1933
Paris, France
Wolfgang Paalen in Paris.
1940
Mexico
Portrait of Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico.
1942
Wolfgang Paalen with his portrait of André Breton.
1933
Paris, France
Wolfgang Paalen in Paris.
1940
Mexico
Portrait of Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico.
1942
Wolfgang Paalen with his portrait of André Breton.
Wolfgang Paalen with his work.
artist sculptor art philosopher
Ethnicity:
Wolfgang Paalen's father was Austrian-Jewish and his mother was German.
Paalen was born in Vienna, Austria, on July 7, 1905. He was the first of four sons of Gustav Robert Paalen, a merchant and inventor, and Clothilde Emilie Gunkel, an actress.
Wolfgang Paalen spent the first years of his life mainly in Vienna and Styria. In 1912 the Paalen family moved to Berlin and to the Silesian city of Sagan (today Żagań). He attended different schools there. In 1919 the family moved to Rome. Leo von König, a German painter, became his first art teacher. Later in Rome, under the guidance of the archeologist Ludwig Pollak, Wolfgang Paalen became an expert in Greek and Roman archaeology.
In 1923 Paalen went to Berlin to apply for the Academy. However, it was unsuccessful. In 1925 he had an exhibition at the Berlin Secession and studied aesthetics, being greatly influenced by Nietzsche, Julius Meier-Graefe, Schopenhauer and the Gestalt theory of Max Wertheimer. After one more year of studies, in Paris and Cassis during 1925-1926, he befriended Jean Varda (Janco), Roland Penrose, and Georges Braque, he also attended the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich.
Starting from the 1930s Paalen resided in Paris. In 1933 he became a member of the Abstraction-Creation group and left it in 1935, together with Hans Arp and Jean Hélion. His artworks at this time were inspired by Paul Valery's Eupalinos. In 1935 Wolfgang Paalen got acquainted with the Parisian Surrealists and André Breton, who became his close friend.
He became a member of the Surrealist movement in 1935 and invented a technique of painting with a smoking candle called Fumage. In the year 1939, fleeing the Nazi uprising in Europe, Wolfgang Paalen went to Mexico City. In autumn 1939 Paalen participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galería de Arte Mexicano together with the Peruvian poet César Moro. It started in January 1940, taking place in the new gallery rooms of Ines Amor. Paalen was a creative artist, who finally rejected official Surrealism, considering it oppressive. During this time he launched his art-magazine DYN, based on the travel-notebooks, films and photographs of this voyage.
By 1944, Paalen had published six issues of DYN, and started his exploration of automatism and its implications on consciousness and the unconscious. His writings and paintings drew a lot of attention from artists around the world and are still discussed by scientists, artists and poets. The movement Paalen inspired, Dynaton, holds an important place in art history.
Wolfgang Paalen's last years in Mexico were characterized by serious health problems, mostly originated in his bipolar disposition. He lived in an old house with studio in the small town Tepoztlán in Morelos. There he worked during the last years of his life constantly suffering from depression.
Wolfgang Paalen was a crucial figure at the origins of modernism. Through his work and his important art magazine DYN, he is credited to be a major accelerator for the artistic revolution of the early-mid 20th century, inspiring the work of Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and other abstract expressionists.
Paalen's estate in Mexico, including papers and photographs, was donated by the heirs of Isabel Marin de Paalen to the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City. Between May and July 2007 a collection of his work was exhibited at the Frey Norris gallery in San Francisco. In 2014 the Wendi Norris Gallery, also in San Francisco, exhibited major works in the solo-retrospective Wolfgang Paalen, Philosopher of the Possible. His collected most important essays on art from DYN, Form and Sense, were re-published in 2013 by Deborah Rosenthal with a foreword by Martica Sawin.
His works can be found around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the State Museum of Berlin.
L'heure exacte II
Paysage Boreal
Untitled (Composition)
Combat des Princes Saturniens III
Messenger from the Three Poles
Untitled (Fumage-Encrage)
Untitled (Automatic Drawing)
La Roue De L'Orage
Study for Totem Landscape of My Childhood
Fumage
Combat de princes saturniens III
Untitled (Automatic Drawing)
Tete
La Femme Blonde
Space Unbound
Sœurs obsidiennes
Beatrice perdue
Ciel de pieuvre
Les cosmogones
Personages
Eroun
Taches solaires
Rencontre sur une plage
Selam trilogy
That's life
Fata Alaska
Forbidden Land
Untitled 1
Les tours de lumière
Metamorphose interrompue
Les etrangers
Tripolar
L'Enclume
He became a member of Abstraction-Création in 1934 and joined the Surindépendants in Paris between 1932 and 1935.
In 1934 Wolfgang Paalen married Alice Phillipot, a French poet, later known as Alice Rahon. In 1946 he divorced with Alice. He then remarried Luchita Hurtado, a Venezuelan designer and artist. She had two children from her former marriage.
