Wolfgang Robert Paalen (July 22, 1905 in Vienna, Austria – September 24, 1959 in Taxco, Mexico) was an Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor, and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.
Family and childhood
Wolfgang Paalen was born in one of the famous Wienzeilenhäuser designed by Otto Wagner in Vienna (Köstlergasse 1 / Linke Wienzeile No. 40), Austria. He was the first of four sons of the Austrian-Jewish merchant and inventor , and his German wife, the actress Clothilde Emilie Gunkel. Gustav Robert, who had Polish-Ashkenazi and Spanish-Sephardic origins, converted to Protestantism in 1900 and changed his name from Pollak to Paalen in the same year.Neufert, Andreas (2015), Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben des Surrealisten Wolfgang Paalen, Berlin: Parthas, , p. 35ff.(In German)Registers of the Protestant Rectory Vienna (Evangelisches Pfarramt Wien), see also Anna Staudacher (2004), Jüdisch-Protestantische Konvertiten in Wien 1782–1914, Vienna, Part 2, p. 234 His considerable wealth was based on modernist inventions and patents such as the vacuum cleaner, the vacuum flask, known under the name Thermos bottle, and the first flow-type heater (for Junkers), amongst others. In a relatively short period Gustav R. Paalen managed to ascend into the distinguished Viennese upper-class of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He became also a well known collector of Old Master paintings with masterpieces, like Francisco Goya's Señora Sabasa Garcia, which he had acquired from the Berlin patron Henri James Simon and is today one of the highlights of the National Gallery, Washington. As a friend of Wilhelm von Bode and member of the Freundeskreis des Kaiser-Friedrich Museums, Berlin, he also financed the acquisition of the famous Titian painting Venus with the Organ-Player.
The first years of his life Wolfgang Paalen spent between Vienna and Styria where his father had opened the fashionable health resort Tobelbad, in the presence of Franz Joseph I of Austria, to whom he dedicated a memorial still visible today. In Tobelbad Paalen senior received such prominent guests as Gustav Mahler, poet and artist Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, Julius Meier-Graefe, Ida Zweig (the mother of Stefan Zweig), among others. Some sources claim that it was Paalen who introduced Alma Mahler, during her visit in Tobelbad in 1910, to the German architect Walter Gropius, whom she married later. 1912 the Paalen family moved to Berlin and to the Silesian city of Sagan (today Żagań), where his father had bought and rebuilt the castle of St. Rochusburg. During World War I Gustav Robert served both empires, the Austrian and the German, with the organization of food supply and worked closely together with Walther Rathenau and Albert Ballin's Zentral-Einkaufsgesellschaft. Wolfgang attended different schools in Sagan, and during the war his parents also engaged a private tutor. The teacher was also an organist who specialized in Johann Sebastian Bach, who thus became Wolfgang's favourite composer.Neufert, p. 86f.
Early teachers and decline of the family In 1919 the family moved to Rome, where they kept a luxurious household in the Villa Caetani on the Gianicolo and received many guests, such as the German painter Leo von König (1871–1944) who became Wolfgang's first art teacher. It was in Rome, under the guidance of his father's friend, the archeologist Ludwig Pollak, that he became an expert in Greek and Roman archaeology. In 1923 he returned to Berlin alone to apply for the academy. Although unsuccessful, he met his lifelong friend, companion and patron, the Swiss violinist, collector, filmmaker and photographer Eva Sulzer (Winterthur 1902 – 1990 Mexico City). In 1925 he exhibited at the Berlin Secession and studied further in aesthetics, deeply influenced by Julius Meier-Graefe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Gestalt theory of Max Wertheimer. It is here and with hypnopompic hallucinations in the castle in Sagan that he found the base for his later ideas of a deep entanglement of vision and outer world. After another year of studies, in Paris and Cassis (1925–26), where he met Roland Penrose, Jean Varda (Janco) and Georges Braque, he visited the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich and, in 1928, Saint-Tropez. He then decided to settle in Paris. The year 1928 marks also the beginning of the decline of the family's splendour, once founded on the patriarchal rules of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After a homoerotic affair with a mental healer, his younger brother Hans-Peter died unexpectedly in a Berlin insane asylum, presumably of suicide; the parents consequently separated; their mother's bipolar disposition intensified as a result; the fortune of Gustav Paalen is quashed after the Black Tuesday, 1929. A later tragedy, crucial to Paalen's development, was his beloved brother Rainer's shooting himself in head with a pistol. Wolfgang witnessed the event, although Rainer survived, following treatment in a Berlin hospital and escaped from the city in 1933. He died in a mental hospital in Czechoslovakia in 1942.Neufert (p. 138ff. and 159ff.) found evidence of this story, told by Luchita Hurtado, Paalen's 2nd wife, in the correspondence of Rainer Paalen with his aunt Fini Gunkel
Paris and surrealism
In Paris he 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 at this time was inspired by Paul Valéry's Eupalinos and tends to macerate and condensate the abstract hardliners with regard to the Surrealists. The pictorial results may be seen as language games: testing the point to which concrete forms may be reduced to latency and the point where they transmit multiple meanings. Paalen anticipated with this research, in a certain sense, the later attempts of such abstractionists as Mark Rothko (Multiforms) and Arshile Gorky and amplified his attempts to visualize his idea of human perception as deeply linked to a cosmic texture of latent or possible contents, with whom every organism is interweaved. In 1934 he married the French poet Alice Phillipot, later known as Alice Rahon and again met frequently 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 at the castle home of Lise Deharme, where he met the Parisian Surrealists and André Breton. An intense friendship developed almost immediately, and Breton involved his new adept in surrealist activities such as the Exposition surréaliste d'objets, which opened at the Galerie Charles Ratton in 1936. Here, Paalen showed L´heure exacte (The Exact Time), a clock with glass eyes and feather hands, which was displayed next to Giacometti's Boule suspendue (Suspended Ball). A small glazed showcase with clay idols called Aux bons soins du navigateur (At the Mercy of the Navigator) was shown, as was Le passage à niveau (The Level Crossing), a wooden root elegantly leaning on a cork wall, along with two other objects made of roots: Le crâne de Voltaire (Voltaire's Skull) and Les cerveaux de Rembrandt (Rembrandt's Brains). That same year Paalen had a solo exhibition of paintings in Paris at the Galerie Pierre, owned by Breton's friend Pierre Loeb. Breton and Penrose included him in the organization of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, where he presented twelve oils, gouaches and objects as well as his first fumage (Dictated by a Candle) representing a ghostly hand performing the act of painting. The contact with Breton deepened during that time and Paalen also participated in the design of Breton's Galerie Gradiva. There he met and worked with Marcel Duchamp and presented his object Chaise envahie de lierre, acquired in the gallery by Marie-Laure de Noailles, who installed it in her famous bathroom, mentioned and illustrated in Harper's Bazaar in April 1938.Harper's Bazaar, April 1938, S. 56, Ghislaine Wood, Surreal things. Making the fantastic real, in: Wood, G. (2007), Surreal Things. Surrealism and Design, London, p.6.
Fumage and first masterpieces
In the course of his association with the Surrealists and their attempts to transform automatic writing into drawing and painting, he was an early modern practitioner of fumage – a technique for generating evocative patterns with the smoke and soot of a lit candle, the earliest documented practitioner of which was American clock maker Silas Hoadley. Between 1936 and 1937 Paalen developed with these visionary-ephemeral forms on canvas, which he then mostly painted over in oil, a number of mature paintings which soon made his international reputation.
The further development in the work of Paalen continues to follow up the idea of a biological-evolutionary-physical-cosmological continuum, in which the human organism can evolve and unfold. Prelude for a series of oil-Fumages within the Surrealist group gave the discreet affair of Pablo Picasso with Alice Rahon which had led to an abortion.Alice's love-letters to Picasso, practically unknown to the public, are stored in the Musée Picasso in Paris; see also Neufert, p. 181f. u. 250ff., who discovered the letters and gives ample insight into the affair and its literary output. The deep crisis of the couple and Paalen's first grave attack of depression led to his first important Surrealist masterpiece, Pays interdit ("Forbidden Land"), an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female goddess and fallen, meteorite-like planets. Paalen had designed his personal model of the permeable poetic soul in the form of a cryptic, abyssal landscape, pervaded by a mixture of feminine mystique and romantic ‘shock’ imagery reminiscent of pre-Celtic faerie mysteries and their cosmic allusions, as these are known in the lyrical tradition of Brittany. This was also the first painting, into which he artfully integrated his fumage, in the extremely fine, crystalline execution of the lower section. In 1937 he realized many paintings in this style, including Fata Alaska.
International Exhibition of Surrealism 1938 and surrealist objects