Elizabeth Leavy Stroman - The Art and Life of Jean Varda

In this first full-length biography, Elizabeth Leavy Stroman vividly brings the forgotten life of Jean Varda  back into the light. Jean Varda was a legendary iconoclast in the 20th century art world, first in Europe, then in the United States. Varda was acclaimed for his byzantine-cubist mosaics fashioned from broken glass, mirrors,crockery, and his colorful collages. He was acknowledged as a teacher, a raconteur, and a man of infinite charm and wit. Stroman takes the reader from Varda’s birthplace in the ancient Ottoman Empire to France and England, where he was at the forefront of the modernist movement, consorting with Braque, Picasso and writers like Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, and many others. Lavishly illustrated with reproductions of Varda's colorful collages, The Art and Life of Jean Varda tells the story of a legendary artist, and bohemian, whose old ferryboat, the Vallejo, was the center of the mid-twentieth-century Sausalito artists’ scene.

Elizabeth Leavy Stroman is the author of A Place of Innocent Recreations: History of the Sausalito Library. She has been an editor and writer for the Sausalito Historical Society and an occasional contributor to The Marin Scope. A past president of the Sausalito Library Board and a retired attorney, she lives with her husband in Sausalito, California.

Location: 

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925