Yet another Count. After Balthus (Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola by his own naming), we read that Wolfgang Paalen called himself “Count von Paalen” before selling his title in an impoverished moment in Paris. According to Amy Winter, Paalen—Count or not—authored the supposed monograph about himself in 1946, said to be by one Gustav Regler. That is already an obfuscation. Here is the story.

In his autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, Regler enthuses in no uncertain terms about the artist:

I went to his studio to look at his pictures. There was something of Moby Dick in the lofty room of which one wall was entirely covered by a panel of Eskimo culture; and beneath the ceiling hung the impressive, outstretched phallus of a whale. As for the pictures—well, it looked as though Captain Ahab had embarked with his ship on a happy voyage over the ocean of stars. (xviii)

Regler raves on about apocalyptic thunderstorms and prophets, expressing in no uncertain terms the astonishment he felt, looking at Paalen’s work and surroundings, which occasioned in Regler a “healing change.” Enough, enough. Winter has discovered a cache of notes biographiques that Paalen left, corresponding more or less verbatim to the Regler text, but in French and not German. Regler’s original over-the-top praise of  Paalen clearly provided the irresistible basis (read: excuse) for “his” (and Paalen’s) “biography,” such as we have it. In short, it is autobiography given out as biography.

On this and other grounds, I maintain that Winter should be counted among the long list of talented women detectives, as summoned up by Amanda Cross and others: Kate Fansler would love the whole story. Winter has done an amazing amount of intelligent snooping about her subject. Some of this tale’s elements were well known, others not. It was common knowledge that Paalen was intimately involved in the Abstraction-Création movement and in Surrealism, that he founded the magazine DYN, published in Mexico City (1942–44), and that he influenced the development of Abstract Expressionism.

Raised in Vienna, Berlin, and Prussia—in the forests of Silesia—Paalen worked in Paris in 1924–25 and studied with Hans Hoffmann in Munich in 1926–27. He moved to Provence, then back to Paris in 1928, and finally to Mexico in 1939. Married to Alice Rahon in 1931, he maintained a close (very close) relationship with Eva Sulzer, a photographer and his lifelong patron and companion. His marriage dissolved in 1947, and for the next four years he had a “California” period, traveling about acquiring and selling pre-Columbian artifacts. Married briefly to Luchita Hurtado, whom he divorced in 1951, Paalen returned to Mexico and married Isabel Marin in 1957. During this time, Sulzer withdrew her support, and, in financial desperation, he became involved in various forms of illegal transport of and traffic in objects totemic and other. Running up against other dealers, Paalen sank lower and lower, until finally he committed suicide in Taxco. Whoof! Winter does not wax judgmental here—some deep psychoanalytic associations come to bear on the topic, explanation enough perhaps. To wit: his mother had suffered from deep melancholia, and his younger brother had shot himself before Wolfgang’s eyes, as he told Hurtado. There was yet more dementia and another suicide…all in the family.

But Paalen’s demise is surely the most dramatic of the lot. I should think it would stun the most sated imagination. (“No railings over the abyss,” as Breton would say.) His end suits his favorite costume, evidently a black body suit and fencing mask: after he shot himself, as Winter sums up, “His body lay undiscovered for days, eaten by wild boars” (228). Goodness me! Very surrealist.

The reader can and Winter does make appropriate comparisons with other suicidal artists, such as the Jewish poet and writer Stefan Zweig, who took his life in 1942 while in exile in Brazil. Winter points out how, in these families of the “good Jewish bourgeoisie” like Paalen’s, the children were encouraged to rise above “trade” to intellectual and cultural pursuits, giving rise to careers like that of the musician Gustav Mahler and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer.

Paalen himself devised the appellations for the various periods of his work, to which these approximate dates can be given: 1) the Cycladic (Abstraction-Création, 1935–36); 2) the Totemic (Surrealist period, 1937–39); 3) the Cosmic and Mosaic (Mexico and California, 1939–47 and 1947–51, respectively); 4) the Telluric (France and Mexico, 1951–56); and 5) the Floral (Mexico, 1957–59). Interesting enough. But one of the most intriguing reasons for his importance lies in his emphasis on an unbounded and unboundaried artistic community, not limited to the stranglehold of the School of Paris (or New York or anywhere else.) Paalen was truly an international figure and adopted a multidimensional, multiperspectival approach in his thinking and writing. Perhaps the greatest influence on him was Wassily Kandinsky, whose manifesto On the Spiritual in Art (1911) encouraged an expansion of space and a “rhythmical relationship of the elements of painting…in its inner space” (11). The concept of “dynatic” energy, otherwise termed the “philosophy of the possible,” on which he based his journal DYN opens the way for cooperation between science and imagination.

That imagination echoed, as Winter points out, Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking and romantic rhetoric. “It was this romantic chord that most appealed to the New Yorkers, particularly Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko, whose focus on the sublimity of the ‘timeless and the tragic’ appeared in 1943 directly after the appearance of the first number of DYN” (13). Barnett Newman’s essay “The Sublime is Now” summons up some of Paalen’s arguments in the latter’s article, “The New Image.” As Winter puts it, “Newman transparently appropriated thoughts and words, conflating various texts to make his own…as New York ambition and chauvinism escalated” (194–99). As for Paalen’s personality, Mark Rothko and Newman found the artist “alas stiff, etc., pale, stiff, both!” (199). So, as she argues clearly and plausibly, he lost out on all sides.

What was called for (and what his theories advocated) was a new art, a new age, a new man, a new American art, and a “New Image,” as detailed in one of Paalen’s best-known essays. All of this made sense in that period. What fueled the newness of his writing was the sense that the elements which were thought of as “contraries” were now “complementaries” (15), oriented to the positive. “What is thinkable is also possible” (17), said Paalen, in a formula reminiscent of Breton’s maxim, “What can be imagined can turn out to be real.”

As for the art objects that became Paalen’s obsession, they were haloed by the aura of anthropological lore, especially that of Franz Boas, frequently cited by Paalen in his “Totem Art” essay. In praising those “great anonymous Indian sculptors” with their “raw creative power and content of primary consciousness and the unconscious,” he was linking his own dynamism to the power of the primitive, at once acknowledging it and appropriating it (199–200).

As is so often the case, Paalen’s importance has come down to the baseline of chronology—who came first, Newman or Paalen?—an uninteresting gauge in my view. Newman uses the themes Paalen had set out in his essays “The New Image” and “Farewell,” namely, “the deficiencies of nonobjective and of Surrealism, and the value of primitive art as a model for modern art” (196). The issue is Northwest Coast and Amerindian art, to which an issue of DYN was devoted, appearing at the same moment as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s piece on the same subject in the Gazette des Beaux Arts in 1943. The influence of the publication Documents, edited by Georges Bataille from 1929 to 1930, with its cadre of ethnologists and ethnographers and their emphasis on the archaic or mythic psychology, was already widespread, of course, as Winter points out. But more crucially, she suggests that Paalen’s ideas, images, and style of discourse were appropriated by the New York School without proper attribution.

Paalen’s exile in Mexico during and after WWII marginalized him, and as the reputation of the New York School rose in eminence, his own status collapsed. By 1957–58, Winter alleges, with reason, that Paalen was all but forgotten. Subsequently, Arthur Cohen’s novel Acts of Theft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) tells Paalen’s tale as that of Count Stephan von Mauger—his smuggling, his dealings with the authorities in Mexico (who were themselves smugglers), and his downfall. All Winter says of this is that Cohen’s book is a fiction, an apocryphal reconstruction based on Paalen’s legend (226, 229 note 13).

Finally, Paalen had wanted to persuade Breton to rethink the bases and concepts of Surrealism according to his own idea of a new humanism, which would, he said, include far more scientific material, including the “philosophical implications of post-Einsteinian physics” (42), as Paalen sums it up in the Regler monograph, to no avail. To the contemporary reader, their like conceptions are visible, as are Paalen’s references in “The New Image” to Breton’s writings: specifically, his “glass house” imagery, like the crystal metaphors of German Expressionism (129), and Breton’s citing of his favorite sentence from Nosferatu le Vampire about the crossing of the bridge, on the other side of which “les fantômes vinrent à leur rencontre” (“the phantoms came to meet them”). Paalen writes about that bridge in “Image”:

The possible does not have to be justified by the known. This is the insight that in the midst of all our troubles, gives us the certitude that some day the bridge between art and life will be built. Other men will cross over. And on the other side it will no longer be phantoms that meet them. The mountain of glass, whose reverberations sometimes blinded us, which too often reflected only our own faces, will open for them and return intact the treasure of their childhood. (129).

In any case, though Paalen might have felt somewhat miffed (rather like Breton, when he felt Freud was not giving proper attention to the Surrealist experiments), Breton never ceased to laud Paalen’s vision and its kind of purity: “Windows as dark as burglars’ lanterns, the child sees them set in the soap bubble curve—but they can only be opened from within. It was Paalen’s achievement in seeing, in enabling us to see, from within the bubble” (64).

Paalen had wanted to merge the scientific and the romantic—and perhaps he succeeded in that, more poetically than specifically. What is clearly truest is that he and his ideas did not succeed in merging with the others. The veil of mystery hung heavy over him and his black body suit, which befitted his celebrated technique of fumage, in which the smoke of a candle is passed over a surface, and inspired the act of “interpreting through new brushwork the design suggested by it” (54).

Winter shows, through her research and straightforward recounting, just what Breton admired in the esoteric spirit of Paalen’s constructions and imaginings when he wrote that “ ‘le domaine de Paalen’ was a complex world of personal myth, fantasy, and tragedy” (63). Whether we look from inside or outside the bubble, and however we describe or define that bubble, the incontrovertible evidence is in: Paalen deserves the mantle of the DYNamist, the man who devoted his life to the belief that the totemic object and the junction of art and science could reveal the untapped energy of the possible.