodoxy of Parisian Surrealism, they engaged in increasingly witty and fantastical Surrealist cooking and games. In the respective bodies of work that ensued, each artist examined the role of women in society and in the telling of history, often reclaiming the narratives of maligned female figures and championing domestic crafts like cooking as loci of generative, alchemical power. With a uniquely wicked sense of humor and incisive darkness, Varo’s examinations of these themes often turned autobiographical. In A Visit to the Plastic Surgeon, Varo’s wit and complex matrix of influences converge in a strikingly contemporary meditation on the consumption and ownership of womens’ bodies—and the mutability of the self.

Explaining the origins of A Visit to the Plastic Surgeon, Dr. Jaime Asch, “a Mexican plastic surgeon for whom this parody was painted, remembers endless discussions, only half in jest, in which Varo worried about the length of her nose and debated the potential benefits of cosmetic surgery” (ibid., p. 185). Varo executed the work in 1960, just as innovations in the field of plastic surgery achieved as a result of the two World Wars began to reach consumer audiences—and as the appearance-focused consumer culture of the 1950s in the Americas reached an apex. Here, Varo examines the anxieties and moral dilemmas of her age through her own idiosyncratic visual language, filled with dry humor and incandescent imagery. Characteristic of much of Varo’s oeuvre, the work is imbued with a deep ambivalence—in this instance towards plastic surgery as, on the one hand, a creative avenue to an ideal self, a re-invention—or on the other as an acquiescence to a sinister, institutional authority.

This is most clearly demonstrated in the tension between the two main characters. The language of scientific achievement, which occurs throughout her oeuvre as a symbol of hope and human advancement, appears in bad faith - promising to surpass nature, the surgeon offers up a monstrosity. This many-breasted figure recalls Artemis of Ephesus, an incarnation of the Greek goddess of virginity and the hunt that evokes fertility through her abundant breasts. Here, the ancient icon of fecundity and power is transformed into a sleek, voluptuous floor model—whose shimmering locks and immobility (as she lacks hands and feet) indicate she is designed as an object for pure consumption. The psychological presence of her gaze towards the heroine, however, betrays her consciousness and subjectivity—rendering her objectification all the more unsettling. The furtive entry of the heroine and her billowing cloak may reveal then not only a desire to conceal the appendage in question—but also a shame in pursuing this consumption-driven ideal. While in Varo’s work the transformation of the body often portends exploration or creativity, here the artist wrestles with the tension between the creative possibility for self-determination offered by plastic surgery, and resistance towards the impulse to conform.

Like many European and North American artists of her moment, Varo approaches this conflict through the language of advertising. A few years later in her series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966-72), Martha Rosler wrestled with the imagery of female objectification in advertising culture of the midcentury, using photomontage to examine the external pressures, expectations, and fantasies projected upon women by drawing attention to the way they are packaged and exposed for consumption. These disquieting images evoke the earlier photomontages of Dada artist Hannah Hoch, whose images of fragmented female bodies combine early twentieth-century advertisements with ancient sculptures in museum collections to assert they are consumed in the same manner—as objects. Like Varo, both artists raised a concern about the use of scientific advancement and technology to further entrap those already on the margins of society—housewives are entangled by vacuum cleaners; models apply increasingly futuristic makeup.

However, as shared by Dr. Asch, Varo’s examination of plastic surgery goes beyond this gendered aspect, and was undergirded by genuine interest in it. Just one year later in 1961, Andy Warhol examines the same aquiline nose that Varo contemplated adjusting in his iconic series Before and After, based on a nose-job ad that ran in the National Enquirer. Like Varo, Warhol fixated on his nose, but unlike her he did attempt to alter it—to mixed results that only fueled his complex. In the wake of World War II, the racial coding of this hooked nose as Jewish cannot be ignored; Warhol zeroes in on its presentation as the undesirable opposite of the desirable Anglo-Saxon nose, which represents entry to a higher socio-economic class, success in addition to beauty. In Varo’s image however, the heroine’s nose is not hooked, but beaklike, pointed—more like that of Pinocchio. The winking humor of this bit of resonance is pure characteristic Varo—a deep believer in the importance of balance and harmony, she never presents darkness without wit - or vice versa.

One of the most explicitly autobiographical and pointedly political works in Varo’s oeuvre, A Visit to the Plastic Surgeon is remarkable not only as a tour-de-force of technical prowess but as an incisive reflection on womens’ relationship with their bodily autonomy in the mid-century.