43 Facts About Wolfgang Paalen

Wolfgang Robert Paalen was an Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor, and art philosopher.

Wolfgang Paalen rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.

Wolfgang Paalen was born in one of the famous Wienzeilenhauser designed by Otto Wagner in Vienna, Austria.

Wolfgang Paalen was the first of four sons of the Austrian-Jewish merchant and inventor Gustav Robert Paalen, and his German wife, the actress Clothilde Emilie Gunkel.

Wolfgang Paalen became a well known collector of Old Master paintings with masterpieces, like Francisco Goya's Senora Sabasa Garcia, which he had acquired from the Berlin patron Henri James Simon and is today one of the highlights of the National Gallery, Washington.

The first years of his life Wolfgang Paalen spent between Vienna and Styria where his father had opened the fashionable health resort Tobelbad, in the presence of Franz Joseph I of Austria, to whom he dedicated a memorial still visible today.

In Tobelbad Wolfgang Paalen senior received such prominent guests as Gustav Mahler, poet and artist Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, Julius Meier-Graefe, Ida Zweig, among others.

Some sources claim that it was Wolfgang Paalen who introduced Alma Mahler, during her visit in Tobelbad in 1910, to the German architect Walter Gropius, whom she married later.

Wolfgang Paalen attended different schools in Sagan, and during the war his parents engaged a private tutor.

Wolfgang Paalen witnessed the event, although Rainer survived, following treatment in a Berlin hospital and escaped from the city in 1933.

Wolfgang Paalen died in a mental hospital in Czechoslovakia in 1942.

Wolfgang Paalen left the group in 1935, together with Hans Arp and Jean Helion.

Wolfgang Paalen anticipated with this research, in a certain sense, the later attempts of such abstractionists as Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky and amplified his attempts to visualize his idea of human perception as deeply linked to a cosmic texture of latent or possible contents, with whom every organism is interweaved.

That same year Wolfgang Paalen had a solo exhibition of paintings in Paris at the Galerie Pierre, owned by Breton's friend Pierre Loeb.

The contact with Breton deepened during that time and Wolfgang Paalen participated in the design of Breton's Galerie Gradiva.

Between 1936 and 1937 Wolfgang 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.

The further development in the work of Wolfgang Paalen continues to follow up the idea of a biological-evolutionary-physical-cosmological continuum, in which the human organism can evolve and unfold.

Wolfgang Paalen had designed his personal model of the permeable poetic soul in the form of a cryptic, abyssal landscape, pervaded by a mixture of feminine mystique and romantic 'shock' imagery reminiscent of pre-Celtic faerie mysteries and their cosmic allusions, as these are known in the lyrical tradition of Brittany.

Together with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Paalen was among those responsible for the design of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he produced a floor, with dead leaves and mud from the Montparnasse Cemetery, and an installation named Avant La Mare, consisting of an artificial pond with water, real water-lilies and reeds, beneath Duchamp's ceiling of empty coal sacks.

The doll Wolfgang Paalen decorated came with a silk scarf, a giant bat on her head and an eerie, mushroom-covered leaf-dress.

Wolfgang Paalen participated in the editorial of the catalogue, published as Dictionnaire abrege du Surrealisme to the show, in which his most famous object, Nuage articule, was discreetly announced as a drawing.

Recent research suggests that Wolfgang Paalen had a huge influence on the design of the exhibition's Great Hall.

Besides Nuage articule, of which two versions are known and preserved In addition to Nuage articule, Wolfgang Paalen presented other objects in the 1938 surrealist exhibition, such as: Potence avec paratonnerre, a larger-than-life wooden gibbet with lightning rods and a dedication plaque to the German philosopher and experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; Le moi et le soi ; and a version of Chaise envahie de lierre.

Wolfgang Paalen published the Lichtenberg-text Gottinger Taschenalmanach in surrealist magazine Minotaure with illustrations by him.

Wolfgang Paalen invited the couple to Mexico, where Paalen wanted to organize a Surrealist exhibition together with Breton.

Wolfgang Paalen justified his refusal in a letter to Breton with his general critique on the pseudo-religious paternal fixations of the Surrealists who, in his opinion, didn't dispose of the means to find other ways out of the spiritual hole, the crisis of Marxism has left in their minds, than to look for new political fathers.

Wolfgang Paalen helped to organize immigration visas for the surrealists in Vichy-France through the Union Mexico-Francia and Julien Levy.

In DYN Wolfgang Paalen theoretically hedged his concept of possibility on various levels, with quantum theory, with his own concept of totemism, gestalt theory, with his criticisms of dialectical materialism and western dualistic concepts, with his analysis of cave painting, and so on.

Important is that they transform the rhythmical appearance of the fumage imprints into a neo-cubist rhythm, which Wolfgang Paalen then compares with the fugue and jazz, through a mosaic-like fracture and complementary contrasts.

Wolfgang Paalen wants to create the atmosphere of a deeply moving, gripping encounter with beings that themselves remain silent.

Wolfgang Paalen dares to pretend that someone can grow by the painter.

Wolfgang Paalen has the same hope as Pygmalion, to fall in love with his creation and to be outgrown by it.

Wolfgang Paalen waits for the picture to renounce allegiance to its creator.

Wolfgang Paalen understood his picture beings as a kind of pictorial version of the ancient choros tragicos, the tragic chorus effect, conceived in Nietzsche's writing on The Birth of Tragedy.

Wolfgang Paalen decided to move to San Francisco with his new family, where he worked with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican in a newly formed association, the Dynaton group.

Back in Mexico Wolfgang Paalen organized 1951 a longer stay in Paris.

Together with his new fiancee, the American painter Marie Wilson, Wolfgang Paalen lived for the next 3 years in Kurt Seligmann's atelier-building in the Impasse Villa Seurat in Paris, built by Andre Lurcat.

Paradoxically Wolfgang Paalen produced a number of masterly works towards the end of this last period, as well as theatre plays and short stories, which reflect his ambivalent state of mind and growing depressions.

Rumours of Paalen having been involved in illegal looting of archaeological sites in Yucatan inspired the American author and theologian Arthur A Cohen to his novel Acts of Theft.

Wolfgang Paalen wrote three theatre plays and various unpublished stories, such as Der Axolotl, Paloma Palomita; his play The Beam of the Balance, a tragic-comedy, reflects the unbroken power of Stalin's totalitarian terror-regime, the release of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the danger of the unbalanced scientific human mind in general.

Wolfgang Paalen's collected essays on art from DYN, Form and Sense, were re-published in 2013 by Deborah Rosenthal with a foreword by Martica Sawin.

The biography of Wolfgang Paalen, published 2015 in German under the title Auf Liebe und Tod is currently published in two volumes in English.

In November 2015 Wolfgang Paalen's painting Les Cosmogones sold for 382.000.