Wolfgang Paalen

Wolfgang Paalen (Born July 7, 1905 in Vienna; Died September 24, 1959 in Taxco, Mexico) was an Austrian-Mexican painter and theorist.

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 Styie where his father had a fashionable health resort. 1912 the family moved to Berlin and to the silesian city of Zagan, 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, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Gestalttheory of Max Wertheimer. After another year of studies in Paris and Cassis (1925/26) where he met Jean (Janco) Varda and Georges Braque, he visited the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich and Saint Tropez until 1928.

After 1928 he stayed again in Cassis and Paris, studied shortly with Fernand Léger and became a member of the group Abstraction-Creation in 1933 and the Parisian Surrealists around André Breton in 1936, participating in all its major exhibitions and outreach thereafter, until he travelled to New York in May 1939. The same year he travels through British Columbia with his wife, the French painter Alice Rahon and his friend Eva Sulzer. In autumn 1939 he followed an invitation of Frida Kahlo and settled in Mexiko, where together with the Peruvian poet César Moro he curated the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galeria de Arte Mexicano. During the war years Paalen retreated more and more to his studio in San Angel, newly built by the German architect Max Cetto.

Due to his magazine, his presence and exhibitions in New York, 1940 Julien Levy, 1945 Peggy Guggenheim Art of this Century and 1946 Galerie Nierendorf, he influenced significantly the genesis of Abstract Expressionism. 1949 he worked in San Francisco with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican 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 into drawing and painting, he created Fumage – 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 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, Man Ray and Salvador Dali he was among the responsibles for the design of the International Exhibition of Surrealism 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 and jazz, 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 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 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" (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 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, with an own concept of totemism, gestalt-theory, with his criticisms of dialectical materialism and western dualistic concepts, with his analysis of cave painting 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 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, CT (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", Galeria 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" (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2000)

External links

* [http://www.paalen-archiv.com Paalen archive: official website about Wolfgang Paalen]
* [http://abstraction.uwaterloo.ca/MainContent/Text-linsley-neufert.html Interesting conversation about Paalen´s "possibility space" and contemporary abstraction]