Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9:1 (2016), 67-72

67

Review of Wolfgang Paalen, Form and Sense
with an Introduction by Martica Sawin,
Arcade Publishing, 2013, 112 pp.

Ellen G. Landau
Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita of the Humanities
Case Western Reserve University

In her informative introduction to the 2013 reprint of Wolfgang Paalen’s
1945 essay compendium, Form and Sense (originally issued as No.1 in Wittenborn and
Company’s “Problems of Contemporary Art” series edited by Abstract Expressionist
painter Robert Motherwell), critic and art historian Martica Sawin laments the
continuing lack of any systematic assessment of the impact of Paalen’s writings
(and paintings) during and immediately after World War II. Her 1995 MIT Press
monograph, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, as well as the
Musées de Strasbourg 2000 exhibition catalogue of the same title, constitute essential
springboards from which to initiate further discussion. The Viennese-born artist
Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) had a somewhat complicated association with both
the established European Surrealists— he had an especially fraught relationship with
André Breton—as well as with a cohort of younger New York painters during the
all-important forties decade. Although they do not always agree, Amy Winter and
Andreas Neufert, head of the Paalen Archiv in Berlin, have also produced significant
explications of Paalen’s multi-faceted career.
A sampling of key essays from Dyn, Paalen’s 1942-44 journal produced
in Mexico and widely circulated in New York City, provided the texts collected in
Form and Sense, which was originally produced as a sort of homage to a mentor on
Motherwell’s part, and Christian Kloyber’s 2000 reprint of the complete run of Dyn
is, as well, of critical significance in any attempt to assess Paalen’s contributions.
My own discussion of Paalen and Motherwell in Mexico and American Modernism
(Yale University Press, 2013) was greatly informed by access to all of these sources.
Ellen G. Landau: exl3@case.edu
Copyright © 2016 (Ellen G. Landau). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9: 1 (2016)

68

It was, however, necessary to mount an extensive search to purchase a copy of
the 1945 edition of Form and Sense, of which only two thousand were printed and
one thousand copies were bound, according to Sawin. My treatment of Paalen’s
importance for Motherwell’s development addresses the lack Sawin recognizes,
but in only one—albeit very key—particular case. Mexico and American Modernism
was published more or less simultaneously with the new reprint volume; the Getty
Research Institute’s more general Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico by
Annette Leddy and Donna Conwell, with an introduction by Dawn Ades, just slightly
before. Leddy’s essay includes brief remarks regarding Paalen’s impact on American
painting, and the GRI exhibition (2 October 2012- 17 February 2013) did have some
relevant comparative works on view.
Sawin’s introduction to Form and Sense provides the reader with a short sketch
of Paalen’s multi-faceted career as a painter and theorist/writer/publisher, training
a particular focus on his interest in ethnology (especially Native American), and
describing his need to escape Hitler since Paalen’s father was Jewish. This led to his
reluctant 1939 resettlement in a Mexico City suburb under the auspices of Diego
Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Paalen moved there along with his wife at that time, the
French painter and printmaker Alice Rahon, and their friend, patron and fellow Dyn
contributor, photographer Eva Sulzer. Sawin summarizes a number of the more
significant conclusions presented by Paalen in essays reproduced in Form and Sense,
including “The New Image,” “Surprise and Inspiration” and “Art and Science,” for
example. “The New Image,” and possibly “Surprise and Inspiration,” were translated
into English for Dyn by Motherwell who, during the second half of 1941, was living
nearby in San Angel and was a frequent visitor to Los Cedros y Begonias, the Paalen
home. During this period, as confirmed by Edward Renouf, Motherwell often
worked in Paalen’s studio. Form and Sense, despite its small press run, may well have
been more accessible in the U.S. than copies of Dyn, and the essays included in it,
as Sawin notes, provided the basis for a number of central ideas also demonstrated
in Abstract Expressionist periodicals. This impact was particularly evident in
Motherwell and critic Harold Rosenberg’s one issue journal Possibilities, edited jointly
by them and published in the winter of 1947-48. (Dyn’s title had been based by
Paalen on the Greek term describing “that which is possible.”) Sawin lists a number
of canonical New York based artists who owned copies of Dyn, including Jackson
Pollock.
While still under-recognized, Wolfgang Paalen’s importance was obviously
critical for mid-century American painters on the road to abstraction; “it was
Paalen,” another artist, Fritz Bultman, reportedly proclaimed to Pollock’s
biographers, “who started it all.”1 “There is no true work of art,” Paalen declared
in the original introduction to Form and Sense (also included in the 2013 edition,
xxiii), “without a deep meaningfulness—but meaningfulness need not mean
straightforward intelligibility.” Writing in 1945, in context with this remark and

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9: 1 (2016)

69

with obvious resonance to his times, Paalen asked, “Why should works of art be
easy to understand in a world in which nothing is easy to understand?” “Paintings
no longer represent,” he continued, “it is no longer the task of art to answer naïve
questions.” Coining a phrase more typically credited to Ad Reinhardt because of its
re-use in “How to look at a Cubist Painting,” a 1946 PM newspaper cartoon, Paalen’s
conclusion still seems prescient. “Today, it has become the role of the painting” he
explained, “to look at the spectator and ask him: what do you represent?”
Issued under Arcade Publishing’s rubric, “Meanings and Movements in
Twentieth-Century Art,” supervised by consulting editor Deborah Rosenthal,
professor of art in the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Rider University,
the 2013 edition of Form and Sense clearly fits the series’ goal of presenting “books
by and about art and artists, particularly of the modern period, that deserve to be
in print again.” In my re-consideration, in Mexico and American Modernism, of the
deeper links between internationalism and a concern with self, and how these were
exhibited by some of the most prominent Abstract Expressionists, Paalen’s effect
on the young Robert Motherwell quickly surfaced as fundamental. Given the impact
of Motherwell’s own writings in early 1940s New York (especially “The Modern
Painter’s World” which initially appeared in the first issue of Dyn), this would likely
also have had an important ripple effect.
Throughout his long career as a painter, collagist and printmaker, Robert
Motherwell always remained convinced that one of the overarching tasks of
modernism is to find “a language that would be closer to the structure of the
human mind.”2 This core belief exemplifies the continuing impact of his youthful
“association” with the Surrealists, as Sidney Janis described their unusual relationship.
One of his most frequently quoted early statements, “the function of the artist is to
express reality as felt,”3 for example, demonstrates the centrality of Chilean surrealist
Matta in guiding the evolution of Motherwell’s ideas on creativity. (The two had
traveled to Mexico together in June 1941, along with Matta’s wife and the painter
Barbara Reis.)
As articulated in “The Modern Painter’s World,” this concept resonates
equally with Wolfgang Paalen’s beliefs, and when his friends returned from Taxco
to the U.S. in September that year, Motherwell stayed on with his future wife
María Emilia Ferrera y Moyers to work alongside Paalen (Seligmann’s close friend)
near Mexico City. Writing “The New Image” during this period, Paalen declared
traditional notions of beauty and ugliness as “by no means necessary preconceptions
for artistic creation” (2013 edition, 37). Because photography can accurately reflect
reality, he dismissed as reactionary “those painters who today use exclusively this
means of expression” (47), a negative reference both to totalitarian-sponsored Social
Realism and the more veristically-inclined Surrealists. Not surprisingly, Paalen was
especially critical of Dalí, denouncing as vulgar the Spaniard’s “cross-image puzzles”
(50); in his own writings Motherwell would employ a similar critique.

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9: 1 (2016)

70

Carefully reading “The New Image” in Form and Sense clearly establishes
Paalen’s both similar and different ideas compared to the orthodox Surrealists. While
lauding automatism’s ability “to sense unexpected images in aesthetically amorphous
material” (a shared goal), Paalen distinguished works produced automatically from
mere subjective interpretation, observing that to dream, in the widest sense of the
word, is an automatist activity, but to relate one’s dreams in an academic style is
decidedly not. Breton, who supposedly almost “excommunicated” Motherwell for
translating “The New Image,” was likely especially irritated by Paalen’s key assertion
in this essay: “The verbal flow of the poet and the kaleidoscopic flow of the painter,
emancipated in automatism, are nothing but raw material—and it is the great merit
of surrealism to have taught us that it is this (and not the exterior world) that is the
true raw material of the poet and the painter” (42). Emphasizing that “the possible does
not have to be justified by the known” (53), Paalen provided a bulwark for his belief (in
contradistinction to Matta, Dalí and Breton) that automatism could—and should—
be used to generate abstraction.
Anticipating the Abstract Expressionists, Paalen wrote that a lack of
recognizable subject matter should not in any way presume exclusion of significant
themes: images, he said, have “the capacity to project a new realization which does not
have to be referred to an object already existing” (51). Maintaining that “the artist
of our time can be authentic only when he creates new modes of seeing, only when
he is original” (48), Paalen made an interesting corollary claim in “The New Image”
when he wrote that “significant” artists of any period have been “more or less
theoreticians.”
In another 1941 text included in Form and Sense, Wolfgang Paalen recorded
supplementary ideas about the nature of creativity that likewise proved crucial
for mid-century American modernism. Completed in December, much or all of
“Surprise and Inspiration” (first appearing in the summer 1942 second issue of Dyn)
could have been conceptualized while Robert Motherwell was still in Mexico. In it,
Paalen advocates that “authentic artists must strive above all to see” (56-57), adding
that they should not be concerned about appearing as “outcasts” from utilitarian
values. He commences this essay by recalling the effects of a short-circuiting lamp
that he experienced on a visit to Altamira’s prehistoric caves in 1933. Its flashing off
and on reconstructed for him the sense of surprise he suspected that primitive man
must have felt when, out of the gloom, suddenly he saw what he’d drawn on the
walls, in brushstrokes “refulgent with genius.” Reflecting discussions with his young
American acolyte, Paalen quoted a Motherwell favorite, pragmatist philosopher
John Dewey, “To be set on fire by a thought or scene is to be inspired” (62), thus
identifying the “surprise” of imagination as a central ingredient of true creativity.
According to Breton’s classic definition, Surrealism found its formal and
ethical basis in the resolution of dream and reality, two seemingly antithetical states.
Paalen’s underscored explanation that “inspiration is the liberation of the torrent of

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9: 1 (2016)

71

imaginative association through the shock of surprise” (65) helped furnish a more nuanced
psychological framework for the generative role of automatist technique. Discussing
Freud’s theorization of the mechanics of dreamwork, Paalen was particularly
interested in the role assigned to condensation, a mind pursuit centered on bridgebuilding. Critical to understanding the function of “unconscious thought (the part of
mental activity that takes place outside the focal points of consciousness),” he writes
in “Surprise and Inspiration” (65), the metaphoric proclivities of condensation help
to differentiate imagination from thinking.
Stimulated by primitive art’s inherent abstraction, as well as new discoveries
in quantum physics (described in “Art and Science”), Wolfgang Paalen had already
begun to evolve a “post-surrealist” philosophy by the time Robert Motherwell
arrived on his doorstep. Dynatic art, Paalen wrote in “Farewell to Surrealism”
(an essay not included in Form and Sense), would exclude any kind of mysticism
or metaphysics, aiming instead at “a plastic cosmogony, which means no longer
a symbolization or interpretation but, through the specific means of art, a direct
visualization of forces which move our body and mind.”4 While previously in awe
of the expatriate Surrealists, by the time he wrote “The Modern Painter’s World”—
and seemingly inspired by Paalen—Motherwell had become fairly eloquent in his
own critique of overreliance on the individual unconscious, as well as capable of
articulating a new desire among his American peers to nuance “pure” automatism
with more deliberate formal advancements. Somewhat more in line with Paalen’s
dynatic thinking, and even more synchronous with ideas percolating among
his younger artist friends, Motherwell would propose an alternate version of
automatism, one he said that is “very little a question of the unconscious,” and rather
“a plastic weapon” for the invention of new form.
Paalen’s example (he exhibited in New York in 1945 and ’46 and spent a year
there after the war) did not, however, lead directly or merely to new paths of formal
innovation. Sawin remarks his tendencies to obfuscation and his suicide. Andreas
Neufert has written of Paalen’s “dilemma” as an assimilated (half-) Jewish intellectual
“who had to rediscover identity as a permanent self-reflection, self-questioning
and continuous invention.” This, Neufert points out, “also contained the question
of identification as such, as a necessary human means but also—in its possible
disortions—as a moral problem.”5 Anxious reflection, both on a personal and global
level, is evident in the tenor of Paalen’s ‘40s writings.
By reintroducing the ideas of a neglected but pivotal figure, Form and Sense
shines a certain kind of penetrating light on some of the more complex roots of
critical artistic transformations that took place during the Second World War and
immediately after. Reading these essays with fresh eyes today, Sawin points out, we
discover in Wolfgang Paalen “a highly informed intellect coming to grips with the
complex question of what form art might take on the cusp of the atomic age” (xviii).

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9: 1 (2016)

1 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York:
Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1989), 534.
2 Robert Buck, “With Robert Motherwell,” Robert Motherwell (New York: Abbeville Press,
1984), 25.
3 Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” Stephanie Terenzio, ed., The Collected
Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32.
4 Wolfgang Paalen, “Farewell au Surréalisme,” Dyn 1 (April 1942): 26.
5 Andreas Neufert, “Wolfgang Paalen’s First Mexican Period (1939-1949): A Synthesis of Jewish
Iconoclasm and Eschatology in the Gleam of the First Gaze,” Estudios de arte y estetica, no. 49 (1998):
400.

72