Without a trace of hesitation or compunction, she drops a male disembodied head (Varo’s father’s? or, more likely, Péret’s?) down a well, which, Varo wrote, was ‘the proper thing to do when leaving the psychoanalyst’. The woman is shrouded in a garment, which contains within it a mask, but her face is partly uncovered. Varo uses the various associations of the veil to invoke seduction (Salome) and the idea of stripping to reach psychological or metaphysical truths. In Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst Varo cloaks the pseudo-science of psychoanalysis in a medieval setting, with the initials of its three fathers inscribed on the portal behind the central figure, ‘FJA’ standing for Freud, Jung and Adler.

They separated and Péret returned to Paris in 1947. There I was with my mouth gaping open within this group of brilliant and gifted people.’ During the Nazi occupation of France she and Péret escaped to Mexico, where they were active in the surrealist community that included Leonora Carrington and the poet Octavio Paz. My position was the timid and humble one of a listener I was not old enough nor did I have the aplomb to face up to them, to a Paul Eluard, a Benjamin Péret, or an André Breton.

In a later interview she recalled, ‘Yes, I attended those meetings where they talked a lot and one learned various things. She went with him to Paris where from 1937 to 1942 they were both members of the surrealist group. Often known, like many surrealist women painters, simply by her first name, Remedios Varo met the surrealist Benjamin Péret in Madrid in 1936.

Janet jaime iconographer