Second volume of the biography on the Austrian-Mexican Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen (1905 Vienna - 1959 Taxco/Mexico) by Andreas Neufert. First English edition.

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.

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.

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time. Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Her first husband was the artist Wolfgang Paalen, among her lovers were Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose, and over the years her circle of friends included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Miró, Paul Éluard, Man Ray, and Anaïs Nin. This bilingual edition of Rahon’s poems confirms the achievement of this little-known but visionary writer who defies categorization. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness. For the first time in any language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

The artist and intellectual Wolfgang Paalen was an important trendsetter in art around the middle of the 20th century.His pictures and texts provided both support and inspiration for young representatives of American abstract expressionist painting such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.Paalen, born in Vienna, moved to Paris in 1929, where he affiliated with the Surrealists.His original contribution to Surrealism were his so-called 'Fumage pictures'. In these he painted hallucinatory motifs using candle smoke, some of which he continued associatively with oil paint, others he left in their own right.Paalen went into exile in Mexico in 1939 on the invitation of Frida Kahlo. From 1942 to 1944 he edited the influential art magazine DYN.The catalogue is dedicated to all of the artist's creative periods. His long-standing interest in collecting and researching the indigenous art of British Columbia and Mexico as well as his literary work are also illuminated in more detail.Accompanies the exhibition 'Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959): An Austrian Surrealist in Paris and Mexico', 4 Oct 2019 - 19 Jan 2020, Belvedere, Vienna.Co-published with Belvedere.English edition.