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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity from the Paalen Archive in Berlin signed by Dr. Andreas Neufert and dated 5 April 2013.
An artist and theorist, Paalen brought a richly imaginative and erudite interpretation of Surrealist aesthetics to bear on mid-century modernism across the Americas. Born in Vienna, Paalen studied and worked throughout Europe--Rome, Provence, Berlin--in the 1920s before settling in Paris by 1929 and becoming involved with the group Abstraction-Création. Emerging ethnographic interests, as well his marriage to the poet and painter Alice Rahon, brought Paalen into the orbit of Surrealism in the early 1930s. He contributed the technique of fumage, a method of drawing with the smoke of a candle, to the Surrealist repertoire and exhibited "poem-objects" and paintings in the major Surrealist Internationals between 1936 and 1939. In 1939, he and Rahon departed Europe for the Americas, spending three months along the Northwest Coast and then traveling to Mexico at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Paalen settled permanently in Mexico, advancing Surrealist and ethnographic interests through DYN, an interdisciplinary avant-garde journal, and later founding the group Dynaton in San Francisco with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican.
Paalen is perhaps best known for the works from what he called his "Totemic" period, which takes its name from a series of paintings begun in 1937 titled Paysages totémiques. He began the series following a trip taken that summer to the Böhmerwald (Bohemian Forest) in Central Europe. In close proximity to his childhood home in Sagan for the first time in ten years and at an anxious moment of fascist consolidation, Paalen located a personal totem in the form of his ancestral landscape. "The totem poles are several beings held together by the compulsion of generations," he wrote of the Paysages totémiques, "They grow into an empty sky; then suddenly one stretches out his bony hand as if to cover the spring of his still sprouting force. These pictures still have a comparative quiet, the rest of the pole."[1]
The present work shares the preternatural and catastrophic iconography of Paalen's Paysages totémiques. Masses of eerily anthropomorphic bones measure the magnitude of destruction and danger; floating and painfully distorted, the bones foreshadow the pyres of war that came just two years later. Mottled stains of carbon deposits at the upper-right-hand corner, left by fumage, intensify the painting's convulsive atmosphere of cataclysm and apocalypse. A portentous and spectral scene, Paysage totémique is nevertheless illuminated by highlights of iridescent color that may suggest lingering traces of a totemic spirit moving through the wreckage of bones and bodies. Paalen's associations with Surrealism intensified in 1937, and the following year André Breton praised his contributions to the movement: "Wolfgang Paalen has never ceased to reign over the regions where desolation lurks, over land hemmed in by brushwood and shipwreck, enforcing an order which celebrates the glory of spring like the sap when it floods up through the wild clematis."[2]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Wolfgang Paalen, quoted in Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 54.
2) André Breton, "Wolfgang Paalen," in Surrealism and Painting,
trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 137.
An artist and theorist, Paalen brought a richly imaginative and erudite interpretation of Surrealist aesthetics to bear on mid-century modernism across the Americas. Born in Vienna, Paalen studied and worked throughout Europe--Rome, Provence, Berlin--in the 1920s before settling in Paris by 1929 and becoming involved with the group Abstraction-Création. Emerging ethnographic interests, as well his marriage to the poet and painter Alice Rahon, brought Paalen into the orbit of Surrealism in the early 1930s. He contributed the technique of fumage, a method of drawing with the smoke of a candle, to the Surrealist repertoire and exhibited "poem-objects" and paintings in the major Surrealist Internationals between 1936 and 1939. In 1939, he and Rahon departed Europe for the Americas, spending three months along the Northwest Coast and then traveling to Mexico at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Paalen settled permanently in Mexico, advancing Surrealist and ethnographic interests through DYN, an interdisciplinary avant-garde journal, and later founding the group Dynaton in San Francisco with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican.
Paalen is perhaps best known for the works from what he called his "Totemic" period, which takes its name from a series of paintings begun in 1937 titled Paysages totémiques. He began the series following a trip taken that summer to the Böhmerwald (Bohemian Forest) in Central Europe. In close proximity to his childhood home in Sagan for the first time in ten years and at an anxious moment of fascist consolidation, Paalen located a personal totem in the form of his ancestral landscape. "The totem poles are several beings held together by the compulsion of generations," he wrote of the Paysages totémiques, "They grow into an empty sky; then suddenly one stretches out his bony hand as if to cover the spring of his still sprouting force. These pictures still have a comparative quiet, the rest of the pole."[1]
The present work shares the preternatural and catastrophic iconography of Paalen's Paysages totémiques. Masses of eerily anthropomorphic bones measure the magnitude of destruction and danger; floating and painfully distorted, the bones foreshadow the pyres of war that came just two years later. Mottled stains of carbon deposits at the upper-right-hand corner, left by fumage, intensify the painting's convulsive atmosphere of cataclysm and apocalypse. A portentous and spectral scene, Paysage totémique is nevertheless illuminated by highlights of iridescent color that may suggest lingering traces of a totemic spirit moving through the wreckage of bones and bodies. Paalen's associations with Surrealism intensified in 1937, and the following year André Breton praised his contributions to the movement: "Wolfgang Paalen has never ceased to reign over the regions where desolation lurks, over land hemmed in by brushwood and shipwreck, enforcing an order which celebrates the glory of spring like the sap when it floods up through the wild clematis."[2]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Wolfgang Paalen, quoted in Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen: Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 54.
2) André Breton, "Wolfgang Paalen," in Surrealism and Painting,
trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 137.