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拍品專文
“I met her today at an exhibition,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary of Rahon on the day, in May 1945, that the artist’s solo exhibition opened at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. “She is striking in appearance. Tall, dark-haired, sunburned, she looks like a Mexican-Indian woman. But she was born in France.” Rahon had arrived in Mexico in 1939, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with her husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, and the Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer. A protégé of André Breton, who published her first book of poetry, A même la terre (1936), Rahon had earlier circulated among the Parisian avant-garde, posing for Man Ray, designing with Elsa Schiaparelli, and entering into a memorable affair with Pablo Picasso. She turned to painting around the time of her emigration to Mexico, channeling the chromatic abstraction of her poetry onto canvases that embraced the land and its prehistoric past. “Her paintings are completely drawn from subterranean worlds, while her descriptions of Mexico are violent with color, drama, and joy,” Nin concluded of Rahon, who would become a close friend (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 4, 1944-1947, New York, 1971, p. 58).
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was a key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her modernist and Surrealist forebears and friends, Rahon believed in the preternatural power of painting, its “primordial principle…conceived in contemplation” (in Alice Rahon, exh. cat., Willard Gallery, New York, 1951). She doubtless saw a kindred spirit in the Russian avant-garde painter and ethnographer Wassily Kandinsky, whose seminal treatise, On the Spiritual in Art (1912), meditates on the mystical and expressive possibilities of color and on the “inner necessity” that gives meaning to external form. “Spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which it is one of its mightiest agents, is a complicated but definite and simplified uplifting movement,” Kandinsky explained. “People really do live in a spiritual city where forces become suddenly effective—not anticipated by architects and mathematicians. Imagine a great wall tossed to pieces like a flimsy card-house, the chambers of a huge tower soaring to the heavens” (On the Spiritual in Art, New York, 1946, pp. 13-14, 24).
Homenaje a Kandinsky conjures a similarly world-shattering feeling, its linear architecture exploding in a brilliant symphony of geometric color that encircles the outline of a city and its inhabitants. “In the mid-1940s, Rahon started a series of works evocative of her travels to real and imaginary cities,” notes curator Tere Arcq, citing the “legendary city submerged in Douarnenez Bay in Brittany” as well as her “frequent trips to Erongarícuaro, Michoacán,” which inspired the painting, Inner City (n.d.) (“Alice Rahon: Following the Trail of the Marvelous,” in Alice Rahon: Poetic Invocations, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2019, pp. 12-13). In Homenaje a Kandinsky, Rahon imagines a spectral and suggestively synesthetic city, its topology crisscrossed by a constellation of lines and colors etched into a grainy blue-green ground. “Perhaps we have seen the Emerald City in some faraway dream that belongs to the common emotional fund of man,” Rahon reflected. “Entering by the gate of the Seven Colors, we travel along the Rainbow” (Alice Rahon, op. cit., n.p.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was a key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her modernist and Surrealist forebears and friends, Rahon believed in the preternatural power of painting, its “primordial principle…conceived in contemplation” (in Alice Rahon, exh. cat., Willard Gallery, New York, 1951). She doubtless saw a kindred spirit in the Russian avant-garde painter and ethnographer Wassily Kandinsky, whose seminal treatise, On the Spiritual in Art (1912), meditates on the mystical and expressive possibilities of color and on the “inner necessity” that gives meaning to external form. “Spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which it is one of its mightiest agents, is a complicated but definite and simplified uplifting movement,” Kandinsky explained. “People really do live in a spiritual city where forces become suddenly effective—not anticipated by architects and mathematicians. Imagine a great wall tossed to pieces like a flimsy card-house, the chambers of a huge tower soaring to the heavens” (On the Spiritual in Art, New York, 1946, pp. 13-14, 24).
Homenaje a Kandinsky conjures a similarly world-shattering feeling, its linear architecture exploding in a brilliant symphony of geometric color that encircles the outline of a city and its inhabitants. “In the mid-1940s, Rahon started a series of works evocative of her travels to real and imaginary cities,” notes curator Tere Arcq, citing the “legendary city submerged in Douarnenez Bay in Brittany” as well as her “frequent trips to Erongarícuaro, Michoacán,” which inspired the painting, Inner City (n.d.) (“Alice Rahon: Following the Trail of the Marvelous,” in Alice Rahon: Poetic Invocations, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2019, pp. 12-13). In Homenaje a Kandinsky, Rahon imagines a spectral and suggestively synesthetic city, its topology crisscrossed by a constellation of lines and colors etched into a grainy blue-green ground. “Perhaps we have seen the Emerald City in some faraway dream that belongs to the common emotional fund of man,” Rahon reflected. “Entering by the gate of the Seven Colors, we travel along the Rainbow” (Alice Rahon, op. cit., n.p.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park