Wolfgang Paalen

Portrait of Wolfgang Paalen, Mexico, around 1940

Wolfgang Paalen (born July 22, 1905 in Vienna , † September 24, 1959 in Taxco , Mexico) was an Austro-Mexican painter, sculptor and art theorist.

After his membership in the Parisian group Abstraction-Création from 1934–1935, he joined the surrealists around André Breton in 1935 and subsequently played an outstanding role as a painter and source of ideas. During his exile in Mexico from 1939 he published the art magazine Dyn , with which he criticized the unconditionally subjectivist, Freudo-Marxist stance of Surrealism and countered it with a well-founded philosophy of contingency . During his stay in Paris from 1951 to 1954 he reconciled with Breton and worked again in his circle until his return to Mexico, where he committed suicide in 1959 due to his bipolar disposition.

Family and childhood

Entrance to Paalen's birthplace, Köstlergasse 1, Vienna

Castle of the Paalen family in Sagan, residence from 1913–1934

Wolfgang Paalen was born in Vienna in 1905 as the first of four sons of the Austrian-Jewish wholesale merchant and inventor Gustav Robert Paalen and his German wife, the actress Clothilde Emilie Gunkel . The house where he was born is one of Otto Wagner's famous Wienzeilenhäuser at Linke Wienzeile No. 40 / Köstlergasse 1. His father had Polish Ashkenazi and Spanish Sephardi as ancestors, converted to Protestantism in 1900 and had his original name changed from Pollak to Paalen. He owed his considerable fortune to trade and the development of modern inventions and patents, such as a. the vacuum cleaner , the thermos and the first instantaneous water heater (for Junkers ). In a relatively short time Gustav Paalen rose to the upper middle class in Vienna of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and was active as a patron and collector of old master paintings; he called u. a. Masterpieces such as Francisco Goya's portrait Señora Sabasa Garcia his own, which he acquired from the Berlin patron James Simon . It is now one of the highlights of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. As a friend of Wilhelm von Bode and member of the Friends of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, he organized and funded the purchase of the famous Titian -image Venus with the Organist (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie).

Wolfgang Paalen spent the first few years in Vienna and Tobelbad in Styria, where his father bought and restored the legendary spa hotel. It was opened in 1910 with the unveiling of a monument donated by Paalen to Emperor Franz Joseph I , which can still be seen today. In Tobelbad, Paalen sen. prominent guests such as Gustav Mahler , the poet and artist Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando , Julius Meier-Graefe and Ida Zweig (the mother of Stefan Zweig ). It was also Paalen who introduced Alma Mahler to Walter Gropius in 1910 . In 1912 the family moved to the Silesian town of Sagan , where their father bought a castle, the St. Rochusburg , and had it extensively rebuilt. During the First World War , Paalen sen. in the food supply for both kingdoms, the German and Austrian, and worked closely with Walter Rathenau's central purchasing company.

Early Teachers and the Fall of the Family

Wolfgang Paalen attended elementary school and the humanistic grammar school (Latin school) in the renaissance part of the city of Sagan built by Wallenstein before the family hired Georg Lubrich as a private teacher during the war, who also worked as an organist in the Sagan church and composer. In addition to Latin, philosophy and cosmology, he introduced Paalen to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his affinity for ghost and clairvoyance. In autobiographical reports, he links his childhood in his parents' castle in Sagan with a hallucinative awakening experience, which served him in 1938, at the height of his surrealist time, as the justification for his idea of ​​inseparable entanglement of perception and the objective world: “I think of the fairy magic, the one took place at night in my childhood. Between a single autumn sunset and sunrise, an astonishing procession of innumerable processions of nuns had devastated the entire forest. All the trees between the Sunga house and the hill where the neighboring castle rose - then suddenly and for the first time appeared over the skeleton of the forest in the morning daze. We rubbed our eyes; it was really and truly there like one of those castles that conjure up in the whim of an evil prince touching his cloth. The whole of Silvanian nature held its breath, deceptively disarmed, silently and as if transformed into opaque glass; only the icy pine needles crunched under our steps. The first gust made us tremble, on the lips of the north wind the whole forest sounded like a crystal glass. “If man can bring things to appearance by means of his imagination, they must be contingent, ie. H. to be latently present in reality - that is one of the fundamental insights of the young Paalen, which he should deepen comprehensively through Surrealism, but also defend against himself: Perception not only projects purely subjective content, but links the sighted with a kind of trans-dimensional Continuum of possibilities. During the war years, Paalen also dealt intensively with the poetic works of German Romanticism , the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the Indian Vedas , in which similar counter-subjectivist perspectives appear.

In 1919 the family moved to Rome , where Paalen began sporadic lessons with Leo von König , which he continued in Berlin after his return in 1924. In Rome, the Prague archaeologist Ludwig Pollak introduced him to Greek and Roman archeology and the secrets of the Laocoon and the Laocoon group , whose lost arm Pollak had found and bequeathed to the Vatican. Back in Berlin he came into contact with Julius Meier-Graefe . He made an unsuccessful attempt at admission to the art academy, met his future patron Eva Sulzer and the Swiss painter Serge Brignoni , and undertook private studies in aesthetics and Max Wertheimer's Gestalt theory , which confronted him for the first time with approaches of a (shape-theoretical) holism . In 1925 he exhibited in the Berlin Secession . After a year in France ( Paris and Cassis ), during which he came into contact with Roland Penrose , Jean Varda and Georges Braque , he attended Hans Hofmann's art school in Munich and Saint Tropez in 1927/28 . Then he stayed in La Ciotat and Paris. 1928 also marked the beginning of the family's decline. The family, which was once built on the patriarchal principles of the Austrian monarchy, broke up as a result of the unexpected death of one of the younger brothers, who was probably killed by suicide after an unhappy homoerotic relationship with a spiritual healer in a Berlin mental hospital; As a result, the parents separated, the mother increasingly suffered from her bipolar disposition, and the father's fortune was consumed after Black Friday 1929. Another tragedy occurred in the library of Sagan Castle in 1932: Wolfgang had to watch his next brother Rainer shoot himself with a pistol. Although he survived the suicide attempt, he suffered severe trauma all his life, which intensified his bipolar disposition. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he fled barefoot and wearing only a shirt on foot from Berlin to Prague, where he worked as a clairvoyant and converted to Catholicism. He died presumably of euthanasia in a Czechoslovak mental hospital in 1942. Rainer's fate preoccupied Wolfgang Paalen throughout his life and is probably one of the reasons for the emphatically enlightening and anti-theological orientation of his research within Surrealism on the complex of religious feelings and their depth psychological significance both for human life and for the work of art.

Paris and surrealism

Wolfgang Paalen in his studio apartment in Paris, rue Pernety, around 1933

Forbidden Land ( Pays interdit ), 1936

The Strangers ( Les étrangers ), 1937

Paalen studied for a short time with Fernand Léger and in 1933 became a member of the Abstraction-Création group . He left the group in 1935 together with Hans Arp and Jean Hélion . His work of this period is u. a. inspired by Paul Valéry's Eupalinos and tries to soften and poetize the rigid pictorial rules of the abstract hardliners Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo . The results can be seen as a kind of language game: to test the point up to which concrete forms can be withdrawn into latency in order to trigger a variety of meanings in the viewer's imagination before they become meaningless and tension-free. In a certain way, with this research on the potential value of the objective , Paalen is already taking attempts at concrete abstraction, such as B. Mark Rothko's Multiforms (1946–1948) and similar language games in Archile Gorky's early work (1936–1939). Already here it is indicated that Paalen was less interested in the unconscious as a largely subjective reservoir of libidinal desires than as a gateway to a mysterious, encapsulated realm of unlimited possibilities that puts the subject in correspondence with the universal. In 1934 he married the French hat designer and poet Alice Phillipot ( Alice Rahon ) and became close friends with Roland Penrose and his wife Valentine Boué , who brought the Paalens into contact with Paul Éluard . In the summer of 1935 he spent some time in the castle of the surrealist patron Lise Deharmes, where he met André Breton . With Breton and Penrose he took part in the organization of the Exposition surréaliste d'objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery and the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries (from June 11 to July 4, 1936) in London, where he attended his First Fumage presented (Dictated by a Candle). In 1936 he showed his pictures to the newly acquired Parisian public in a solo exhibition at the Pierre Loeb Gallery . Contact with Breton deepened during this time, and although he criticized the materialistic and occult tendencies of the surrealist ideology, which in his view diverged, early on, Breton protected him as the last of the German romantics . Paalen first met Marcel Duchamp during the design work for Breton's Gradiva Gallery , where he sold his Chaise envahie de lierre to the patron Marie-Laure de Noailles , who then presented it in the bathroom of her Paris city palace on Place des Etats Unis.

Fumage and first masterpieces

Paalen's Fumage pictures, begun with candle smoke and then executed in oil, which he painted in Paris in 1936 and 37, revolve around his original theme of the hallucinative perception experience (" the hallucinatory certainties that let me live ") and the thematic separation of realities from the world of fairy mythology, totemism, the cult of the mother goddess and the fear-driven epiphany. This series of images began with a long-lasting affair between Pablo Picasso and Alice, which led to a pregnancy and an abortion. The deep crisis of the couple and Paalen's serious depression led to a brilliant creative frenzy, the first result of which is also his first surrealist masterpiece: Pays interdit (Forbidden Land), 1936–1937, an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female deity and falling , meteor-like planets. Pays interdit is also the first oil painting in which the fumage is artfully incorporated into the extremely finely executed crystalline structures of the lower part. “On the one hand, he presents his inner being through this image of the soul as permeable, the appearance of the Cycladic-looking fairy queen takes place in a crystalline, fanned out flora, onto which everything breaks in and through like falling, even striking planets.” Perception even bridges the separation to the cosmic one Level: Even the most distant asteroid has the status of a soul phenomenon, as a glass ball becomes a symbol for the extended inner position of its field of vision, which André Breton tells us about in the face of Pays interdit : "Perhaps, yes, it is definitely a temptation of the eye for our time, To put oneself in that ideal stage of creation in which the butterflies formed a single band to be cut off, in which the birds all together started a single musical spiral, since the fish swam around undivided inside a silver boat. (...) Windows, as blind as the lamps of night thieves, children see the colors that curve around a soap bubble - unfortunately they only open from the inside. But it is Paalen's merit to have penetrated so far that he was able to see from inside the soap bubble and let us see the world from there. ”Breton defended himself over the entire period of the last Parisian years before the outbreak of war and the dispersal of the Surrealists With these and similar words Paalen's special conception of a truly undivided world, whose contradiction to the ideology of Freudo-Marxism that predominates in surrealism only leads to open conflict during the years of exile.

International Surrealism Exhibition Paris 1938 and Surrealist Objects

The second version of Nuage articulé , executed for the International Surrealism Exhibition in Mexico City in the Galería de Arte Mexicano , 1940

Le genie de l'espèce
Wolfgang Paalen , 1938
Poultry bones, wooden box for dueling pistol
Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

The further development in Paalen's work consistently continues the holistic idea of ​​a biological-evolutionary-physical-cosmological continuum in which the human organism unfolds. For him, the visual connecting elements of the disintegrating realities are the emotional similarities and deep correspondences, which he makes the subject above all in his objects. In contrast to the classic surrealist object, in which the incompatibility and the consciously senseless falling apart of meanings is celebrated as a puzzle, Paalen tries to bring hidden connections to life in the seemingly opposite.

“(...) In the oldest language, as in the origin of all thought, there is no juxtaposition of opposites, but (due to the absence of an abstract concept of exclusive meaning) only a concept of correspondences; that is, a concept that results from the inability to formulate a concept without its equivalent, an equivalent that later evolved into an opposite. (...) In fact, through the concept of its existence, no real thing can be conceived as opposed to another; if not, what would be the opposite of an apple, for example? "

Together with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dali, Paalen was among the responsible designers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in the Beaux-Arts gallery in Paris in 1937/1938 . He installs a real water lily pond, called Avant la mare , with reeds, water lilies, ivy and water in a fold in the floor filled with plastic cloth and leaves the entire floor of the exhibition rooms, inspired by his own work Le sol de la forêt from 1933, with wet Covering foliage and damp earth from the Montparnasse cemetery . The doll that Paalen decorated and Man Ray , Denise Bellon et al. a. captured in the photo, with their silk scarf, the huge bat over their head and the gruesome, mushroom-covered leaf dress, looks like one of the barely visible, floating totemic fairy creatures from his pictures painted with fumage and oil, which he in May of the same year Surrealist gallery Renou et Colle showed. André Breton , traveling to Mexico himself, sent a text to the exhibition from Bermudas that began with the words: “A lattice gate turns, this is the realm of Paalen. The great poplar avenue of his interior leads into the abyss of childhood with the images of fear ”, and thus aimed at the core of the emotion, with which Paalen amid the prevailing context of erotic projections about the role of fear as a gateway to the world of units of emotional similarities , in which, in his opinion, the divisions between realities have been abolished, wanted to open a new chapter in the research surréaliste. Paalen also took part in the preparation of the catalog book Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme , in which his most important and best-known object Nuage articulé was discreetly announced as a drawing. Recent research has shown that Paalen had a tremendous influence on the design of the main hall in the exhibition, with some historians suggesting that the entire installation, including Duchamp's blanket covered with empty coal sacks, on the one hand expresses the threatened situation of surrealism in itself, reflected in the immediate threat of war, but also a kind of oversized uterus as a vademecum against the deeper reasons for the crisis that lay in the paternalistic fixations of the entire epoch. Paalen's biographer Andreas Neufert in particular takes the latter reading and sees the installation as a symptom of an ideological shift within surrealism, away from Sigmund Freud's rigid theory of the Oedipus complex and towards ideas around Otto Rank's theory of birth trauma and his recognition of the emotional nature of the Child and his mother bond, which at that time only represented Paalen and his wife Alice Rahon in Surrealism, but subsequently drew wider circles. Passionate supporters of such matricentric theories were u. a. Benjamin Péret , Remedios Varo , Leonora Carrington , Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko .

The erotic connotations of Nuage articulé with its natural sponge covered umbrella as an intense and yet hidden corresponding contrast (flower as a female gender with a phallic stamp; sponge as a metaphor for the power of nature, as a female utensil that has cleansed female, bare skin; umbrella as a masculine symbol civil order and defense against natural forces, etc.) quickly helped Nuage articulé to gain high recognition among the Surrealists and their growing audience. Geo Dupin, Paalen's sister-in-law, dealer and assistant in the design of the objects, remembers that Alfred Barr was blown away by Paalen's object and only did not buy it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York because it was too fragile and large to be transported was. Nuage articulé was later placed in a more political context and published in the London Bulletin along with a text by André Breton , which Samuel Beckett had translated. Below the picture was the comment: “A sponge umbrella reminiscent of another umbrella that has become notorious”. The rolled up umbrella of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain , which he always carried with him during the demonstratively consensual press appearances with Adolf Hitler despite bright sunshine, had been stylized into a kind of symbol of unsuccessful appeasement, especially in the English public. In addition to Nuage articulé, of which two versions have survived, Paalen also exhibited other objects, e.g. B. Potence avec paratonnerre , a larger than life wooden gallows with a lightning rod and a dedication plaque to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , Le moi et le soi and Chaise envahie de lierre . Nationally known u. a. also Paalen's object Le genie de l'espèce , a dueling pistol made from poultry bones, in which means and ends coincide.

On the recommendation of Marcel Duchamp, Peggy Guggenheim gave Paalen a solo exhibition in her London gallery Guggenheim Jeune in March 1939. It was also Duchamp who recommended Paalen to the New York gallery owner Julien Levy : “Dear Julien, PS to my recent letter: Do you know Paalen's work? I suppose that you have seen some reproductions. Among the young Surr [ealists] 's he ought to come out - he paints scenes' for' a sorcerer (you never see the witches). All this to hope that you might show him in NY ", Duchamp wrote to Levy as early as January 1939. In March he sent an invitation with the note:" In London with Mary [Reynolds] for a few days - Just came to see the last day of Paalen's show - His 'sorcelleries' look real on the walls - Hope you try them in NY “One year later, in March 1940, Julien Levy showed Paalen's surrealism in his new gallery on 15 East 57th Street, which was very well received by the press Pictures from Paris and some new works on paper from Mexico.

The years of exile in Mexico

Interior view of Paalen's studio house in San Angel with the picture Les Cosmogones

In 1939 he was the first surrealist to decide to go into exile overseas and traveled with his wife, the French painter Alice Rahon and his girlfriend Eva Sulzer via New York to British Columbia and, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo, settled in Mexico , where he lived with curated a large surrealism exhibition for the Peruvian poet César Moro in 1940 and published the art magazine DYN 1-6 between 1942 and 1945 .

The Dyn project

Title page of Wolfgang Paalens Dyn 4–5, Amer-Indian Number, Mexico 1943

One of his most important achievements as a theorist was the publication of the influential art magazine Dyn , in which Paalen, largely on his own, took a critical position on the most pressing questions about the art of his time. His essays deal with the themes of the modern conception of space in painting after Cubism , the consequences of post-Einsteinian quantum physics on modern thinking in art, the possible inspirations through the totem art of the Indians of British Columbia on contemporary painting, the possibilities a reform of surrealism through a revision of dialectical materialism , the role of time in the processes of inspiration, as well as other subject areas of anthropology, moral philosophy and literature. Fundamental is Paalen's criticism of ontology , his reference to contingency with the unconditional awareness that no eternal truths exist and that the real reason for human existence, and thus art, can only be found through the relativization of (binary) human perceptual categories, the recognition of the multicausal and the opens up the diverse nature of being. What becomes visible is the consequence with which Paalen tried from the beginning in Surrealism to break up the radically subjectivist approach through the idea of ​​a latent cosmic all-weave in which the human organisms are also woven in like fabrics and, by virtue of their emotional possibilities, the artificial separations of space Temporary can temporarily cancel. Through his magazine, his presence and his participation in exhibitions - in 1940 with Julien Levy , in 1945 in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century and in 1946 in the Nierendorf Gallery in New York - he exerted a significant influence on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism .

Barnett Newman explicitly listed Paalen in a private note entitled America has a new art movement (the first authentic art movement here) along with Pollock, Rothko, Hoffman, Gorky, Baziotes and Motherwell as “The men in the new movement” desired representatives for the new art movement; He provided Motherwell with a question mark, while Paalen is listed twice, once with the addition "New" (possibly to distinguish Paalen's surrealist work from the new Dyn works).

In 1949 Paalen worked in San Francisco with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican in the Dynaton group before moving to Paris in 1951 and again to Mexico in 1954.

The new space in painting

In Mexico, parallel to his work as editor and theoretician, he worked on his spacials, developed from fumage , with which he surprised the New York art world in 1945 at the Art of This Century gallery . With these pictures, characterized by a prefigurative spatiality, and his essays, Paalen became for a few years the most discussed and most influential of the European artists in exile. In his theory of the observer- dependent space of possibility, which gave abstract painting new momentum and a unified, new worldview in the 1940s, Paalen also processed findings from quantum physics as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemistic worldview and the spatial structures of Indian painting in the Canadian north-west. Coast. Robert Motherwell studied with him in Mexico in 1941 and 1943 and in 1945 published his essays under the title Form and Sense as the first edition of the series Problems of Contemporary Art in New York, in 1947 also the first publication of the Abstract Expressionists, Possibilities , in analogue The continuation of Paalen's Dyn (from Greek to dynaton = the possible) appeared. His spatial theory was summarized again in 1951 in the catalog book for the exhibition Dynaton, A New Vision in the San Francisco Museum of Art under the title Metaplastic .

After the war

Archaeological passions

In 1946, Paalen separated from Alice and married the Venezuelan designer and artist Luchita Hurtado , whom he had met in New York through his friend Isamu Noguchi . Luchita moved to Mexico in 1947 to live with Paalen, and together they explored the ancient cultural sites of the Olmecs , about which Paalen later wrote a widely acclaimed treatise in the French art magazine Cahiers d'Art . In it Paalen broadened the hypothesis of his friend and colleague Miguel Covarrubias , according to which the Olmecs are to be perceived as a suppressed culture which, after hundreds of years of war, was finally wiped out by the aggressive Mayan culture; Paalen also compared the Olmecs to the ancient matriarchal cultures of Europe, which had to capitulate to violent, patriarchal cultures more than 3000 years ago. His hypothesis about the matriarchal socio-cultural origins of Mesoamerica, which he backed up with remarkable finds and documents, was never substantively refuted and influenced or strengthened above all artists from his circle, such as Alice Rahon , Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington in their archaic, esoteric or feminist motifs and themes. It lives on to today's archaeological and artistic discourses (the most famous example of our times is Mel Gibson's cinematic work Apocalypto ).

San Francisco, Paris

In 1948, one of the two children Luchita brought into the Paalen household from her previous marriage died of polio in Mexico. The couple decided to move the family to San Francisco, where he worked with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican in a newly formed artist community: the Dynaton Group. You lived z. Sometimes together in a large house in Mill Valley and had solo exhibitions in the San Francisco Museum of Art and a group exhibition in the Stanford University Art Gallery, in which he also presented parts of his essay on his new spatial concept, which he had worked on the years before . It was published as a catalog on the occasion of the group exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Paalen's persistent desire to maintain his main living center in Mexico and to revive his friendship with André Breton during an extended stay in Paris led to a mutual divorce from Luchita, who subsequently decided to live with Lee Mullican. From Mexico, Paalen traveled to Paris in 1951 with his new girlfriend, the American painter Marie Wilson. He lived there with short interruptions for the next three years in Kurt Seligmann's studio house ( Villa-atelier 1 villa Seurat ) in Paris, built by André Lurçat . He reconciled with Breton, spent the summers at Breton's house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie , helped invent surrealist games like Ouvrez-Vous? and L'un dans l'autre and painted a considerable body of lyrical-abstract pictures that were exhibited in Paris in 1952 (Galerie Pierre) and 1954 (Galerie Galanis-Hentschel) with commercial success. One of the four issues of Breton's art magazine Medium - Communication Surréaliste was dedicated to Paalen. After an extensive trip to Germany, he returned to Mexico in 1954.

The last few years in Mexico and suicide

Paalen's recent years in Mexico have been marred by mounting health problems, primarily due to his bipolar (manic-depressive) predisposition. With the help of his friends and sponsors, Eva Sulzer, Jacqueline Johnson and Gordon Onslow Ford, he managed to acquire an old house and studio in Tepoztlán in Morelos , Mexico , where he lived and worked for the last years of his life. Paradoxically, the last two years in particular have been extremely productive, with some of his best pictures from the last period. His passion for collecting Olmec sculptures led him to ever more adventurous expeditions and ventures in the wilderness of eastern Mexico and the Yucatans . Rumors that Paalen was involved in illegal excavations inspired the American writer Arthur A. Cohen to write his novel Acts of Theft (1980). As an expert and source of ideas, Paalen assisted the American filmmaker Albert Lewin in his film epic The Living Idol . In 1958 Paalen received André Pieyre de Mandiargues and Octavio Paz in Tepoztlán, who both published texts about Paalen after his suicide. On the night of September 25, 1959, Paalen left his hotel room at the Hacienda San Francisco Cuadra in Taxco , where he sometimes sought relief from his depression. He was found dead the following day, shot in the head.

Paalen as a poet and man of letters

In addition to his work as a visual artist, Paalen also excelled as an author of poetic works, which he wrote in French and German and exchanged with Valentine Penrose , Alice Rahon , André Breton and Paul Éluard . In 1941, Breton was admiring the literary and poetic text that Paalen had written from 1939–1940 on his trip through British Columbia : "I have read Paysage totémique , read it again, read it with a loud voice, nothing is more adorable and undoubtedly more ingenious". Paysage totémique was published in parts in Dyn . In recent years, Paalen has written several plays and various short stories, such as The Axolotl and Paloma Palomita , in which he sometimes ironically tried to mirror his fluctuating moods and his growing depression and to convey it to his friends in a hermetic way. His play The Beam of the Balance , a tragic comedy, is a reflection on the unbroken power of Stalinist state terrorism, the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945, and the danger of science out of balance in general. It was first known through a semi-public reading at Robert Motherwell's house in East Hampton in the summer of 1946. His play Elorn, A Ballad from Brittany , on the other hand, deals with Paalen's lifelong passion for pre-Celtic matriarchal myths.

legacy

Paalen's artistic estate in Mexico was recently donated by the heirs of his widow Isabel Marin de Paalen to the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City, including photos and some writings. The estate that Paalen left in the care of his friend, surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford , is currently administered by the Lucid Art Foundation, Inverness CA, which he founded, which recently passed Paalen's rich archive of writings, photos and manuscripts to the heirs Eva Sulzers, his heiress and sole heir, restituted in Switzerland. He served u. a. as the basis of the biography Auf Liebe und Tod (Parthas, Berlin 2015) and is now in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Between May and July 2007, a collection of Paalen's work was exhibited at the Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco . In 2014, the Wendi Norris Gallery in San Francisco presented a number of major works in the solo exhibition Wolfgang Paalen, Philosopher of the Possible , including the large format Les Cosmogones .

Paalen's collected essays on art from Dyn and Form and Sense were reprinted in 2013 by Deborah Rosenthal with a foreword by Martica Sawin .

The German art historian Andreas Neufert has researched the life of Wolfgang Paalen in detail and in 1999 published the monograph and the catalog raisonné in Vienna and New York in the interior of the whale . His biography on love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen deals, among other things, with Paalen's lifelong passion for matriarchal myths and their influence on the American avant-garde of the 1940s.

The Austrian Gallery in the Belvedere in Vienna is organizing a major exhibition on Wolfgang Paalen in autumn / winter 2019-2020.

Art market

Paalen's relatively narrow oeuvre of approx. 300 canvases, some objects and sculptures has in the past mainly been traded privately or through specialized galleries and art dealers. Only smaller works appear in auctions at times, especially since most of the important works are in museums or important private collections. In 2009 Christie’s Paalen's important surrealist painting from 1938 auctioned Paysage (Pays) medusé . With an estimate of 30–40,000 euros, it was knocked down for 373,000 euros. In November 2015, Les Cosmogones fetched $ 382,000 in the Latin American Art auction at Sotheby’s New York. With 387,500 euros for Paalen's early program picture Advertisement I (Peinture), 1935 , the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach achieved a new record price for this artist in July 2020.

Works

• Hommes possibles 1934
• Avertissement 1935
• L'heure exacte object, 1936
• Pays interdit 1936-1937
• Rencontre sur une plage , 1936 illustration
• Toison d'or , 1937 illustration
• La Balance , 1937 illustration
• Paysage totémique de mon enfance , 1937
• Nuage articulé I , objet, 1937
• Paysage totémique , 1937
• Fata Alaska , 1937
• Les Étrangers , 1937 illustration
• La Housse Mannequin 1938
• Combat des princes saturniens I and II, 1938 illustration
• Paysage médusé , 1938
• Taches solaires , 1938
• Plumages , 1938
• Le genie de l'espèce (object, 1938) illustration
• Combats des princes saturniens, III , 1939 illustration
• Nuage articulé II (object, 1940) illustration
• L'heure exacte II object, 1940 illustration
• Polarités chromatiques , 1940
• Espace sans limite , 1941
• Les premieres spaciales tryptich, 1941–1944
• Les Cosmogonies , 1943
• Hamnur Trilogy , 1947
• Nuit tropicale , 1947
• Fête mexicaine , 1949
• Le Messager des trois Pôles , 1949
• L'enclume , 1952
• Lumière fossile , 1953
• Banistas , 1958

Essays in Dyn

English

• The New Image , No. April 1 - May 1942
• Suggestion for an Objective Morality , in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942
• Seeing and Showing , in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942
• Surprise and Inspiration , in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942
• About the Origins of the Doric Column and the Guitar-woman , in: Dyn, n ° 2, July-August 1942
• The Dialectical Gospel , in: Dyn, n ° 2, July-August 1942
• Art and Science , in: Dyn, n ° 3, spring 1942
• Book reviews
• Totem Art , in: Dyn, n ° 4–5, 1943
• Birth of Fire , in: Dyn, n ° 4-5, 1943
• On the Meaning of Cubism Today , in: Dyn, n ° November 6, 1944

French

• Farewell au surréalisme , No. April 1 - May 1942
• L'Image nouvelle , in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942
• Aperçu pour une morale objective , in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942
• Paysage totémique (3 articles), in: Dyn, n ° 1, April – May 1942, n ° 2, July – August 1942, n ° 3, spring 1942
• Surprise et inspiration , in: Dyn, n ° 2, July – August 1942
• L'Évangile dialectique , in: Dyn, n ° 3, spring 1942
• Le Grand Malentendu (trad. Of Art and Science ), in: DYN, n ° 3, spring 1942
• Rencontre totémique in: Dyn, n ° 4–5, 1943
• Actualité du cubisme , in: Dyn, n ° 6 November 1944
• Pendant l'éclipse , interview of Paalen with Carter Stone, in: Dyn, n ° 6 November 1944

literature

Biographies

• Andreas Neufert : Wolfgang Paalen. Inside the whale . Springer, Vienna and New York 1999 (monograph and catalog raisonné).
• Dieter Schrage:  Paalen, Wolfgang Robert. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 733 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Amy Winter: Wolfgang Paalen. Artist and Theorist of the Avantgarde Praeger, Westport (Connecticut) 2002.
• Andreas Neufert: To love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen . Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 .

Exhibition catalogs

• Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism , Museum of Modern Art, New York 1936.
• Exposition surréaliste d'Objèts , Paris (Charles Ratton Gallery) 1936.
• Wolfgang Paalen , Paris (Galerie Renou et Colle) 1938 (foreword by André Breton).
• Wolfgang Paalen , London (Galerie Guggenheim Jeune) 1939.
• Surrealismo , Galería de Arte Mexicano , Mexico City 1940.
• Wolfgang Paalen , New York (Art of this Century Gallery) 1945.
• Dynaton A New Vision , San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco 1951.
• Domaine de Paalen , Paris (Galanis-Hentschel Gallery) 1954.
• Homage to Wolfgang Paalen , Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City 1967.
• Presencia Viva de Wolfgang Paalen , Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City 1979.
• Dynaton: Before and Beyond , Frederick R. Waisman Museum of Art, Malibu (Pepperdine University) 1992.
• Dieter Schrage (Ed.): Wolfgang Paalen. Between surrealism and abstraction. Museum of Modern Art Foundation Ludwig Vienna, Verlag Ritter, Klagenfurt 1993, ISBN 3-85415-124-1 .
• Wolfgang Paalen, Retrospectiva , Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (Imprenta Madero) 1994.
• Wolfgang Paalen - The Austrian surrealist in Paris and Mexico. Extensive exhibition at the Museum Belvedere, Vienna, October 4, 2019 - January 19, 2020.

Web links

• Official website of the Wolfgang Paalen Society (English, German)
• Book trailer: Andreas Neufert, On love and death
• Literature by and about Wolfgang Paalen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Wolfgang Paalen  in the German Digital Library
• Discussion on the subject of space and abstraction
• Lecture by Andreas Neufert: The Totem as Sphinx, Wolfgang Paalen's urgent Illuminations during his Voyage into Exile 1939 Symposion Vivísimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America of the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles
• Discussion with Dawn Ades, Andreas Neufert and Daniel Garza Usabiaga about Wolfgang Paalen
• Auf Liebe und Tod reading by Andreas Neufert, Berlin, October 10, 2015, together with Felix Römer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andreas Neufert: On love and death. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen . Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 , p. 35 ff.
2. ^ Matriculation of the Evangelical Parish Office Vienna, see also Anna Staudacher: Jewish-Protestant Converts in Vienna 1782–1914 , Vienna 2004, part 2, p. 234.
3. ↑ Neufert, p. 74 f., Refers to the correspondence between Gustav R. Paalen and Wilhelm von Bode and Julius Meier-Graefe, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kunstbibliothek.
4. ^ Neufert, p. 86 ff.
5. ↑ cit. n. Wolfgang Paalen, Paysage totémique II, in: Dyn 2, Mexico 1943, p. 46 f.
6. ↑ Neufert (pp. 138 ff. And 159 ff.) Found numerous pieces of evidence for the fate of his brother Rainer, about whose suicide attempt Luchita Hurtado, Paalen's second wife, had related, in the correspondence between Rainer Paalen and his aunt Fini Gunkel.
7. ↑ according to Gordon Onslow Ford, see Neufert, p. 530.
8. ↑ Harper's Bazaar , April 1938, p. 56, Ghislaine Wood: Surreal things. Making the fantastic real . In: G. Wood: Surreal Things. Surrealism and Design , London 2007, p. 6.
9. ^ Wolfgang Paalen, letter to André Breton, October 5, 1936 (Paris, Bibliothèque Doucet)
10. ↑ Alice's love letters to Picasso in the Musée Picasso, Paris, which have so far hardly been noticed by research, were recently discovered and viewed by Andreas Neufert, who gives insight into the affair and its poetic output in his biography about Paalen, Neufert, p. 181 f., 250 ff.
11. ↑ Andreas Neufert: Paalen, journeys into the interior of possibility / Voyages vers l'interieur du possible . In: Moderne auf der Flucht / Les modern s'enfuient. Austrian artists in France 1938–1945 / Des artistes autrichiens en France 1938–1945 . Exhibition catalog (German / French) Jewish Museum Vienna (Turia & Kant publishing house) Vienna 2008, p. 106.
12. ^ Wolfgang Paalen, letter to André Breton, October 5, 1936 (Paris, Bibliothèque Doucet)
13. ^ Wolfgang Paalen, The Dialectical Gospel, in: DYN No. 2, Mexico (July-August) 1942, p. 56
14. ^ André Breton , Non plus le diamant au chapeau ... , in: Catalog Exhibition Wolfgang Paalen , Galerie Renou et Colle, Paris 1938 (English in: London Bulletin , February 10, 1939, pp. 13–15, translated by Samuel Beckett )
15. ↑ Wolfgang Paalen, Totem Art, in: DYN No. 4-5 (Amerindian Number), Mexico, December 1943, pp. 7ff.
16. ↑ Annabelle Görgen, Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme Paris 1938 , Munich 2008, s. a. Chapter Wolfgang Paalen - Connection between exhibition design and individual objects , p. 113 ff.
17. ↑ Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod , pp. 236, 255 f., 308, 312 ff. And 335.
18. ^ Andreas Neufert, Conversations with Geo Dupin , Paris 1987, see also Neufert, p. 303 ff.
19. ^ ELT Mesens, in: London Bulletin (Feb. 1939), No. 10.
20. ↑ Nuage articulé I (ex Geo Dupin Collection, Paris, today Moderna Museet , Stockholm), and Nuage articulé II , redesigned by Paalen for the International Surrealism Exhibition in Mexico City in 1940 (ex Ines Amor Collection, Mexico City, today private collection, Berlin)
21. ^ Marcel Duchamp, notes to Julien Levy, January / March 1939, Julien Levy Gallery Records, University of Pennsylvania.
22. ↑ Barnett Newman's notes from the years 1943–1945, in which he explains his thoughts on the new art movement, also contains topics such as “The nature of this movement a. The image complex, b. The problem of plastic form, c. The roots in American primitive art ”and“ The role of the artist ”, topics that Paalen had previously dealt with in detail in Dyn. [Barnett Newman Foundation archive 18/103]
23. ↑ Wolfgang Paalen, Le plus ancien visage du Nouveau Monde , in: Cahiers d'art 27 (1952), No. 2.
24. ^ Wolfgang Paalen, Metaplastic , Relativity of Measure and Theory of the Dynaton , San Francisco Museum of Art, 1951.
25. ^ André Breton, Wolfgang Paalen , in: Medium. Communication Surréaliste , No. 1 (Oct. 1953), p. 1.
26. ^ The Living Idol, Mexico / USA 1956, with Steve Forrest and Liliane Montevecchi.
27. ^ André Pieyre de Mandiargues, La mort volontaire , in: La Nouvelle Revue française (Dec. 1959), No. 84.
28. ↑ Octavio Paz, Préface à une exposition , in: Catalog of the memorial exhibition of Wolfgang Paalens in Librairie Loilée, Paris 1960.
29. ↑ Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod , pp. 23, 611.
30. ^ André Breton in a letter to Wolfgang Paalen dated July 31, 1941 (Bibliothèque Doucet, Paris).
31. ↑ Amy Winter, Interview of Luchita Mullican, Santa Monica, May 1, 1994 (Archives of American Art, New York)
32. ↑ The heirs of Eva Sulzer left the estate to the art historian Andreas Neufert as their authorized trustee in all questions of author's rights (Succession Wolfgang Paalen et Eva Sulzer, Berlin).
33. ↑ Ara H. Merjian: Wolfgang Paalen: Implicit Spaces. Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco, May 17–12. July, 2007 . surrealismcentre.ac.uk/. Retrieved December 11, 2014.
34. ↑ Mark Van Proyen: Wolfgang Paalen at Frey Norris (San Francisco) . art ltd. magazine. Retrieved December 11, 201.
35. ↑ Christie's: Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) . Retrieved December 11, 2014.
36. ↑ http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2015/latin-america-modern-art-n09428/lot.7.html
37. ↑ https://www.grisebach.com/kaufen/kataloge/listenansicht.html
38. ↑ Wolfgang Paalen (1905-59) - The Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico. In: belvedere.at , accessed on December 25, 2019.