Neufert Paalen Life and Work

I. Forbidden Land: The Early and Crucial Years 1905 - 1939
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7568-2671-1
Verlag: Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 342 Seiten

This publication is devided into three parts. The first volume is devoted to the artist's fascinating adolescence in Vienna, Rome and Berlin as well as the turbulent days in surrealist Paris until his exile in 1939. The second volume will focus on Paalen's life and work in wartime and post-war Mexico and North America, which became so seminal for American art. In the third volume, Neufert will present an updated version of his 1999 Catalogue Raisonné.

Andreas Neufert, born in 1961, studied art history, philosophy and Byzantine studies in Munich, Vienna and Paris. He received his PhD in Aesthetics and Art Mediation in 1997 and has since published regularly on modern and contemporary art. In 1993 and 1994 he organized the Paalen retrospective at the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City (as co-curator). In 2019 he curated the exhibition Wolfgang Paalen - The Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico at the Belvedere, Vienna. He lives in Berlin and Montesardo (Puglia)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Neufert, Andreas

Leseproben

Encounters

Elias Canetti, Diary entry from December 1959

Geo Dupin in the shop window of her Librairie Loilée, Paris, 1960, with Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (ANC of WPP)

Madame Dupin was already standing in the doorway when, following a surprise invitation, I stopped the car in front of her house in Meudon. Her subtle, masculine, statesmanlike head peeked out from behind a hedge as I approached her. Slightly wavy slicked back hair and a spacious forehead; bushy brows crowning a pair of dark hollow eyes fixed sternly on you as you spoke to her; an almost cubically cut nose. The way she moved, her lofty manner of filling the space between herself and others with words; it all created this off the cuff atmosphere of perfumed pallor, grandseigneural brilliance and ironic lucidity.

Her apartment was on the ground floor of a modern residential complex in the sloping grounds below the main street of Meudon, only a few steps away from Auguste Rodin’s villa where the ageing sculptor had once received the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and where his sculptures and plaster models can still be admired to this day. The small flat looked like the modest living and working space of a quirky art historian who, starting from Rodin, had reached intellectually across the century of modernism, unaware of the fullness and power she was about to face. The place smelled of cold cigar smoke and stale red wine and was packed with masks from Africa and Oceania, all kinds of curiously shaped stones and oriental fabrics; in front of the many books and tied-up files on the narrow shelves stood small sculptures made of stone and wood, crystals and Wunderkammer objects. On every wall hung pictures of a painter I had once discovered as I was leafing through a book about Parisian Surrealism. That must have been a good 35 years ago, in 1986. Geo Dupin was this painter's sister-in-law, assistant, companion and later also his agent in Paris. She was the first in a series of captivating encounters that would help me to illuminate one of the last blind spots in the history of modern painting. Little did I know that the moment I entered the apartment that day, I had already been let in on a well kept secret: the life of Wolfgang Paalen.

While talking to and about the small dog on her lap, Geo handed me a large envelope with flickering eyes. On a folded sheet of paper was the hand–written name of . Inside it was a notebook of the cheapest sort bearing in the same handwriting the title . I immediately flipped through a few pages. The words ran softly over the lines of the stained, woody paper. Letters lined up one after the other without embellishment. They gave me the impression that the writing followed a logical sequence and had been thought through several times during the process. An old school, befitting method met a rather pathetic appearance. Peculiar contrasts were also present within the text:

Milk brothers cream sisters / What I’ve always longed for: a horizon to unbutton / A hormonic marriage life / Dialectic coffee pot with double bottom (reversible)/ We should let it be waggled (dog’s jargon)

Other passages were less bizarre and more romantic, filled with surprising comparisons, as well as cutting-edge observations. Every now and then there were parts where Paalen related his disappearance into the imagination. On some pages, he travelled within seconds through his emotional life with a few zigzagging lines, became the mouthpiece of his inner self, touched nameless overshadowing life events and repeatedly measured his own impulses, his oscillations between the painter’s upswings and solitary implosions. While I was pondering the fact that no text had touched me so deeply in a long time, Madame Dupin resumed her search for files, records and old albums, and shortly after she spread out before me a series of photographs of him which she had in her possession. Over the course of my research on Paalen, it became increasingly clear to me how reliable and revealing seeing old papers can be. Forgotten between books, in drawers or compartments of closets, they suddenly come to the surface like flotsam, often only through memories swelling up all of a sudden after personal encounters. While carefully sorting through the papers, the first threads were imperceptibly sewn in my head and islands of time started to group around them, all by themselves. Little did I know that my work on the biography had already begun. In the following weeks, we took a look at his paintings. Paalen had left Madame Dupin a few boxes of photographs of his works – a sign of the Argus eye he kept over his oeuvre and its creation. His work was an immense block of eternities – that much I knew the very moment I saw the originals. A miracle of space and time, delicate and haunting, floating through different periods. His painting struck me as one of a separate kind in which the history of modern painting seemed to be strangely contained.

It was evident that Paalen had found himself in an uncomfortable position very early on, like the railway traveller in Kafka’s who gets lost in the long tunnel: nothing but ghosts inside it and even the glimpse of light appearing at the end is too little to hope for. In the following days, I visited Madame Dupin almost every day and read Paalen’s texts, letters and travel reports. Together we started to lay the base for a catalogue raisonné. We went through old inventory lists, contacted collectors and rummaged through archives of gallery owners and auction houses. One day we received a visit from a Californian lawyer and violinist whose viennese wife had put him on Paalen's trail and who had purchased almost every artwork of Paalen he could find since the early 1970s. His name was Harold Parker. He invited me for dinner and less than twenty minutes later asked me to travel with him to Mexico to meet the people who belonged to Paalen’s entourage so long as they were still alive. I accepted.

Alice Rahon-Paalen, 1986

As enlightening as the incredible number of letters, manuscripts and photographs I found over 30 years of research were, the people I met have been by no means less exciting. At times they conveyed by their sheer presence much of that non-factual knowledge without which a biography can hardly be written. The trip to Mexico the following January constituted the brilliant prologue of a never ending series of encounters. When we landed in Mexico City the heavy damage caused by the catastrophic earthquake which struck the city four times in 1985 and 1986 was still clearly visible everywhere. The ruins of over 400 collapsed buildings still rose untouched from the ground like bizarre giant splinters, the ghosts of modern office complexes stood like windowless skeletons along the streets, their curtains flapping in the wind, and guarding police officers warned of their imminent collapse. In comparison the old suburb of San Ángel had suffered very little. The characters we visited here appeared more fantastic to me almost daily. Alice, Paalen's first wife, welcomed us like a ghost of herself. She was soft spoken and her soul was wide open; its inner walls too pervious to master the demands of everyday life any longer. We had a long talk. The very essence of her, young and loving as I expected after all I had heard, was still within reach. But the strands of her stories were no longer decipherable. The Hungarian-German painter Gunther Gerzso, of whom Paalen had once written after the war, received us in his house. The place was furnished like the city villa of a nineteenth century collector of old Dutch masters. The paintings hung neatly over the European furniture, each lit with spotlights of shining brass. They were however all his own work. Gerzso was elegantly dressed and friendly as he told me about his encounter with Thomas Mann in Switzerland and about the crazy parties at the house of Luis Buñuel, for whom he had worked. What he could tell me about Paalen was rather limited, because he had only met him in the final phase of his life. At the time Paalen was already living in Tepoztlàn/Morelos and only came to town sporadically. He appeared to be a kind of protean personality, Gerzso said. His attempt to get by without any truths had collapsed during its self-made stage. I took this knowledge with me. The following day Paalen's last wife and official widow received me in the living room of the house in Tepoztàn where the painter had spent his last years (only years later would she let me into his studio).

Gunther Gerzso, c. 1950

Everything was still in its place: the Indian artworks corresponded with Paalen’s paintings in elaborate hanging schemes and nothing seemed artificial. One was immediately enveloped by a carefully grown second skin and could hardly be embraced more authentically. Isabel Marín de Paalen was the younger sister of Lupe Marín, Diego Rivera's first wife, and in spite of being born into one of the ancestral families of Mexican modernism was imbued with a peculiarly antiquated status anxiety. Like many in Paalen's circle, she believed that her late husband had in fact descended from Russian-Baltic feudal lords, the Counts von der Pahlen. Such legend had already (and perhaps not unwontedly) followed Paalen’s father, who had never denied it for fear of being seen as a Jewish parvenu. It was the Austrian architect Friedrich Kiesler, the designer of Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in New York...