page_title: Wolfgang Paalen
section_title: International Exhibition of Surrealism 1938 and surrealist objects
hierarchical_section_title: Wolfgang Paalen / Paris and surrealism / International Exhibition of Surrealism 1938 and surrealist objects
caption_attribution_description: English: Wolfgang Paalen, Les étrangers 1937
context_page_description: Wolfgang Robert Paalen was a German-Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934 to 1935, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.
context_section_description: Together with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, Paalen was among those responsible for the design of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he produced a floor, with dead leaves and mud from the Montparnasse Cemetery, and an installation named Avant La Mare, consisting of an artificial pond with water, real water-lilies and reeds, beneath Duchamp's ceiling of empty coal sacks. The doll Paalen decorated came with a silk scarf, a giant bat on her head and an eerie, mushroom-covered leaf-dress. It anticipated the barely-visible, floating, gliding totemic fairy creatures from his oil paintings with fumage that Pierre Colle would show the following June in his surrealist gallery. He also participated in the editorial of the catalogue, published as Dictionnaire abrégé du Surrealisme to the show, in which his most famous object, Nuage articulé, was discreetly announced as a drawing. Recent research suggests that Paalen had a huge influence on the design of the exhibition's Great Hall. Other critics suggest that the entire installation was meant to imply the minatorial situation of the Surrealist group itself, reflected by the approaching war, as well as a huge mother's womb as vade mecum to fight the causes of the crisis, which were located in the paternalistic fixations of the whole epoch. Paalen's biographer Andreas Neufert, in particular, suggests the latter reading and sees the installation as a symptom of an ideological shift within Surrealism, away from Freud's rigid theory of the Oedipus complex to ideas centred on Otto Rank´s theory The Trauma of Birth, with its recognition of the emotional nature of the child and its ties to the mother. This latter theory was represented and defended exclusively by Paalen and his wife Alice Rahon in this period.
  The erotic connotations of Nuage articulé, with its umbrella covered with natural sponges, embodied a dynamic sense of contradiction: bloom with stalk; sponge as symbol of nature, as a feminine utensil, which touched and cleaned naked female skin; umbrella as a masculine symbol of order and protection from natural forces. It thus became widely recognized among the Surrealists and their growing public. Geo Dupin, Paalen's sister-in-law, remembered that Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had been extremely taken with Paalen's object and had chosen not to buy it, for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, only because it was too fragile and difficult to transport. Nuage articulé was published later in a more political context in the Surrealist magazine London Bulletin, together with a text by André Breton translated by Samuel Beckett with a comment that the sponge-umbrella would bring to mind another, sadly prominent, umbrella – that of Neville Chamberlain at the 1938 Munich Conference and the failure of the British policy of appeasement. Besides Nuage articulé, of which two versions are known and preserved In addition to Nuage articulé, Paalen presented other objects in the 1938 surrealist exhibition, such as: Potence avec paratonnerre (Gallows with Lightning Rod), a larger-than-life wooden gibbet with lightning rods and a dedication plaque to the German philosopher and experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; Le moi et le soi (The Ego and the Id); and a version of Chaise envahie de lierre. Perhaps inspired by the revolving doors used as movable walls for paintings and metaphorically called portes ‘revolver’ in the surrealist exhibition, Paalen designed a pistol shape from different small animal bones, which he fastened to a box with a tray and glass lid lined with black velvet. As in museum displays of valuable paleontological discoveries, he included its title on a copper plate inscribed ‘Le génie de l'espèce’ (The Genius, or Engineering, of the Species).
caption: Les étrangers, 1937
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