Nuage articulé

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Wolfgang Paalen, Nuage articulé II, 1939

Nuage articulé (articulated cloud) is a surrealist object in the form of an assemblage by Wolfgang Paalen from 1937 . The object, an umbrella covered with natural sponges, is one of the most obvious objects in the legendary Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme , which took place in Paris in 1938 in the Wildenstein Gallery. It was also exhibited in numerous subsequent exhibitions in Amsterdam (1938), Cambridge (1938) and Mexico City (1940). Numerous photographers have captured the object in its context, such as Man Ray , Kurt Husnik, Josef Breitenbach and Denise Bellon .

description

The object consists of a standard black umbrella as a carrier and flat-cut, dry natural sponges that are glued to the textile surfaces, the tensioning mechanism, the handle and stem of the umbrella. The dimensions are 66 × 94 cm.

History of origin

The original definition of surrealist object art comes from the French poet Comte de Lautréamont , who in his work Die Gesänge des Maldoror describes the beauty of the young man Mervyn by means of antipodal metaphors: “He is beautiful like the retractability of the catches of birds of prey; or the uncertainty of the muscular movements in the wounds of the soft tissues in the region of the back of the neck; or even more like this permanently effective rat trap, which is always re-tensioned by the captured animal, that is, it can automatically take in infinite rodents and even functions hidden under straw; and above all like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table! ”(6th song, 3rd stanza) In 1937 Gallimard prepared the publication of Lautréamont's collected writings in an illustrated luxury edition, to which Breton invited Paalen along with other artists to contribute an illustration. The umbrella returns again and again in the metaphor of surrealism: After a rainy day in 1930, it became a congenial symbol of masculine-surrealist furor for many years - at that time André Breton tore the umbrella out of the hand of a smaller passerby before going to the cinema because it was the Almost stabbed Big Breton in the eyes as he passed. The writer broke the umbrella over his knee without further ado, which encouraged his friends Desnos, Prévèrt, Tanguy, Péret and Duhamel to do the same for other passers-by. The visit to the cinema literally fell through with the tumult that followed, but the group euphoria generated that emotional satisfaction that was and remained an affair of the heart to Breton.

Drawing of the Nuage articulé object , created in 1937 by Wolfgang Paalen

In the autumn of 1937 Breton began "at some friendship dinners, after or before meetings and with a limited number of participants" to collect and evaluate opinions and suggestions on the planned Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme , and to prepare the catalog. Although his sister-in-law Geo Dupin helped him with his work, Paalen was not finished with Nuage articulé before the Dictionaire abrégé du surréalisme catalog went to press ; that Breton considered the umbrella project to be essential, however, is shown by the drawing he made of it and had it printed in the dictionary. We do not know whether Paalen brought the half-finished umbrella to one of the discreet private gatherings in a smaller circle away from the café or just told about it. The very possibility alone that Paalen would dialectically eroticize the reality of the umbrella will certainly have caused a stir, and when it became clear that a male-female union would take place here, all eyes were on reception. Beyond the phallus, the umbrella as a utensil embodied a masculine, ordered, bourgeois existence that was armed for all the dangers of nature and was suddenly on everyone's lips again. Paalen's suggestion of a material feminization was almost overlooked at first - the sponge covering drew moisture into it, had cleanly touched naked woman's skin and yet remained natural, and the curved opening of the sponge screen suddenly became a calyx with the stem as a fertilizing stamen. In the surrealist context, however, the umbrella as coitus to be grasped with hands was primarily perceived as a threat from bad weather conditions. Marcel Duchamp's intimate partner Henri-Pierre Roché reports that Breton immediately “asked Duchamp to make a ceiling for the large main room of the exhibition” and had the spontaneous idea of ​​“hanging up hundreds of open umbrellas with their tips turned down”. Only at the last moment, when it became clear that it would be impossible to find so many used umbrellas at short notice, did Duchamp loan an open coal furnace and a whole wagonload of used sacks from a coal merchant in La Villette, from which the coal dust trickled and which he took with him Newsprint filled with newsprint hung from the ceiling over the coal stove instead of the umbrellas. In both versions of Duchamp, the obscure menace was in the foreground - it is impossible to imagine what would have happened to an umbrella cover in the case of pounding rain - while the game with erotic levels of meaning was either very restrained or completely absent.

However, as his later writings in particular show, with Nuage articulé Paalen thought beyond the surrealist projections of erotic content to a deeper entanglement of apparently dissonant levels of meaning. For him, the visual connecting elements of the disintegrating realities are the emotional similarities and deep correspondences that he makes the subject. 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? "

reception

It is at least conceivable - via a detour - that Paalen also considered the threat level of the exhibition from the start. In the following year Nuage articulé illustrated a provocative-satirical statement on the Munich conference convened by Hitler in September 1938 in the London Bulletin (No. 10, February 1939) with the signature: “A sponge umbrella reminding of another umbrella that closed The rolled-up umbrella of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, which he always carried with him during the demonstratively amicable press appearances with Hitler despite the bright sunshine, had been stylized into a kind of symbol of unsuccessful appeasement, especially in the English public. In 1939, the London newspaper The Tatler subsumed similar references in the review of Paalen's solo exhibition in Peggy Guggenheim's London gallery Guggenheim-Jeune, broken, of course, by the objects' black humor: "Nuage articulé will hardly suggest a sponge umbrella. But exactly one it is, and a nice touch for joking friends since a certain umbrella took on a threatening role in foreign policy - our impregnable first line of defense. "

Versions and presentation

Nuage articulé's erotic connotations quickly earned the work a high level of recognition among surrealists and their growing audiences. 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. In 1938 the object was mostly presented hanging from the ceiling, in 1940 Paalen decided on a more museum-like presentation on a pedestal.

Two versions of the work have been preserved, the first (1937) on a screen with 8 segments, the second (1940) based on a screen with 10 segments: Nuage articulé I (1937/38) was kept by Geo Dupin and included in the Purchased in the 1970s by the Swedish art historian Pontus Hultén for the Moderna Museet , Stockholm, where it can still be seen today. Nuage articulé II (1939/40) was redesigned by Paalen in autumn 1939 after his arrival in Mexico for the International Surrealism Exhibition in Mexico City (opening in January 1940), as no objects could be shipped from Paris due to the war. It was kept by Ines Amor, the owner of the Galería de Arte Mexicano , which hosted the exhibition in 1940, and later sold to a private collection in San Diego. In 1956, the property was restored by Paalen himself after it was damaged. Today it is in a private collection in Berlin. It has recently been exhibited several times, for example in 2011 in the Schirn Kunsthalle , Frankfurt (exhibition Surreale Dinge), in 2012 in the Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad (exhibition Surrealistiska ting), in 2013 in the Center Pompidou , Paris (exhibition Le surréalisme et l´objet ) and 2018 in the Nationalgalerie Berlin , Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart (exhibition Hello World - revision of a collection). Since 2015 it has only been shown together with a decagonal plexiglass hood specially designed by the Italian architect and designer Giuseppe Boezi.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Breton selected the drawing Vieil océan (“Old Ocean”) from two proposals, which was reprinted in the appropriate place in the Gallimard edition: “I wanted human royalty to be nothing other than the incarnation of your reflection. I ask a lot, and this sincere wish is glorious for you. Your moral greatness, image of the infinite, is as immense as the level-headedness of the philosopher, like the love of women, like the divine beauty of the bird, like the introspection of the poet. You are more beautiful than the night Answer me, Ocean, do you want to be my brother? «Comte de Lautréamont: Œuvres complètes , Paris 1938, p. 24.
  2. ↑ Georges Hugnet: Pleins et déliés, La Chapelle sur Loire 1972, p. 39.
  3. ↑ See Henri-Pierre Roché: "Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp", in: Robert Lebel: Marcel Duchamp, Cologne 1959, p. 84.
  4. ↑ Whoever originally had the idea for the umbrella will not be able to be fully clarified, although it remains doubtful whether Paalen would have put so much effort into the production of his umbrella if it had been clear to him from the start that it would have been with hundreds of others would hang on the ceiling. In fact, Nuage articulé then hung from the ceiling of the back room , in which Paalen's object Potènce avec Paratonnerre (gallows with lightning rod) also stood. See Annabelle Görgen, Exposition internationale du Surréalisme Paris 1938 , Munich 2008, pp. 130f.
  5. ^ Wolfgang Paalen, The Dialectical Gospel, in: DYN No. 2, Mexico (July-August) 1942, p. 56
  6. ^ ELT Mesens, in: London Bulletin (Feb. 1939), No. 10.
  7. ↑ On the day before the opening, Foreign Minister Eden had tried to persuade Chamberlain to draw closer to France and the USA. At the latest when Hitler marched into Prague in October 1938, where Paalen's brother Michael had been hiding in a pension with his father since the summer, even the most naive hopes, which Paalen himself had never cherished, vanished. "Munich was nothing but showing off", quoted Georges Gèrard Paalen in a nutshell, "Germany has gained a lot of time as a result to better prepare itself." n. Georges Gérard, L'abeille Noire , Houdemont (Editions GMT), p. 204 (autobiography of a close friend of the Paalens).
  8. ↑ Anonymous, in: The Tatler , London, March 1, 1939
  9. ^ Andreas Neufert, Conversations with Geo Dupin, Paris 1987, see also Neufert, Auf Liebe und Tod. The life of the surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin (Parthas) 2014, p. 300 ff.
  10. ↑ Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (eds.), Surreal Things, Sculptures and Objects from Dalí to Max Ernst , Frankfurt 2011, pp. 262f. Illustration p. 210f.
  11. ↑ Karolina Peterson (ed.), Surrealistiska ting , Halmstad 2012, p. 24 (fig.)
  12. ↑ Didier Ottinger (ed.), Dictionnaire de l´objet surréaliste, Paris (Gallimard) 2013, illustration p. 202
  13. ↑ Andreas Neufert - BOOK PARTY . architekturbuero-engelbrecht.de. Retrieved September 15, 2019.