Form and Sense

By Wolfgang Paalen, Martica Sawin and Deborah Rosenthal

Wolfgang Paalen was a central figure in internationalist surrealist circles in the late 1930s. Artist and intellectual, he was a European whose fascination with archaic cultures led him finally to Mexico, where he founded the influential magazine DYN in 1941. In the bold texts from DYN that make up Form and Sense, we encounter a unique artistic mind and an oracular voice.

Paalen’s book is an intellectual delight with essays on cubism, surrealism, the universality of forms in architecture, and the relationships that exist between art and science. He weaves together the new ideas and archaic inspirations in twentieth-century painting and sculpture. His nuanced and original considerations of some key figures—Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso—marked Paalen in turn as a significant thinker in the world of modern art.

This painter’s book, illustrated with carefully chosen examples of the art he examines, makes us not only understand but also experience the rich interplay between idea and image that informs the art of our own time. A new introduction by the scholar Martica Sawin examines Paalen’s career, particularly his influential writing on surrealism and abstraction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcade
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611459234

Book preview

Introduction to the Arcade Edition by Martica Sawin

In April 1942 a new journal, with its title Dyn scrawled in red across a yellow cover, appeared in the window of New York’s legendary Gotham Book Mart. Although edited and published in Mexico by the Viennese-born artist Wolfgang Paalen, the new journal’s contents were mostly in English and addressed to a New York readership of European refugees and younger American artists. An initial essay, Farewell to Surrealism, made this orientation clear. The magazine arrived during the year of Surrealism’s greatest visibility in the New World, just two months before the Surrealist wartime émigrés, led by André Breton, launched their own journal, VVV, and six months before the openings of the attention-getting First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. From his wartime refuge in Mexico Paalen, the most erudite and cosmopolitan member of the prewar Paris-based Surrealist group, had decided to challenge Breton by spearheading a new art movement directed toward a synthesis of the implications of modern science and modern art, which he described as a direct visualization of the forces that move our bodies and minds. He hoped that there would be a fertile seedbed for his ideas among the younger American artists who had become unhinged from their provincialism—in the words of one of them, Gerome Kamrowski—and were looking for ways to fill the void, even experimenting with Surrealist automatism.

Dyn lasted for only two years and six issues, but significant portions of its contents were given a prolonged life by the publisher George Wittenborn who in 1945 reprinted seven essays from Dyn under the title Form and Sense, the first volume in his groundbreaking Problems of Contemporary Art series. In his introduction Paalen explained that the selection of essays was intended to present complementary facets of thought, and suggested that, taken together, they constituted a philosophy of the possible, a program for getting beyond the dogmas of contemporary art to open up new artistic territory. Two thousand copies of Form and Sense were printed (the original invoice indicates only a thousand were bound); it is listed in the book inventories of a number of New York School artists, as was the journal Dyn; it was also distributed abroad—this writer was able to buy Form and Sense at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1949. With the dearth of forward-looking writing on art in those final months of World War II, Paalen’s modest book took on a prophetic aspect, as it set forth a program for art in a postwar world at the dawn of the atomic age . The fact that works by Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, David Hare, and former Surrealists Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford were reproduced in the book (as well as in the last issue of Dyn) is evidence of Paalen’s intention to claim these artists for his new movement.

A crucial link to the New York art world had been formed in 1941 when a young Robert Motherwell showed up at Paalen’s studio in San Angel, Mexico with an introduction from his teacher, the Surrealist Kurt Seligmann. According to Moth-erwell, Paalen gave him a yearlong course in Surrealism in six weeks, in exchange for information on American pragmatic philosophers, John Dewey in particular.¹ Motherwell made some of his earliest paintings in Paalen’s studio, meanwhile establishing an ongoing connection with Mexico through his marriage to the Mexican actress Maria Ferreira. Thus he was available to become involved with Dyn; he translated several of Paalen’s essays from their original French (necessary since the journal was directed mainly toward an American audience), and contributed an essay, The Modern Painter’s World, to the final issue. He also served as a link to the younger American artists in New York and is reported to have brought Dyn to sessions in Matta’s studio where Baziotes, Pollock, Gerome Kamrowski, and Peter Busa were exploring gambits that would lead beyond Surrealism.

Much about Wolfgang Paalen’s life remains an enigma, partially because of his own acts of obfuscation. In order to create the impression of a growing movement, he used pseudonyms for some of the writings and artworks published in Dyn that he had written or painted himself.² In During the Eclipse, the dialogue that opens Form and Sense, the interlocutor Carter Stone is an invented character, as Paalen admitted in a letter to Motherwell.³ The small book on Paalen that was published on the occasion of his 1946 exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery listed Gustave Regler, a German writer living in Mexico, as the author, but the general consensus is that it was written by the artist himself.⁴ Later he was to resort to a variety of deceptive stratagems for smuggling antiquities across the Mexican border. As the authorities were closing in, he wrote to his friend Gordon Onslow Ford that he must save what little honor remained and at the age of fifty-four he took his own life.

Wolfgang Paalen was born in 1905 in Vienna. His father Gustav came from a family of well-to-do Jewish merchants and was himself a prosperous entrepreneur; he also served as secretary general of an important Berlin newspaper and was an avid art collector who encouraged his son’s interest in painting. As the eldest son in a wealthy family Wolfgang received a privileged education in languages, math, science, and philosophy, largely from private tutors. Due to his father’s connections, he was brought up in an environment of artists and intellectuals, among them the influential critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who advised him in his study of art. Paalen’s life was clouded by a younger brother’s attempted suicide and the nervous breakdown of another brother who died in a mental hospital, as well as by his mother’s melancholia and, during the war years, concern over the fate of his parents.⁵

By 1939, when he settled in San Angel on the outskirts of Mexico City, Paalen had been exposed to much of the European avant-garde art of the 1920s and thirties. He had studied art in Rome and Berlin, and with Hans Hofmann in Munich and Cassis, before moving to Paris where he was first associated with the Surindépendants and then joined Abstraction-Création, an international group dedicated to nonobjective art. The early abstract phase of his work is documented in the 1933 photo of his rue Pernety studio, reproduced as the Form and Sense frontispiece. In the mid-1930s he gravitated to Surrealism, participated in the movement’s collective exhibitions, and had solo shows in Paris and London. He married the artist Alice Rahon, a woman of extraordinary beauty, who left him for a time to be Picasso’s mistress, and he received financial support from Eva Sulzer, a Swiss heiress who became part of a ménage à trois with Wolfgang and Alice.

In 1939 Paalen, seriously interested in the growing field of ethnology, traveled to British Columbia and Alaska following a route taken by Kurt Seligmann the previous year. There he made some spectacular acquisitions of Tlingit and Haida carvings while villages, ceremonial dress, and totems in situ were documented in Eva Sulzer’s photographs. In the fall the trio accepted an invitation from Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to stay with them in Mexico. For the Galería de Arte Mexicano Paalen organized a Surrealist exhibition using lists prepared by André Breton, who at the time was still in military service in France. Since a return to Europe was by then unthinkable, Paalen found a home near Rivera in San Angel. There he built a studio with space for items collected in the Pacific Northwest, including a fifteen-foot-high carved screen from a Tlingit hut and a whale’s penis six feet long as a reminder of the virility needed for creative work. From this quiet locale he launched in the direction of New York both writings and paintings, the latter first shown at the Julien Levy gallery in 1940. Somewhere in Me, a painting from that exhibition, broke