WOLFGANG PAALEN (1905-1959)

Following a trip to Greece in 1936, Wolfgang Paalen began Pays interdit, or L’upyre as it was originally titled, a canvas which would occupy him until well into the following year. When it was completed, Paalen revealed an apocalyptic world, set beneath an aurora borealis-like sky from which iridescent orbs descend. A single figure perches atop the craggy expanse, a nod to Delphic oracles and fairy-tale chimera. As Marcel Duchamp noted, ‘[Paalen] paints scenes 'for' a sorcerer (you never see the witches)’ (M. Duchamp to J. Levy, Julien Levy Gallery Records, January/March 1939, University of Pennsylvania).
Pays interdit marks a critical moment in the young artist’s aesthetic development. In 1935, Paalen, then just twenty, met André Breton, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement. Breton quickly took to Paalen – of whose work he said, ‘All great artists invent a new world: but these new worlds reveal the original experiences of the human race’ – and invited him to participate in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London (H. Read, ‘Wolfgang Paalen’, in Minotaure, Paris, May 1939, No. 12-13, p. 90). There, Paalen debuted his first fumage, a technique he devised in which smoke from a candle is used to create patterns across the surface of the canvas or a sheet of paper; it was inspired by the Surrealists’ use of psychic automatism and Pays interdit is one of the earliest examples in which Paalen incorporated fumage into his painting practice. By 1937, when the work was finished, Paalen had had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Pierre in Paris and was thoroughly integrated into the Surrealist movement.