Paalen Life and Work: I. Forbidden Land: The Early and Crucial Years 1905 - 1939

By Andreas Neufert

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9783756826711

Andreas Neufert

Andreas Neufert is a German art historian and curator

Book preview

Contents

Encounters

I

Childhood and Youth

1. Between two Realms 1905–1913

2. A Hypothetical Life: The Castle in Sagan 1913–1918

II

Orientations

3. Finding the North in the South 1919–1924

4. A Matter of Love and Death 1925–1931

5. Poetry and Truth (in painting) 1932–1934

III

The Crucial Years: Surrealism in Paris

6. Ecstasies of the Night 1935–1936

7. Forbidden Land 1936–1939

Appendix

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this book to my partner Barbara and our children Valerio, Alexander, Clarisse, and Benjamin, who with their cheerfulness and intuition contributed to the necessary emotional balance that every intellectual work – as a tightrope walk between the different areas of life – so urgently needs. I will always be grateful to them for this. I would also like to thank several people personally, without whom this book, much more than a decade in the making, could not have been completed: first and foremost Luchita Hurtado, who, as at times probably the last intimate contemporary witness of Paalen's life, played the liveliest role in my work and always sought to answer my sometimes probing questions with heart, soul, and great power of memory at any time of the day or night. Fariba Bogzaran, who accompanied my concerns with great passion and a critical mind throughout all these years, not least through her generous hospitality. Gertrud Parker continued our old friendship with much affection after Harold’s death and always patiently read and meaningfully commented on unfinished chapters. Georgiana Colville helped me with the – always necessary – research in Paris through her hospitality, her knowledge, and her access to the remaining circles of the Surrealists. In great parts this biography was written in 2007–12 (around pregnancy and birth of Clarisse and Benjamin, which might resonate in the text for attentive readers) building on my research work from 1987–90 and 1993–97. It was given a boost in 2008 by a generous one-year research grant from the University of Waterloo, Canada, the newly opened family archives of Michaela Paalen, Peter Thoemmes, and Peter Gunkel, and the interest of the publishers Luise Metzel and Gabriela Wachter to supervise the book project for Parthas Verlag in Berlin and to make the German publication possible. Barbara Basile deserves special thanks for her keen interest and meticulous translation into English and subsequent proofreading. The colleagues, collectors, and archivists deserve my special thanks because they made the difficult search for traces of the history of Paalen and his ancestors much easier through their great generosity with materials, advice, and sympathy. My special thanks also go to the following people who enlivened and supported my work at various stages with their personal knowledge and information: Dawn Ades, Dore Ashton, Manuel Álvarez-Bravo, Robert und Rita Anthoine, Teresa Arq, Ann und Franz- Josef von Braun, Elisa Breton, Aube Breton-Elléouët, Colin Browne, Jutta and Christopher Breu, Whitney Chadwick, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, Georgiana Colville, Frances Carey, Geo Dupin, Kent Dickson, Martin Dresler-Schenk, Rita Eder, Miguel Escobedo, Marcel Fleiss, Megan Fontanella, Rudolf Friedrich, Daniel Garza-Usabiaga, Gunther Gerzso, Alexandra Gruen, Peter Gunkel, Axel Heil, Stanley William Hayter, Jean Hélion, Christian Kloyber, Kurt Krüger, Annette Leddy, Elisabeth Langhorne, Ilja Luciak, Alain-Paul Mallard, Daniel Malingue, Bona and Sybille Pieyre de Mandiargues, Ursula Meyer, Robert Motherwell, Wendi Norris, Antony Penrose, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Hans Herwig Olbrich, Ulla and Heinz H. Pietzsch, Silvia Pandolfi, Annemay Regler-Replinger, Gregor von Rezzori, Felix Römer, Stella Rollig, John Richardson, Joachim Tepperberg, Peter Thoemmes, Petra Somitsch, Osvaldo Sanchez, Martica Sawin, Franz Smola, Cäsar Supplitt, Marian Swiatek, Claus Sulzer, Gérard Roche, Hector Rivero-Borell, Rowland Weinstein, Yolanda Westphalen, Amy Winter and Virginia Zabriski.

Encounters

Paalen...he was found eaten and disfigured...

Elias Canetti, Diary entry from December 1959

Geo Dupin in the shop window of her Librairie Loilée, Paris, 1960, with Nuage articulé, 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 Paalen. Inside it was a notebook of the cheapest sort bearing in the same handwriting the title Miniatures. 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 Blue Octavo Notebooks 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 where Paalen was to exhibit in 1945, who contributed to the spread of this story. This was at the time rather obstructive to a painter’s career. Having mistaken Paalen’s father for the Viennese diplomat Konstantin Count von der Pahlen, he boasted of finally revealing the true identity of the mysterious painter who threatened to steal his thunder in New York (years later I found an exchange of letters between Isabel Marín and a certain Count von der Pahlen, whom she had written to in order to learn more about her in laws). Isabel didn’t know much about her husband who, as she admitted after hours of tiresome conversation in Spanish, had never loved her anyway, whereupon she showed me their two separate bedrooms. She then dug out some childhood photographs of Paalen, which she allowed me to reproduce. Later I would continue facing them in private boxes of other relatives I was to meet over the years. Most recently in the archives of Peter Thoemmes and Peter Gunkel, his mother’s great-nephews in Lübeck, and in the albums of Michaela Paalen, his brother’s daughter – the same photographs again and again. In one of these photographs a 4 year old Paalen stands in front of the fence of a residential house with a small front garden, typical for the Charlottenburg area in Berlin. The Paalen children visited this city regularly, for example during vacations on their way to the Baltic Sea, or later, when they lived in Silesia. Their father owned a flat on Kurfürstendamm until the late 1920s. Here the family was finally about to travel to Heringsdorf for a summer retreat. That day Paalen's mother had dressed her eldest son as a Spanish grandee of the eighteenth century. Black robe, long locks of hair escaping from a black hat, a walking stick. The little boy proudly faced the photographer, clearly enjoying looking halfway like a man at last, despite the girlish hairstyle. A boy who looked like a girl, disguised as a boy from another time. His mother, I knew, had been an actress until the day he was born. She had given up her career and apparently did everything to relive her lost girlish dream through him. There he was the future Paalen, a child, an actor, desperately in love with the possibilities of self-transformation.

Paalen in San Angel, Mexico, c.

1940, GRI ANC of WPP

Paalen, San Angel (Mexico) 1942

Cut out by Paalen (in his studio apartment, rue Pernety) 1933, GRI ANC of WPP

Paalen, Veracruz (Mexico) 1946

Wolfgang with his father Gustav Paalen, Bansin (Usedum, Germany)1937, MPp

In another photograph taken in front of his house in San Ángel, Paalen’s face disappears under a sombrero and one could imagine his shadow racing towards him like the phantom of a bandit ready to shoot and wipe him out. The image of Paalen at the excavations of a colossal Olmec head in the jungle of Veracruz seemed to me another of these metaphors for mysterious disappearance. The stone face lies mightily in the earth pit, capturing everything around it: the local helpers but also Paalen himself, standing next to it with fragile elegance. It is as if to remind us of how short the lifespan of a man is compared to the duration of the glances that the sublimely smiling face of the Olmec exchanges with the universe. And some more photographs are worth mentioning here. One of them is taken on the sofa in his apartment. He is now missing altogether. Madame Dupin used to think that he had cut himself out of the picture. A wishful announcement of his fate? There were also camouflage pictures, as I called them then (today I would say evidence of family unity). One shows Wolfgang together with his father in almost identical attire and posture, standing in front of a boarding house in the Baltic seaside resort of Bansin (light-coloured single-breasted suit, tie and hat): if it weren't for age, one would have problems telling them apart. Everything is as delicate as seemingly coincidental, but in truth there are only subtle signs of disappearance. However, the photograph of Paalen's 1939 trip through British Columbia suits my detective theory of self erasure very well. Dressed as a shaman with mask and shawls, he climbs through the pudendum femininum of a huge Tlingit shaman house front, a wooden panel painted with a large female bear. In the middle of the face are two large empty eyes looking strangely into nothingness. I wonder if the painter has imagined her blind. A blind woman who seemed to see farther through feeling rather than through her eyes? The female bear was undoubtedly the totem animal of a wise, ancient shaman. Entering the house was like returning to the womb – a ritual memory. But why did this strange combination of motherly ancestor and mistress have to be blind? It made me think of the blind seer Tiresias, the spirit worlds of the indigenous peoples and Paalen's childhood in the fabled castle of Sagan, where he had seen what he would later call his hallucinatory certainties.

Paalen dressed as a shaman with the Tlingit house front, British Columbia 1939 (Photo Eva Sulzer), ARp

I managed to contact Michaela Paalen. She gave me the address of a private Polish scholar from the once Silesian Sagan (now the Polish Zagan) named Marian Swiatek. In a broken German the man told me many anecdotes on the phone about the town where Paalen had spent part of his youth. During his stay in Sagan, Marie-Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal had for example fallen in love with the daughter of the pharmacist, who inspired his famous work De l'amour. While reading excerpts from old local papers he kept interrupting himself: ‘the Paalens, very mysterious family, I know old families from Sagan, heirs of Talleyrand and Kurlandic relatives in Sweden. But no one ever mentioned the name Paalen. The more I heard about him the more I began to understand Wolfgang’s revelatory relationship with the mysterious Saint Rochusburg, the castle of his youth. Shortly after, I came close to the estate without actually seeing it – one more reason to find out what it had looked like inside the building. Swiatek provided me with old views of the castle before and after Paalen's father had redesigned it, postcards from the Nazi era and photos of the ruined grounds left behind by the Ukrainian front command who had used it during the last days of the war. Later, Michaela Paalen sent me some blurry interior shots, nothing more than a hint of elegance. It was not until early 2022 that a Silesian postcard collector sent me first-hand photographs from the advertising brochure of a Sagan interior designer, Georg Danke, showing the full splendor of the impressive suite of rooms and its artwork.

Remains of the Rochusburg Castle, Sagan, owned the Paalens from 1913 - 1934 (Photo author)

Years before, on a rainy winter day, I turned off the Hirschberg Valley on my way to Krakow and drove up to the Sagan area, spontaneously looking for the castle the Paalen family had once inhabited. The old town with the French castle, the Wallenstein’s palace, the Latin school and the surrounding villas were in a pitiful state. In the municipal office I was unceremoniously told that Saint Rochusburg had been destroyed after the war. On my way out, however, one of the officers came running after me. He still knew the whereabouts of its remains and showed me the way. So after a long walk I suddenly found myself in front of a one-story building with massive walls, now inhabited by a car mechanic stuffed with sheet metal and spare parts. Something of the facade resembled the base floor on the old castle. Crows flew up screeching from the rafters of an empty shed. I followed the flight of the eerie birds until they disappeared behind the trees of the hill, giving way to a strange feeling of emptiness. Nature seemed to hold its breath.

‘What are you looking for here?’ said a rusty female voice in Polish just behind me. I had not noticed the elderly peasant who was quietly watching me in my contemplation. She was wearing a ratty leatherette coat, which barely concealed the knitwear underneath, and a pink head scarf over unkempt white locks of hair. I replied, in German, that a large estate had once stood here and asked if she remembered it. With an angry look and in stunted German she replied that she remembered the castle well. ‘It was not a bomb, oh no, it was the Ukrainians! There were fierce battles here between ’44 and ’45, you can’t imagine. They looted what they could get their hands on. They stripped the castle bare. After the war it fell into disrepair and was dismantled down to the first floor’. She came closer and continued almost whispering. ‘It had been a place of splendor. Noble people had lived there at the time. They were a little crazy, yes, one of them, one of the boys, landed in a fool's house in the end. No, we were not allowed to play with them. No way. Strange things happened inside the castle, if you really want to know. Secret meetings. Nobody knows anything about it. Then the German state police came in and got rid of all that spooky devilry. The noble gentlemen turned out to be hidden Jews. Someone bought them out and they could go home to their country, or God knows where. They were Czech Jews, or Austrian. Suddenly they were gone. Years before the war. Then everything was such a mess that you no longer knew where you belonged. After the war, the stones from the walls were used to build a stable for the Kombinat, which was destroyed in a fire. Since then, everything lies in a state of neglect just as you see it today. It’s all lost’. She led me through the garden. The plinths of the Italian sculptures once mirrored in the water of the pond basin were still visible. In my mind, I did my best to replace what was missing (I had happened to find the original sculptures in the garden of the painter Leo von König’s daughter near Munich). ‘Maybe it is better this way’, she said. ‘After all, bad things were happening in there. I don't know anymore. I've forgotten everything’. She made a dismissive gesture with her hand, raised her eyebrows and nodded to leave. I pulled out the small photo of Wolfgang sinking in an armchair with his brother Rainer. The old woman looked at me suspiciously, grabbed the picture and stared at it for a while, almost spellbound. ‘Are you sure that ...?’ She frowned. Her face brightened. For a while she was pensive. Then she shook her head again. ‘There's no point in remembering, they’re all dead!’ Her voice was suddenly grim. She gave back the photograph back to me and started walking downhill without saying goodbye. ‘It only pains me to think of the old days. It is easy for you, young people, to investigate the past: you weren't there’, she exclaimed, turning her back and disappearing into the woods that stretched along the creek to the town. Something prevented me from following her any further. Perhaps it was the inspiring feeling of insufficiency, within which curiosity can spread its wings like air in a suddenly opened vacuum.

The person who provided me with the most extensive documents and information was the English painter Gordon Onslow Ford. He lived in an earthquake-proof studio house in the Bishop Pine Preserve northwest of San Francisco, surrounded by his paintings and collection, hand-carved furniture and a stone jaguar chac mo’ol from Mayan times that had once belonged to Paalen. In order to reach him, you had to drive through a park-like landscape of strongly scented pine and Bay trees, hosting other studios and wooden houses of artist friends, all within a few hundred metres of the Saint Andreas Fault between the Atlantic and Pacific Earth plates. With a slight smile, he told me his land was shifting six centimetres northwards every year, away from the United States. The first time when Harold Parker brought me to his monastic retreat on my way back from Mexico, the reclusive painter showed little amenability. Only in autumn 1992, when I turned up again to prepare the Paalen retrospective exhibition in Vienna, did he invite me to spend two weeks at the writer’s retreat of his late wife, Jacqueline Johnson, so that I could look through the few papers and sketches of Paalen, as he casually put it. ‘Soon you will know more than you would like about this man’, he said grinning with British humour, and after showing me how to operate the wood-burning stove he left me alone. The following morning, his assistant led me to the archive room. There were piles of photographs and letters waiting for me, many still untouched for the sole reason that they were written in German. Paalen’s letters to a certain Aya (who, after extensive research, turned out to be Helene Meier-Graefe, the second wife of the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe), were at first youthful and passionate then grown-up and philosophical, yet always romantic, and turned out to be a godsend for my research, much like my conversations with Gordon. He sometimes invited me to his studio or one of the local restaurants for lunch or dinner, where the serious monkish painter gave way to a mischievous upper-class British boy with an Eaton education. Our meetings kept turning into humorous literary forays. Gordon, overcome with a child-like excitement, talked about a poetry-filled existence in the moment of Surrealism, and I about Central Europe, Zweig, Mahler, Kokoschka and Musil. At this time Gordon read through the first part of Musil’s Man Without Qualities and wrote his essay for the Viennese catalogue – Paalen, the Man of Many Possibilities – as if he had rediscovered Paalen through this book and now finally understood him. ‘It was an excellent model for an early Kokoschka portrait which made one feel the elegance of the turn of the century and the presence of a long line of ancestors’. Much of what he had told me about Paalen in previous conversations is found in his text. The contrast between the outer modesty and the inner supernova: for example, his sometimes hilarious helplessness in the face of the practical necessities of life, his extraordinary agility (inner and outer) and his inner struggles, expressed with the obsessive energy he channeled into all his activities (and the sleepless nights which were for him normal working days). He was always on the cusp of an opportunity, inviting others to follow him to the threshold of the unknown.

Gordon Onslow Ford, Mexico c. 1946, (Photo Elisabeth Onslow Ford Rouslin)

There is a very special woman who must be mentioned here because she was the most intimate witness of his life. She died too early to be confronted with the whole range of my research and I have to live with the fact that we can no longer listen to what else she could have added. Eva Sulzer had been Paalen’s companion for many years, but she always remained well hidden in the background. When I visited her in Mexico, she was still living in the old house in San Ángel, where she had moved after the war. This was when Paalen broke up the curious ménage à trois with her and his wife Alice in order to marry the Venezuelan artist Luchita Hurtado. The millionaire heiress of a Swiss steel magnate met me in the courtyard. Dressed plainly and in a very reserved manner, Eva led me through several empty rooms into a living-room furnished only with a wooden table and three chairs. Two cats frolicked in the corner and it took me a while to acknowledge the Spartan poverty and the cultured, well structured sentences with which she curiously began our conversation as belonging to the same picture. Noticing my initial confusion, she quietly began to tell her story: their arrival with Alice in Mexico as a threesome in 1939, the soon broken friendships with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the tensions before and after Leon Trotsky’s assassination. We talked about the war and political conflicts. Who were her enemies? ‘The Nazis. Dictators, including the Stalinists’, she said tersely. ‘The barbaric in mankind. The spectre of a world without a motherly feeling, without compassion, without love and faith in the infinitely tender, angelic space that dwells in us humans: the spiritual’. The three saw themselves as a research laboratory on love, as an island against the inertia of the heart surrounded by a sea of hatred and violence. They had taken up the cause of preserving the most dynamic of all human forces. The pure and selfless force that flows from motherhood into civilisation. We talked about music. She was a violinist. For a long time she had played chamber music in an ensemble and taught lessons. ‘Paalen loved Bach and Mozart. His private teacher as a child was the Sagan church’s organist, a pupil of Max Reger and composer of cantatas. A very educated man, he gave his brother piano lessons and introduced both boys to classic antiquity through old Greek and Latin. They read Plutarch and Herodotus together, studied Euclid’s geometry, Archimedes’s astronomy, Protagoras’s moral teachings and Lucretius’s natural philosophy’. Paalen’s teacher took notice that although the boy was not as talented a piano player as his younger brother, he had a photographic memory for his own perceptions. He could cite even the earliest childhood memories in the most vivid way.

Eva Sulzer, Mexico c. 1940 (Photo Ikerne Lizarraga)

During our second meeting Eva and I talked about the reasons why Paalen had fallen so far into oblivion. ‘One reason’, she said, ‘was his obsession with particle physics, which hardly anyone in the art world was sharing after the war. In order to believe in Paalen and his paintings you have to learn to distrust your eyes, much as particle physics suggests’, she said. ‘With all his might he rebelled against the universe as it appears. The table, the tree, the floor beneath our feet are in truth wildly swirling collections of particles’, she continued laughing: ‘microphysically speaking, you can reach metres into them!’ The following night I dreamt of a world made of pudding, I saw fibrous shapes suddenly rising before my eyes and the earth shattering like ice. If the world is full of particles, each one living according to its own clock, the one who has internalised it must be crossed by the icy wind of feeling lost. Moreover, she continued, he was systematically ignored, even silenced to death by the North American artists he had greatly inspired and influenced, and he suffered greatly for it. But he never defended himself. He was too proud.

‘Childhood is an artist's most important material, I firmly believe that’, said Eva when we met for the last time. ‘This is also true for a musician. Paalen believed that too, but he didn’t mean mere, mostly embellished childhood memories. It was more about the mental state of the child, or let's say the child’s willingness. The willingness of the mind to be exposed to one’s own risk. Think of the amazement, the shock, the shudder. Shuddering is the best of part of a human mind, Goethe once said. What happens when I stand there with my eyes wide open and see something that makes me shudder through and through? These are his images, you see, these are the answers. A child sees everything for the first time: the morning light as it breaks in the rising mist over the meadows, the colours of the sky in the snow, the all-embracing white. Childhood is infinite because it knows no before and after. Only the now. Childhood allows a glimpse back that can never be found again. The windows close. Paalen struggled to keep them open through his painting. Open to the present, as a projection of a primordial landscape that has been resting in the memory of the human species for millennia before one personally encounters it. And this too is but a mesh in the vast fabric of time’. I took out another image. One of Paalen’s paintings from the late 1930s depicts old footprints in an endless snowy desert. From its depths threatening fairy creatures are leaping to the foreground. Trembling lines disguised as lightning bolts. We linger before them and see them through the eyes of a human being who perhaps walked there many eons ago; a moment is captured, a fraction of a second that opens the door to eternity. ‘You know’, said Eva after a short break, ‘Wolfgang kept the skeleton of a whale in his garden in Tepoztlàn, and when he didn’t want to be interrupted in his work, his visitors were told that he was in the belly of the whale. If you manage to visit him there, he will tell you his story. I'm afraid I did not know him fully. Perhaps I didn’t even try’.

Only on my last trip to Mexico, when a great wave of influenza struck the entire Western world with fear, did I dare to visit the place where Paalen died. Nothing can convey the feeling of darkness as profoundly as a Mexican night under the open skies at almost 2000 metres above the mirror of the Pacific Ocean. The seven heavens of Aztec mythology have collapsed. At half past four in the morning Paalen left his room in the Hacienda San Francisco Cuadra, on the outskirts of Taxco, the silver town. How many times has he been here? Dreamingly, I asked myself this preposterous question. It might be important after all. In the later 1950s he used to come here regularly, first with his (then-) wife Isabel, then mostly alone. Since Luis Buñuel’s cinematic version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Abismos de pasión) this magical place had become very popular among artists and writers. On that morning, 22 September 1959, Paalen walked alone up the narrow lane to the garden gate that separates the former hacienda from the forest. From there he left the human dwellings behind and walked through the forest following the pole star for perhaps an hour. On some autumn days some locals come here to eat living bugs. Today nature embraces him alone. Even the city lights that kept him company at the beginning of his journey have disappeared behind the hill, swallowed up by the forest, the trees and the cloudless new moon sky. He feels the cold barrel of the revolver against his temple, he is the one holding it. The thoughts in his head crumble to dust even before he pulls the trigger, they atomise, press against the impenetrable wall of death - like faces of the children on a departing train. They know they are departing. They know they are leaving one reality but they know nothing of the other, future reality. They cry out in disquiet. This is the near-death memory: facing the wall at the end of all things, thoughts lightning fast, searching for a trace of the life lived that could answer the question of their future.

Hazienda San Francisco Cuadra, Taxco (Mexico)

Wolfgang Paalen, c. 1909 in Berlin, ARp

Part 1

Childhood and Youth

1

~

Between Two Realms

1905–1913

At least our emperor is only goofy,

but no megalomaniac

Wolfgang Paalen, Sunga

Wolfgang Paalen was born in the city of Vienna, at the heart of central Europe, as the child of an Austrian father with Moravian-Jewish and a German mother with Lower Saxon-Catholic roots. All kinds of legends about his at times Jewish, at others Baltic parents and his birthplace circulated within relevant literature. Searching through registration services and birth registers of Oberpahlen in Livonia, Vienna, and Baden proved fruitless, except for a jumble of police registrations and notices of departure between Berlin, Baden, Tobelbad, Rome, and Vienna, which testify to an impressive level of mobility. Finally, in 2006, I had the idea of visiting the Evangelical Parish of Vienna. There I found a birth and baptismal certificate dated 6 August 1905 that finally shed some light on this shadowy existence. It gave 22 July of the same year as Wolfgang Robert Paalen’s date of birth and his birth place the parental flat at Köstlergasse 1 in the 6th district of Mariahilf to Gustav and Emelie Paalen, both Protestants. In addition to his father’s name, Robert, the infant received the first name of Austria’s favourite composer, although almost as inflationary as the one of the emperor himself.

Wolfgang saw the light of day in the first-floor apartment of the famous Wienzeilenhaus designed by master architect Otto Wagner and embellished with a richly decorated iron veranda facing the Naschmarkt. Completed in 1899 and situated on the corner of Wienzeile 38/Köstlergasse 1, the building is designed in the Secession style, with two opulent entrances, a spectacular lift system, a ground-floor coffee house with a wroughtiron framed glass porch, large windows, and fine gold stucco by Koloman Moser, which remains magnificent and strikingly modern to this day. For a while, Otto Wagner was a neighbour of the Paalens. His legendary glass bathtub stood next door at the Köstlergasse 3 and it is not unlikely that the interiors of the Hollereck estate in the Salzkammergut, which Gustav Paalen was to design with Wagner’s office a few years later, were inspired by sporadic visits to the apartment at the Naschmarkt. The flat where the Paalens remained until they moved to Styria in the spring of 1909 was just a few steps away from the Theater an der Wien, the Karlsplatz, the Opera house, and the elegant shopping streets. To the west, passing Schönbrunn Palace, the Wienzeile led out into the countryside and, at the upper end of Mariahilfer Strasse, the railways of the ‘k.u.k. privilegierten Kaiserin-Elisabeth-Bahn’ awaited passengers travelling to Germany, Switzerland, France, and the neighbouring crown lands of the Balkans, Hungary, Galicia, and Bukovina. On 7 May 1908 the small family was able to watch the festive parade of Wilhelm II in honour of the 60th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Josef I as if from a private opera loge, which, with all the important representatives of the German royal houses and their entourage, leisurely deflected from the railway station along Mariahilfer Strasse and the left Wienzeile to Schönbrunn – the last and probably most pompous procession of the two empires before their downfall. Photographs of Emelie and her little Wolfgang were taken by mobile photographers who accompanied the procession along with the curious residents and the thousands of tourists from all over the world, and a few days later they could be sent as postcards to family members whose descendants keep them to this day. In those years, Vienna was still the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Cis- and Transleithania, ironically called Kakania for the impossibility of pronouncing it. ‘In many ways an exemplary state, though unappreciated’, writes Robert Musil. ‘There was a tempo, but not too much of a tempo’. Paalen would spend his life searching for this and many other features of his homeland in France, Mexico, and finally in an imaginary Austria, to which, however, he never returned. But it is quite possible that when he said to Marie-Louise von Motesiczky that Austria continues to be a vivid dream ¹ , he thought of motherly images such as those described by Musil while writing the first notes for his novel The Man Without Qualities in the year Wolfgang was born: ‘Glaciers and sea, Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights on the Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from chimneys as from upturned nostrils while the village cowered between two small hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm its child between them’.²

Iron entrance and lift of the Köstlergasse 1 building, SWP

Postcards with Wolfgang and parents, May 1908, SWP

Wolfgang’s mother, Clothilde Emelie Gunkel, nicknamed Emmy or Clo-Clo, was born on 31 May 1879 in the small town of Breitenbach/Eichsfeld near Göttingen. Shortly after, the Gunkel family moved to Nienburg on the Weser, ‘where the big hammer breaks the ice’. According to Wolfgang’s youngest brother Michael ‘she meant the weir at the Weser bridge, where the stream smashed the ice floes in winter, which she found very impressive’. Having only briefly met his grandparents when he was ‘a small child and they were already very old’, he describes Adam Gunkel as a ‘mischievous, tough gentleman (...), a bit of a peasant’ and typical merchant ‘from the Eichsfeld’, whose ancestors ‘still travelled across the country with large wagons pulled by many horses to do their business’.³ In fact, the Gunkels came from a widely dispersed family of renowned country carters who managed the transport of cumbersome and sensitive goods such as church organs, looms, or even cash deliveries throughout Europe. Looking back on their three-hundred-year family history, they had relatives in Florence, Paris, and Vienna. Johann Nestroy recalls their Vienna venue in Der Zerrissene (1844): ‘I have fourteen suits / Partly light and partly dark / The tailcoats and the pantaloons / All from Gunkel’.⁴ Emelie’s mother Anna Margarete Gunkel, née Dellemann, appeared to Michael ‘as very lady-like, but grim, stubborn and self-confident. Mama told me that the family was always quarrelling – they went to church together on Sundays and they returned home by different routes, because they had been fighting all along the way’. Michael only knew his uncle Robert indirectly; Gustav, perhaps as a