Wolfgang Paalen
Encyclopedia
Wolfgang Paalen was an Austrian-Mexican painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 and theorist.

Early life

Wolfgang Paalen was born in Vienna in 1905, as the first of four sons of the Austrian-Jewish merchant and inventor Gustav Robert Paalen, and his German wife, the actress Clothilde Emilie Gunkel. The first years of his life he spent between Vienna and Styria where his father had a fashionable health resort. 1912 the family moved to Berlin and to the Silesia
Silesia
Silesia is a historical region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland, with smaller parts also in the Czech Republic, and Germany.Silesia is rich in mineral and natural resources, and includes several important industrial areas. Silesia's largest city and historical capital is Wrocław...

n city of Żagań
Zagan
Zagan may refer to:*Zagan - a demon in the Ars Goetia*Żagań - a town in west Poland...

, where his father had bought a castle, the St. Rochusburg. Wolfgang Paalen went to different schools in Sagan, before his parents engaged a private teacher.

In 1919, the family moved to Rome, where the Paalens received many guests, such as Leo von König who became Wolfgang's first teacher. In 1924, he went back to Berlin where he applied for the Academy without success. In 1925, he exhibited in the Berliner Sezession  and went through a further formation in aesthetics, deeply influenced by Julius Meier-Graefe
Julius Meier-Graefe
Julius Meier-Graefe was a German art critic and novelist. His writings on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism as well as on art of earlier and more recent generations, with his most important contributions translated into French, Russian and English, are considered to have been instrumental for the...

, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Gestalt
Gestalt
Die Gestalt is a German word for form or shape. It is used in English to refer to a concept of 'wholeness'. Gestalt may also refer to:* Gestalt psychology , a theory of mind and brain, describing the Gestalt effect....

 theory of Max Wertheimer
Max Wertheimer
- External links :* * * * *...

. After another year of studies in Paris and Cassis (1925/26) where he met Jean (Janco) Varda and Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...

, he visited the art school of Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...

 in Munich and Saint Tropez until 1928.

After 1928, he stayed again in Cassis and Paris, studied shortly with Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...

 and became a member of the group Abstraction-Creation
Abstraction-Création
Abstraction-Création was a loose association of artists formed in Paris in 1931 to counteract the influence of the Surrealist group led by André Breton....

 in 1933 and the Parisian Surrealists around André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

 in 1936, participating in all its major exhibitions and outreach thereafter, until he travelled to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in May 1939. The same year he traveled through British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

 with his wife, the French painter Alice Rahon
Alice Rahon
Alice Rahon was a French Surrealist painter and writer.- Life :Alice Rahon was born in the village Chenecey-Buillon in the French Franche-Comté region. In 1931 she met the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen whom she married later. She was inspired by his Surrealist poetry...

 and his friend Eva Sulzer. In autumn 1939 he followed an invitation of Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....

 and settled in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, where together with the Peruvian poet César Moro
César Moro
César Moro is the pseudonym of Alfredo Quíspez Asín a Peruvian born poet and painter. He travelled to Paris in 1925 and most of his poetic works are written in French.-External links:* *...

 he curated the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galería de Arte Mexicano
Galería de Arte Mexicano
The Galería de Arte Mexicano was founded by Carolina and Inés Amor at march 7, in Mexico City and has been the first gallery of Mexican art. The gallery building was the first building in Mexico of Andrés Casillas de Alba....

. During the war years Paalen retreated more and more to his studio in San Angel, newly built by the German architect Max Cetto
Max Cetto
Max Ludwig Cetto was a German-Mexican architect, historian of architecture, and professor.Born in Koblenz, Germany, Max Cetto studied at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Munich and Berlin. At the latter he studied with Hans Poelzig, graduating as an engineer–architect in 1926...

.

Due to his magazine, his presence and exhibitions in New York City, 1940 Julien Levy, 1945 Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...

 Art of this Century and 1946 Galerie Nierendorf, he influenced significantly the genesis of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

. 1949 he worked in San Francisco with Gordon Onslow Ford
Gordon Onslow Ford
Gordon Onslow Ford was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton....

 and Lee Mullican
Lee Mullican
Lee Mullican was a painter and art teacher, and an influential member of the Dynaton Movement. He was a member of the UCLA art faculty from 1962 to 1990. He married Luchita Hurtado; their son Matt Mullican is a New York City based artist; their son John Mullican is a Los Angeles based writer and...

 in the Dynaton group, before he went to Paris in 1952 and back again to Mexico in 1954. He committed suicide in 1959 in Taxco/Mexico.

Work

In the course of his association with the Surrealists and their attempts to transform automatic writing
Automatic writing
Automatic writing or psychography is writing which the writer states to be produced from a subconscious and/or spiritual source without conscious awareness of the content.-History:...

 into drawing and painting, he created fumage
Fumage
Fumage is a surrealist painting technique invented by Wolfgang Paalen in which impressions are made by the smoke of a candle or kerosene lamp on a piece of paper or canvas.It was later employed by Salvador Dalí, who called it "sfumato"....

 – a technique for generating evocative patterns with the smoke and soot of a lit candle. Between 1936 and 1937 Paalen developed with these visionary-ephemeral
Ephemeral
Ephemeral things are transitory, existing only briefly. Typically the term is used to describe objects found in nature, although it can describe a wide range of things....

 forms on canvas, which he then mostly painted over in oil, a number of mature paintings which soon made his international reputation. Together with Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...

 and Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

 he was among the responsibles for the design of the International Exhibition of Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 in the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris 1938, where he installed one of the first environments beneath Duchamps ceiling of empty sacks of coal. The doll Paalen decorates, with her silk scarf, the bat above her head, and the eerie leaf dress covered with mushrooms, resembles the scarcely visible, hovering and gliding totemistic fairy creatures of his paintings. It was particularly in the forties and fifties that Paalen's art played a major role in changing the conception of abstract art. Paintings such as Les premiers spaciales of 1941 set entirely on the new pictorial space because they concentrate on pictorially immanent means: Rhythm, light and colour. Important is that they transform the rhythmical appearance of the fumage imprints into a neo-cubist rhythm, which Paalen then compares with the fugue
Fugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....

 and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

, through a mosaic-like fracture and complementary contrasts. He wants to create the atmosphere of a deeply moving, gripping encounter with beings that themselves remain silent. There is no action, no metamorphosis
Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation...

 in them and nothing happens with them in the space. The picture itself is the being, or a frozen resonance of it. Precisely because of this total silence, every topical expectation put to them is reflected as a question. In a cartoon published by Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...

 in the fifties, Paalen's suggestion from Form and Sense is repeated: "Paintings no longer represent; it is no longer the task of art to answer naive questions. Today it has become the role of the painting to look at the spectator and ask him: what do you represent?" Paalen understood his picture beings as a kind of pictorial version of the ancient choros tragicos, the tragic chorus, conceived in Nietzsche's writing on The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. It is the deep existential foundation of reality, what he is interested in. Although it becomes common practice after 1947, until this time, nobody had placed so much responsibility on the viewer as Paalen did with his rhetoric and pictorial language.

Theory

In the spring of 1942 the New York art world witnesses the result of Paalen's intense work in the first years of exile in Mexico – the art journal Dyn
Dyn
Dyn or DYN may refer to:* DYN * Dyne, unit of force* DynDNS...

(derived from the Greek tò Dynaton – "that which is possible"). In its first issue he publicly announces to his friend Breton his Farewell to Surrealism. In the second issue he scandalised his former advocate again by publishing a survey on Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...

 and an article with the provocative title The dialectical Gospel. In DYN Paalen theoretically hedged his concept of possibility on various levels, with quantum theory
Quantum theory
Quantum theory may mean:In science:*Quantum mechanics: a subset of quantum physics explaining the physical behaviours at atomic and sub-atomic levels*Old quantum theory under the Bohr model...

, with an own concept of totemism
Totemism
Totemism is a system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant...

, gestalt
Gestalt
Die Gestalt is a German word for form or shape. It is used in English to refer to a concept of 'wholeness'. Gestalt may also refer to:* Gestalt psychology , a theory of mind and brain, describing the Gestalt effect....

 theory, with his criticisms of dialectical materialism and western dualistic concepts, with his analysis of cave painting
Cave painting
Cave paintings are paintings on cave walls and ceilings, and the term is used especially for those dating to prehistoric times. The earliest European cave paintings date to the Aurignacian, some 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known...

 etc.. Via his journal published in Mexico between 1942 and 1944 with a total of 5 issues he temporarily advanced to be one of the most influential art theorist during the war. In seven large essays and countless smaller articles and reviews he discussed in detail all current hot topics that also concerned the young artists in New York, and in response received their full attention. With the exception of Totem Art, all essays are republished under the title Form and Sense by Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....

 in New York as the first issue of the series of writings titled Problems of Contemporary Art in which also the first papers of the later Abstract Expressionists, like Possibilities, were published. Paalen's short sojourns in New York and the two solo exhibitions made him known as a painter in artist's circles, however his predominant absence from the New York art scene and the wide reception of Dyn and Form and Sense fostered his image as a kind of intellectual secret agent primarily exerting indirect influence on the events through his intensely discussed ideas.

Literature

Biographies (selection)
  • Gustav Regler, Wolfgang Paalen, New York (Nierendorf) 1946
  • Andreas Neufert, Wolfgang Paalen, Im Inneren des Wals, Wien-New York (Springer) 1999 (Monografie und Werksverzeichnis)
  • Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen. Artist and Theorist of the Avantgarde, Westport, Connecticut (Praeger) 2002


Exhibitions and Catalogues (selection)
  • Wolfgang Paalen, Paris (Galerie Renou et Colle) 1938 (Vorwort André Breton)
  • Wolfgang Paalen, London (Galerie Guggenheim Jeune) 1939
  • Surrealismo, Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City 1940
  • Wolfgang Paalen, New York (Galerie Art of this Century) 1945
  • Dynaton A New Vision, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco 1951
  • Domaine de Paalen, Paris (Galerie Galanis-Hentschel) 1954
  • Hommage à 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
  • Wolfgang Paalen, Zwischen Surrealismus und Abstraktion, Museum Moderner Kunst Wien (Ritter) 1993
  • Wolfgang Paalen, Retrospectiva, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil, Mexico-City (Imprenta Madero) 1994


Reprint of DYN
  • Kloyber, Christian, ed. Wolfgang Paalen's DYN: The Complete Reprint Editor's Note by Christian Kloyber; Introductury essays by Lourdes Andrade, Guy Buchholtzer, Gordon Onslow Ford, André Breton, Octavio Paz (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2000)

External links

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