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.

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language, this book gathers the three collections of poetry Rahon published in her lifetime, along with uncollected and unpublished poems and an album of portraits, manuscript pages, and artworks.

A lively history of the Surrealists, both known and unknown, by one of the last surviving members of the movement—artist and bestselling author Desmond Morris. Surrealism did not begin as an art movement but as a philosophical strategy, a way of life, and a rebellion against the establishment that gave rise to the World War I. In The Lives of the Surrealists, surrealist artist and celebrated writer Desmond Morris concentrates on the artists as people—as remarkable individuals. What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and flaws? Unlike the impressionists or the cubists, the surrealists did not obey a fixed visual code, but rather the rules of surrealist philosophy: work from the unconscious, letting your darkest, most irrational thoughts well up and shape your art. An artist himself, and contemporary of the later surrealists, Morris illuminates the considerable variation in each artist’s approach to this technique. While some were out-and-out surrealists in all they did, others lived more orthodox lives and only became surrealists at the easel or in the studio. Focusing on the thirty-two artists most closely associated with the surrealist movement, Morris lends context to their life histories with narratives of their idiosyncrasies and their often complex love lives, alongside photos of the artists and their work.

Wolfgang Paalen, the almost forgotten Viennese painter and surrealist, only quite recently won back his original place as one of the most influential artists of the mid 20th century. This biography, originally published in German 2015 with great success, inspired the extensive retrospective in the Belvedere, Vienna, 2019 and though set the ball rolling, because it meticulously and comprehensibly explicates for the reader how it came about that this rather cautious and reticent artist became a key figure in the revolutionary movements of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. 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 for 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. With his works and texts he launched a revolution in artistic thought that saw him rise to become the hidden agent 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 this first major biography of Paalen, Andreas Neufert explores the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in the scenery of the European-American exile movement around 1940. More than ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters, documents and life interviews, it has become a fresh, richly detailed, wise and masterful portrait. It provides a deep insight into 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.

Consists of essays about the avant-garde journal Dyn, which was produced in Mexico in the 1940s - and its editor, Austrian painter and theorist, Wolfgang Paalen.

This book deals with the life and works of one of the most interesting and mysterious surrealist painters of the twentieth century. The first monograph on the artist to circulate worldwide, it includes an introductory study by Masayo Nonaka, curator of the exhibition Women Surrealists in Mexico and author of several books on Mexican surrealism. Masayo's essay provide a singular perspective on the pictorial universe of Remedios Varo and is accompanied by magnificent reproductions of her most important paintings.The group of works included in this book was part of the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, which visited various venues in the Unites States and Canada in 2012.