Wolfgang Paalen

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Wolfgang Paalen (1905 in Baden, Austria - 1959 in Taxco, Mexico) was a painter who successfully practiced various styles, including fumage, also published strongly documented philosophical essays.

Wolfgang Paalen was born in Baden near Vienna in 1905 and grew up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan family. While his mother was an actress, his father had made his career as grand merchant and imperial master of ceremonies in the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy and left Vienna with his family shortly before the war in 1914 to move to a large property near the Silesian city Zagan. Wolfgang Paalen spent his youth between the ostentatious family castle in Zagan and the Prussian capital Berlin, where he decided to become a painter at the age of 16 when he took up sporadic instruction with the Berlin Secessionist Leo von Koenig. 1929 he settled in Paris after travelling and studying in France with Hans Hoffman and Fernand Léger. After a short involvement with the abstractionists Paalen soon found an active voice in the exuberant surrealist milieu and joined the Paris group around André Breton in 1936. Around this time, he felt that the official surrealism movement was too unjust and discredited it.

Paalen stead fastly and single mindedly pursued a career as artist and thinker, spending time during the 1930s and 1940s in such places as Paris, New York and Mexico. In the course of his association with the surrealists and their attempts to transform automatic writing into drawing and painting, he started to use Fumage – a technique for generating evocative patterns with the smoke and soot of a lit candle. Between 1936 and 37 Paalen developed with these visionary-ephemeral forms on canvas, which he then mostly painted over in oils, a limited number of mature paintings which soon made his international reputation. The surrealist day dreamscapes of 1937 opened up more and more in 1938 towards an electrifying, linear style abandoning the landscape like a prospect towards a multiperspective surface, arriving then to a cosmic abstraction in 1940 during his exile in Mexico and New York, always trying to translate human capacity for vision into the logics of painting.

The Fumages were shown in various celebrated one-man-shows in such places as Paris 1938 (Galerie Renou et Colle), London (Guggenheim Jeune) and New York (Julien Levy Gallery). Influenced by both Concrete Art and the Paris Surrealists with their mentor André Breton, the work of Paalen combined an artistic approach deeply committed to modernism and a project which, in its both speculative and anthropomorphic aspects, extended far beyond art. It was particularly in the forty's and fifty's that Paalen's art played a major role in changing the conception of abstract art. Especially in New York Paalen had great impact on the American Art Scene during the formative years of Abstract Expressionism with his paintings, as well as his writings published in his art magazine DYN (1942-44), and Form and Sense (1945), the latter edited by Robert Motherwell. However, after his suicide in 1959 in Mexico his work, seemingly eclectic at first glance, sank into oblivion.