My thesis investigates an interdisciplinary narrative of the transatlantic migration of Surrealism to Mexico during the 1940s. I focus on the ways exiled European Surrealists approached notions of Mexican material culture in a hybrid society where local traditions coexisted with a global modernity. Looking to popular and print culture outlets, I concentrate on how Mexican material culture was perceived, promoted, and marketed through a Surrealist lens. Specifically, I consider the collaboration of the German pharmaceutical company Casa Bayer, S.A. and exiled Spanish-born Surrealist Remedios Varo, who produced a series of medical advertisements during her first decade in Mexico City from 1943 to 1949. Through an examination of Varo’s work, my thesis explores the changing boundaries of fine and commercial art that resulted from the efforts of artists who participated in modern mass culture and consumerism. I investigate the significance of her Surrealist advertisements for Casa Bayer as a material culture bound on one side with fine art and the other side with the development of Mexican advertising. This case study supports my argument that Surrealism, as a transnational aesthetic, was one alternative way of demonstrating the new cultural meanings of advertising in an ambiguous, modern Mexican society. Examining Varo’s illustrations in light of the movement of western Europeans to Mexico and the country’s commitment to modern progress explains why the artist negotiated her past avant-garde sensibilities with her Mexican present. / Art History

During the first half of the 20th century, several members of the Western surrealist movement traveled to Mexico with the intention of experiencing Mexican culture and gaining knowledge about the rituals and traditions of the Mexican indigenous population. They sought life experiences that could influence and confirm the surrealist’s ideological convictions. They wanted to internationalize their artistic movement by including successful Mexican artists. The ideology of Western surrealism connects ideas and practices from the human subconscious to situations of reality, where the subconscious is portrayed as a pure form of truth. The perception of reality positions it as the opposite of the dream. The dreamlike, irrational aspects depicted in the human subconscious become, according to logic, another version of reality and truth. The surrealist ideology identified with Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, which positions and portrays women in traditional gender roles in the history of arts, where femininity and the woman are seen as biased to male creativity. In works produced by male surrealists, there is an overrepresentation of sexualizing, idealizing and projecting erotic desires onto the female body.  This thesis aims to investigate how the artists Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning, who themselves identified with the surrealist movement, relate to the construction of femininity and the role of women within surrealism and society. The analysis is based on a selection of reproduced works by Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning where themes of marriage, motherhood and sexuality is explored. These three themes serve as points of reference for a feminist theoretical framework in a visual analysis. The results of the analysis serve as a starting point for a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences that arise between the visual languages of the artists from a transnational perspective. By examining the relationship between the Western surrealist movement and Mexico's art and cultural scene during the first half of the 20th century, the movement's social and political ideas are discussed in relation to Mexico's national and cultural traditions, with the intention of providing insight into the role of women in surrealism and society.  The result of the analysis indicates that Varo and Tanning oppose the idea of how surrealism portrayed femininity. Instead, they created an independent idea of femininity and identity in relation to surrealism's ideology of the subconscious, mystical, and dreamlike. This means that the representation of femininity in the works serves as a statement against surrealism's idea of the female artist, by emphasizing their artistic ideas and visual language. The analysis provides an understanding of how hybrid identities guide navigation in relation to multiple cultural identities, artistic practices, and challenge assumptions about nationality, gender roles, and artistic cultural belonging. From a theoretical perspective of transnational feminism, the results of the analysis are discussed in terms of how cultural hegemony and postcolonial factors affect cross-cultural artistic encounters and how the rolls of gender and female artists are shaped by patriarchal structures that transcend national borders.

This dissertation explores the presence and meaning of astronomical elements in the creative work of Surrealist artists and writers who were involved with the movement from the 1920s to the 1940s. Set against a backdrop of widespread popular interest in astronomy in France during these decades and those directly preceding them, Surrealists such as André Breton, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Wolfgang Paalen, Oscar Domínguez, Matta, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Kurt Seligmann all addressed cosmic themes in their artistic production. This dissertation identifies and analyzes their varied engagement with such themes, including their presence in the related areas of astrology and the Tarot. The heavens offered the Surrealists a rich terrain for invention—one that could be seen as scientific or occult, fanciful or factual, as well as ancient or up-to-date. In their quest to access previously unknown realms of reality, the Surrealists found in the little-explored and often strange territory of outer space a new realm for creative invention. As such, these artists and writers projected their surreal visions onto the universe in their continued search for the marvelous. / text