Paalen. Life and Work

It was a life full of tensions and unexpected turnarounds that finally led the son of an Austrian-Jewish merchant from the Vienna of Emperor Franz Joseph via Sagan, Rome, and the Berlin of the abysmal 1920s to the Paris of the Surrealists. In 1938, his breakthrough came with his smoke paintings (Fumages) and his collaboration with Marcel Duchamp at the famous 'Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme' in Paris. In 1939, at Frida Kahlo's invitation, he went into exile in Mexico and put his thoughts down on paper in a series of explosive essays published in his own magazine DYN, through which he launched a revolution in artistic thought that saw him rise to become the secret leader of young American painting in the 1940s. Although he exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the Century gallery in New York shortly after Jackson Pollock in 1945, he fell into oblivion after the breakthrough of the Abstract Expressionists. In 1991, American painter Robert Motherwell spoke of a 'conspiracy of silence' regarding Paalen's innovative role in 1940s New York. After an interlude in Paris, Paalen took his own life in Mexico in 1959.

In the first volume of his meticulously researched biography, Andreas Neufert provides a deep insight into the childhood and the crucial Surrealist years in Paris before his exile in Mexico.

An overlooked chapter of modernism, which is given a common thread by Paalen's lifelong passion for matriarchal myths and their influence on the American avant-garde of the 1940s.