Pays interdit
Pays interdit (Forbidden Land) is a surrealistic painting by Wolfgang Paalen , which in the final version from 1937 shows a teardrop-shaped, stylized feminine idol with tentacle-like tentacles, which stands precariously close to an abyss that suddenly opens up towards the viewer in dark-crystalline forms opens up and in front of which three spherical bodies float, two of which are shaped like falling, burning meteorites. The picture is the first oil painting Paalen, artfully on the invented paals technique of Fumage builds and grappling on multi-layered manner with the contexts of fear of death and feminine that introduce his view of the area of the human psyche, in which the artificial Develop separations between self and world. The picture is in a private collection.
background
The picture marks the beginning of Paalen's concise visual criticism of the unconditionally subjectivist attitude of Surrealism, from which he later developed his well-founded philosophy of contingency . Paalen began taking pictures in the first two weeks of October 1936 after a severe mental crisis. In August 1936 he learned that Pablo Picasso's prolonged affair with his wife Alice ( Alice Rahon ) had led to a pregnancy and an abortion. Paalen later commented on the episodes of depression, which he was finally able to channel into a veritable creative fury: “It is then as if the fire, or the germ in it, collapsed and anything horrible can take its place. During the day I can hardly think, let alone speak to anyone, with anger, suspicion and guilt. At night I die of fear that everything will be shattered. Rest is such a distant term, barely discernible in these dark days. Perhaps it will be painting that will pull me out of these bouts of terrible darkness and be able to put the few stones together that I can no longer find in the empty world. And if this does not succeed, I at least know for sure that it is not about having an ego, but only hearing a call into life when one is faced with absolutely nothing. My vision has returned once more. I can now justifiably say that I see like the old pagan Apollonius: from the inside out. ”After an orientation trip to Greece, he began to work on the mysterious picture in mid-October that would keep him busy until next year and that of this one, almost solemnly and with the vocabulary of the mystic Apollonius of Tyana should bear witness to the inner fall into the abysses of fear of death: 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. Paalen designs his personal basic model of the permeable, surreal image of the soul in the form of an abysmal, fragmented landscape, pulsed with a mixture of feminine mysticism and romantic horror, which are reminiscent of preceltic fairy mysteries and their cosmic allusions, as they are known from the lyrical tradition of Britain. In view of this archetype for the artist's later great fumages, the poet friend André Breton spoke of symbols for a kind of expanded inner view: “Perhaps, yes, it is certainly a temptation 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, as the fish swam around undivided inside a silver boat. (...) Windows, as blind as the lamps of nocturnal thieves, children see such colors as they 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. ”Through the fear of death, the artist / viewer reaches the core of childlike emotion, the world of units more emotionally Similarities in which the divisions between realities are abolished.
description
What particularly catches the eye in this picture is the extraordinary color in the upper part - subtly graded shades of green that look as if they were painted on gold - and in the lower part a fine execution of crystalline fanned-out spatial structures, hints of mucous membranes and moist, inner tissue. The fumage spots peek out like black holes in only a few places. The armless and legless stone figure with its balloon-shaped receiving organs - stomach, breasts and head - was interpreted biographically as a mythologized portrait of the friend Eva Sulzer, to which Paalen turned after the crisis with his wife: as a kind of Eve of the future, a woman that was not born, but owes its life directly to the divine powers. Even without an umbilicus, she embodies the navel of the world, where the past and future meet, a unity of womb, womb and mother, or as James Joyce described her: “Heva. Naked Eva. She didn't have a navel. Look Belly without blemishes, swelling pregnant, a round shield made of tight vellum, no, grain piled white, shining and immortal, lasting from eternity to eternity. ”Paalen had visited the oracle site in Delphi several times before with the omphalos , the one carved from white stone, rounded at the top , symbolic stone pillar for the navel of the world, which fell from the sky as a lightning-triggered meteorite and was originally a sacrificial stone of the goddess Gaia . Delphi is dedicated to the earth goddess Gaia (from »delphos« - Greek for uterus) and, with her oracle site , once played by the female priestess Pythia , was certainly one of the places of longing on the artist's inner map, the deep symbols for birth and clairvoyant people Looking for forms of language of a primordial femininity that communicated directly from the uterus . Paalen's friend and intimate connoisseur, the German writer Gustav Regulator , spoke of his “Amazon Empire” in view of the picture: “On a planet that circles away from the main roads / quietly and thoughtfully, / lies the empire, (...) and here far from them / he speaks to women / as if they belonged to his distant star people. (...) And one he calls queen, / since she cannot hide; / Her tall figure makes every branch of a tree / under which she stands / a flower-bearing homage / she looks at the mountains / as if her palaces were standing there; / Coasts are her strips of blissful union / with the sun / The sea welcomes her like the one returning home / every time she betrays the shore / and it seems as if she now lives / in the element that breathes according to the pulse of the stars; (...) / Time is the invasion of space / and is to be measured according to the number of comets / which hit its element / which it made visible and shining, / which it consumed and nourished. / The gods, however, are the creatures / of these rushing currents, / Splinters of the dissolving falling stars, (...) / His feeling that we are always walking on the edge of infinity / that the abyss accompanies us like a true shadow. (...) / like meteors in the desert. ”The fertility symbolism of the figure and the larger, transparent one of the three spheres with the enclosed form allusions for earth, femininity, eros and enveloping prenatal space are in compositional harmony with each other, floating hieratically in front of the impenetrable thicket of the terrestrial abyss. Paalen might have had the idea for the meteorite impacts while reading Camille Flammarion's visionary novel La Fin du Monde , in which Eva was given the power to watch the earth, which was cooling down and dying after a meteorite impact, as it set until it iced up.
literature
- 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 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ 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 2015, p. 321ff.
- ^ WP, unpublished fragments, Notes EP 9/1, 1937 (?), Quoted in n. Neufert 2015, p. 270
- ↑ André Breton, Non plus le diamant au chapeau ..., in: Exhibition catalog Wolfgang Paalen, Galerie Renou et Colle, Paris 1938 (English in: London Bulletin No. 10, February 1939, pp. 13-15)
- ↑ Wolfgang Paalen, Totem Art, in: DYN No. 4-5 (Amerindian Number), Mexico, December 1943, pp. 7ff.
- ↑ James Joyce, Ulysses, London 1922 (quoted in German edition, Frankfurt / M. (Suhrkamp) 1975, p. 54, translated by H. Wollschläger)
- ↑ To commemorate the meeting point of the two eagles, which Zeus sent in the opposite direction to find the center - the navel - of the world. Strabon reports: “The oracle is a deeply hollowed grotto with a not very large opening. An inspiring haze rises from it, but above the opening there is a high tripod, which Pythia climbs, breathes in from the haze and prophesies in verse and prose. ”Strabon, Erdbeschreibung 1911, p. 5f.
- ^ Gustav Regulator, Portrait WP, unpublished typescript, March-April 1945, p. 7, quoted. n. Neufert 2015, p. 274
- ↑ Camille Flammarion's popular science novel about an earth collision with a comet (La Fin du monde, Paris 1894) was published in a new illustrated edition in 1925 and inspired a. a. also Max Ernst.