Happy Surrealist Saturday!!
One thing I am realizing with almost each exploration is how there are always a few characters present in every single surrealist story. Their impact is so deep that surrealism wouldn’t have had such a big influence on society without them.
And the thing is, these people are barely mentioned when surrealism is brought into discussion. One of these people is the one I explored today, whose name is Wolfgang Paalen.
Wolfgang Robert Paalen was born on July 22, 1905, in Vienna, Austria. His father, Gustav Robert Paalen, was an industrialist whose fortune came from a remarkable pair of inventions: the vacuum cleaner and the Thermos bottle.
As a child, Wolfgang moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Rome, growing up surrounded by figures like Gustav Mahler (Austrian composer), Albert Einstein (German-born theoretical physicist), and Sigmund Freud (Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis). The family's social world was the intellectual summit of fin-de-siècle Europe.
But his personal world was shadowed by grief from early on. His brother Hans-Peter died unexpectedly in a Berlin asylum. His other brother Rainer shot himself in the head (Wolfgang witnessed it) and survived only to die in a psychiatric institution in Czechoslovakia in 1942. These losses never entirely left him.
He arrived in Paris in the late 1920s and studied briefly under Fernand Léger (French Cubist painter and pioneer of modern art). His early paintings were abstract and Cubist-inflected, and he moved through the Abstraction-Création group alongside figures like Hans Arp (French-German sculptor and Dadaist) and Jean Hélion (French abstract painter). But Surrealism was the magnetic pull he couldn't resist.
In the summer of 1935, Paalen met André Breton (French poet and self-appointed pope of Surrealism) and joined the movement almost immediately, alongside his wife, the poet Alice Rahon.
Breton saw in him a painter who was also a genuine thinker. Within a year, Paalen had invented something that would change the vocabulary of automatism forever.
He called it fumage.
Let me describe to you this technique which I find to be really simple: he held a lit candle beneath a primed canvas, and let the smoke do the drawing. The soot moved only by heat and air, coiling into ghostly forms that no conscious hand could have planned. Paalen would then complete or enhance what the flame had begun.
His first fumage bore the title "Dictated by a Candle", and that title tells you everything about his philosophy. The artist's role was to listen and to find, as he put it, "the invisible within the visible."
The technique made such an impression on Breton that Salvador Dalí (Spanish Surrealist painter, master of the uncanny) and Roberto Matta (Chilean Surrealist painter) both adopted versions of it. Paalen became one of the central forces in what would be Surrealism's defining public moment.
In 1938, he co-designed the legendary Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris alongside Marcel Duchamp (French-American artist and pioneer of conceptual provocation), Man Ray (American artist and photographer), and Dalí.
The show featured works by Picasso (Spanish painter and sculptor), Miró (Spanish painter and key Surrealist voice), and Magritte (Belgian painter and master of the uncanny image).
For his contribution, Paalen created an installation called Avant La Mare which was an artificial pond with real water-lilies and reeds on a floor of dead leaves and cemetery mud, beneath Duchamp's ceiling of twelve hundred coal sacks. Recent scholarship suggests Paalen had an enormous influence on the design of the Great Hall itself.
Then as in 1939, as the Nazis advanced into France, Paalen accepted an invitation from Frida Kahlo (Mexican painter and one of the most iconic figures of 20th century art) and fled to Mexico with Alice Rahon and Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer.
On the way, he made a voyage through the Pacific Northwest of Canada, where he encountered the totem poles and ceremonial objects of Indigenous peoples such as the Haida, the Tlingit, and the Tsimshian. He was stunned and he began collecting, studying, and writing. What he found in that art was a vision of the cosmos that was both ancient and entirely alive. It was something Surrealism, for all its ambitions, had never reached.
Mexico welcomed him into an extraordinary circle. Diego Rivera (Mexican muralist and one of the great political painters of the 20th century) and Kahlo housed him near the Casa Azul. He became close with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.
In 1940, he co-organized the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City alongside the Peruvian poet César Moro, a show that brought together 108 contemporary works alongside pre-Columbian art and masks from Rivera's private collection.
It was one of the most radical curatorial gestures of its era as it was both a refusal to treat Indigenous art as decoration, and an insistence on it as a living intellectual tradition.
In 1942, he published "Farewell to Surrealism" in the first issue of his new magazine, DYN. It was a direct challenge to Breton (then in New York exile, editing the rival journal VVV), who Paalen accused of dogmatism, ideological rigidity, and an inability to engage seriously with science.
DYN was bilingual, interdisciplinary, combining art theory with quantum physics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and philosophy. Its double "Amerindian Number" in 1943 was the first serious art magazine to treat Indigenous North American art as equal in intellectual and aesthetic weight to the European avant-garde.
The magazine circulated through the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, and young New York painters devoured it.
Jackson Pollock (American Abstract Expressionist painter and pioneer of action painting) owned every single issue. Robert Motherwell (American Abstract Expressionist painter and founder of the New York School) later said he received his "post-graduate education in Surrealism" from Paalen. Barnett Newman (American Abstract Expressionist painter and theorist of the sublime) listed Paalen alongside Pollock, Rothko, Hoffman, and Gorky as "the men in the new art movement."
Paalen's essay on totem art deeply influenced the emerging iconographies of Mark Rothko (American painter known for luminous color fields), Adolph Gottlieb (American Abstract Expressionist painter), and Clyfford Still (American Abstract Expressionist painter). Scholars now describe DYN as the "missing link" between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
Yet Paalen himself remained mostly in Mexico, invisible to the Manhattan scene he was quietly shaping. He was described, more than once, as an "intellectual secret agent."
In 1949, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and formed the Dynaton group with painters Gordon Onslow Ford (British-American Surrealist painter and meditation practitioner) and Lee Mullican (American painter associated with cosmic abstraction).
They exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1951. He reconciled with Breton in Paris in the early 1950s, spent summers at Breton's house at Saint-Cirq-la-Popie, and exhibited again with the Surrealists. But the reunion never fully settled.
He returned to Mexico and on September 24, 1959, in the silver mining town of Taxco, he took his own life. He was 54 years old.
Today, his work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Britain in London, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
In 2009, his 1938 fumage painting "Paysage (Pays) médusé" sold at Christie's for €373,000 which is nearly ten times its high estimate.
Between 2021 and 2022, major retrospective exhibitions placed him in the same rooms as the figures he helped shape: Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Met and Tate Modern, and Surrealism and Magic at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The art world is catching up.
Oh I almost forgot to tell you my favorite Paalen story. During a 1940 opening at the Julien Levy Gallery (the New York gallery that was a crucial platform for European Surrealism in America) in New York, he switched off the lights and walked through the crowd holding a single burning candle.
Gathered around him were Pollock, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Baziotes, and Kamrowski which were the future of American painting, watching the man who invented fumage move through the dark. He had come to them not with a manifesto or a theory, but with a flame.
Thank you for reading!🌹
