Named Remedios, meaning remedy, to heal her parents' grief over a dead sister, and later shaving five years off her own age to fit a male-dominated art world, this painter built one of the most precisely engineered imaginations of the twentieth century. This episode traces Remedios Varo from a Catholic convent school and her hydraulic engineer father's mechanical diagrams to the Madrid academy, the bohemian cafes of 1930s Barcelona, and the surrealist circle of Paris.

We follow her through the Spanish Civil War, poverty so severe she forged de Chirico paintings for food, imprisonment in France, a documentary screening in which she spotted her estranged husband in an internment camp and bribed his way out, escape via Varian Fry's rescue committee, and arrival in Mexico City in 1941. There, alongside Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna, she stu ...