WOLFGANG PAALEN, ARTIST AND THEORIST OF THE AVANT-GARDE

par Susan Power

Member of the surrealist movement from the 1930s, artist, editor of the review DYN, art theorist, collector of Amerindian and pre-Columbian art, Wolfgang Paalen remains an essential figure of European and American avant-gardes and of surrealism in particular.

In the preface to the catalog of the Paalen retrospective, organized by Georges Dupin at the Librairie Loliée in 1960 (one year after the artist's death), the Mexican poet Octavio Paz speaks of the difficulty of situating his work in the history of modern art as well as in surrealism, and of that of "grasping its true significance" (2). Ten years later in 1970, José Pierre protests against the oblivion into which Paalen has fallen (3). It was therefore necessary to wait more than three decades for us to finally have a decisive book on Paalen.

This book is what Amy Winter, art historian (4), has been able to bring us.

It is the fruit of long years of research within the framework of a doctorate. It is the culmination of important documentary work of biographical reconstruction. It is also an in-depth analysis of his artistic production, supported by the meticulous study of the artist's theoretical and critical texts, on a multitude of archival documents, and on numerous interviews with the artist's close associates.

Halfway between biography and critical interpretation, this precious work reconstructs Paalen's eventful life between Europe and America: his childhood shared between Vienna and Berlin, his artistic training in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Munich and Provence, the beginning of his career in Paris between 1929 and 1939, then the stays in the New World, exile in Mexico, visits to New York and California.

Divided into eleven chapters, this work chronologically follows Paalen's extraordinary journey, from his Austrian origins (he was born near Vienna in 1905), to his tragic end in Mexico in 1959.

Although Paalen is mainly known for his participation in the surrealist group in Paris and as the inventor of the automatic technique of fumage, Amy Winter is especially interested in his period of Mexican exile, from September 1939. During this exile, he edited the review Dyn, in six issues between 1942 and 1944. This period will also be the most fruitful regarding his plastic work. The author shows us how much Paalen's ideas and those of his review had repercussions on the artists of American expressionism.

It is not possible for us here to give an exact account of the density of information and analyses contained in this study, so great is its richness in this domain. We can however say that this book definitively marks a date, and we hope that it will finally be able to open a new cycle of research on Paalen, these researches having with it a solid starting point, the long-awaited reference book.

Let us dwell however on two of the numerous propositions advanced by our author.

Amy Winter attributes the artist's 1946 monograph, signed Gustav Regler, to Paalen himself. This hypothesis is based on the discovery of manuscripts in Paalen's archives. Their text proves identical to that of Regler's monograph. Moreover, this statement has been corroborated by interviews with another Paalen specialist, Christian Kloyber, who suggested that Paalen could have entrusted Gustav Regler with the honor of being the signatory of his monograph, in recognition of his financial and moral support.

In her second proposition, Amy Winter strives to reinscribe Paalen in the history of twentieth-century art and to reevaluate the contribution of Paalen, the theorist, to the American abstract expression movement. This is indeed, it seems to us, the most decisive contribution of this study. A good half of the book applies itself - with erudition and with what mastery! - to minutely tracing the links between Paalen and the New York School. These influences acted mainly through the avant-garde review Dyn. For example, Amy Winter rightly emphasizes the affinities between Paalen's writings and those of Barnett Newman.

Two entire chapters are devoted to the analysis of Dyn, with a precious appendix that specifies the content of the six issues (5). These two chapters alone would justify, if need be, the purchase of this work, indispensable to any library on surrealism and the avant-gardes of the last century.

Taking its title from the Greek word dynaton, which means the possible, Dyn offered an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together images and theoretical, poetic and ethnographic texts, in English and/or French. At the end of the Second World War, André Breton, beyond the divergences of viewpoint and Paalen's provisional distancing from surrealism, recognized that Paalen had been "right on many points," as he writes to Benjamin Péret. And it is indeed difficult to understand the evolution of many of surrealism's conceptions of the forties, fifties and sixties if one neglects Paalen's research, which this movement reappropriated in its own way.

The review Dyn is for Paalen the occasion to explicate his own theories, as testified by the first issue, released in 1942, with three fundamental texts: "Farewell to Surrealism," "The New Image," and "Suggestion for an Objective Morality" (6). The double issue 4-5, published in 1943 and subtitled "Amerindian," highlighted Paalen's collection of Amerindian art, whose first text "Totem Art" introduced a set of writings on the diverse native cultures of America.

The following chapter, entitled "Cosmic Creation," lays the groundwork for the discussion subsequently developed on the resemblances between Paalen's theories on art and those of Newman. Amy Winter examines Paalen's ideas in relation to those of John Graham, in his text Systems and Dialectics of Art, a flagship text for American artists at the end of the 1930s. The link between Graham and Newman is established by making a detour through Paalen, who, according to Winter, "followed and questioned Graham, in the same way that Newman appropriated and overturned Paalen's ideas" (7). Yet, the filiation between Paalen and the American expressionists was not limited to theory alone.

American artists certainly saw his "Cosmic" works, from the period between 1941 and 1945, reproduced in the reviews of the time, or hung during the monographic exhibitions devoted to Paalen, at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century, in April 1945, and subsequently at the Karl Nierendorf gallery in 1946.

Undoubtedly Wolfgang Paalen, Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde is a first response to the challenge launched by Breton in the short text he writes in 1950 for Paalen's first exhibition in Paris since the Second World War: "Truly independent criticism concerned with departing from beaten paths could propose no better task than to give an attentive account of Paalen's evolution, as it precipitates from his so-called 'Cycladic' period to his current period, passing through his 'totemic' period and as it emerges from his theoretical texts in the review Dyn, which he directed from 1942 to 1945 in Mexico" (8).

Like a precious stone with a multitude of "facets," to borrow Octavio Paz's words (9), in this book by Amy Winter, Paalen's fascinating work is revealed, just like the unfolding landscape of his life. She has been able to present them to us in a powerful panoramic view, with at the same time a richness of fascinating details.

(1) Susan Power is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, thesis in progress "The Surrealisms of the New World (United States, Mexico, Caribbean)," under the direction of Marina Vanci.

(2) Octavio Paz, "Preface to a Retrospective," in Wolfgang Paalen Retrospective, Paris Librairie Loliée, 1960.

(3) José Pierre, Paalen's Domain, Paris, Éditions Galantis, 1970.

(4) Amy Winter is also currently Director and Curator of the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College of The City University of New York.

(5) The review Dyn has been republished in facsimile, Wolfgang Paalen's Dyn: The Complete Reprint, Christian Kloyber (Ed.), Vienna, Springer-Verlag, 2000. Bilingual English-French.

(6) If the first two of these texts were at the heart of the then divergences between Paalen and the surrealists, the third met, for its part, the unreserved approval of the surrealists exiled in Mexico, and many of the New York surrealists, like André Breton. While boycotting any direct collaboration with Dyn (except Pierre Mabille, but as a companion of the movement, he was not concerned by this boycott), they attentively read this review - as shown by the archives available at Doucet -, which they commented on article by article, then, when the rapprochement was made, Paalen was a painter and a thinker to whom they rendered several times, beyond the rupture episode provoked by the first text, unambiguous homages.

(7) Amy Winter, Wolfgang Paalen, Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde, Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2003, p. 189.

(8) André Breton, "A Man at the Junction of Great Roads," in Surrealism and Painting, New edition revised and corrected 1928-1965, Paris, Gallimard/Folio, (1965), 2002, p. 184.

(9) Octavio Paz, "Preface to a Retrospective," in Wolfgang Paalen Retrospective, Paris Librairie Loliée, 1960.