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Surrealist Views, American Landscapes
Notes on Wolfgang Paalen’s Ruin Gazing
Kent L. Dickson
Department of English and Foreign Languages
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Critics have often noted that American nature and American landscapes
made strong impressions on European surrealist painters such as André Masson,
Yves Tanguy, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford.
“The vastness and natural spectacles of the continent,” observes Martica Sawin,
“impelled [these painters] to broach new subject matter, to invent new forms, and
to deal with space in a multiperspectival way.”1 But what of literary depictions of
American landscapes? In a different way than visual works, surrealist literary texts
tend to infuse the landscape with a series of explicit theoretical formulations worth
exploring in depth. Perhaps the central examples are André Breton’s Arcane 17 (1945)
and Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (1948). In this article, though, I focus on a text
more marginal within Surrealism and far less circulated; it has not, until now, been
translated into English)—Wolfgang Paalen’s landscape-heavy “Paysage totémique.”
Paalen (1905-59) was an Austrian painter and writer who arrived relatively early
in the New World—summer of 1939, just on the cusp of the wave of European
emigration during World War II. He had joined Breton’s circle in 1935, collaborated
on the last numbers of Minotaure, and participated in the notorious “International
Surrealist Exhibition” of 1936. His considerable gifts as a writer, thinker and linguist,
along with his invention of the automatic painting technique of fumage, endeared him
to Breton. When in the spring of 1939 he left Paris for New York in the company
of his wife Alice Rahon and their companion Eva Sulzer, he was one of the most
respected of the younger generation of Surrealists. The three travelled from New
York to Jasper National Park in Alberta and on to Prince Rupert, British Columbia,
via the Canadian Pacific Railway. From there they embarked on an ambitious two
month study tour of Northwest Coast art sites in southern Alaska, Haida Gwaii, the
central B.C. coast, and Vancouver Island, travelling by liner, float plane and small
Kent L. Dickson: kldickson@csupomona.edu
Copyright © 2014 (Kent L. Dickson). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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boat.2 In Victoria Paalen consulted with the preeminent authorities on Northwest
Coast art, W.A. Newcombe and George T. Emmons.3 Leaving Canada, the trio
travelled via San Francisco to Mexico City, where Paalen established a studio,
organized the 1940 “Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo” (with César Moro
and André Breton), founded the art review Dyn, and helped establish a vigorous
Mexican branch of Surrealism in exile. A central event in his development as a
thinker and painter, Paalen’s trip inspired several important essays, including the piece
concerning us here.
An Exemplary Landscape
Paalen’s descriptions of British Columbia’s coniferous forests in “Paysage
totémiqe” exemplify many of the preoccupations of late-thirties Surrealism,
while also giving voice and form to his own hypotheses on the origins of artistic
vision. Surrealist practices and concepts that influenced him included automatism,
objective chance and the surrealist object, mimeticism and dissolution. As the title
makes clear, he also relied on and indeed attempted to push forward the important
strain of ethnographic thinking within Surrealism. Totemic landscapes implied
for him a close connection between landscapes and the people inhabiting them
such that cultural forms (especially artistic traditions) emerged as the maximum
expression of the rootedness of a particular people in a particular place. This kind
of thinking, while essentially ethnographic, seduced a wide spectrum of vanguard
artists interested in so-called primitive art including the Surrealists. A related notion
from ethnography was also influential—that of documentary, whereby objects
were seen as the truest witness to a culture (a notion re-worked by George Bataille
in his influential magazine Documents). Likewise, Paalen relied strongly on a trope
common to 1920s primitivism generally, including the surrealist version, which seeks
homologies between the psychic development of the child and “primitive” phases
of human prehistory. In “Paysage totémique” Paalen incorporates these theoretical
stances into a personal vision of the artistic process whereby modern art regains its
role—the role it had in tribal societies—as a vital nexus of human community in
order to counterbalance the potent but morally blind forces of science. He foresees
a divinatory function for the artist analogous to that of the shaman, and conceives
of the work of art as a kind of node fusing psyche, community, and environment
(landscape). In this text as well as others he depicts the key moment in the creation
of a work of art, the instant of vision or inspiration, as a divinatory moment of
automatism in which the artist, through the agency of “surprise,” recognizes in the
material of the environing world an image, thus giving voice to a culture thoroughly
shaped by and interpenetrated with the biological or material substrate. Paalen’s
conception of landscape is deeply communitarian and human. The landscapes of
“Paysage totémique” coalesce around works of art (totem poles in situ) which, in
turn, are inconceivable without their environing nature. Paalen applied the term

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“specific space” to this state of tension between a monumental work of art and its
environing nature that for him exemplified totemic landscapes.
“Paysage totémique” is a thickly poetic, allusive piece of travel writing
registering the Jasper to Prince Rupert leg only of Paalen’s trip. That is, it registers
Paalen’s eager first encounter with the woods of the northern Pacific coast, but
nothing of the inlets, islands, small towns, and village sites where the vast majority
of totem poles stood. Paalen published it in installments between 1942 and 1945
in his journal Dyn, an art review in which he enunciated an off-surrealist or postsurrealist message rejecting certain aspects of the movement though clearly aspiring
to continue and amplify Surrealism in many regards. Beautifully published in
large format, with full-page color reproductions of artwork and black and white
photographs, the journal inherited the fine-book aesthetic of Minotaure. Many of
the Surrealists or former Surrealists in Paalen’s Mexican circle contributed, as did
international artists sympathetic to Surrealism such as Anaïs Nin and Henry Moore.
In truth Paalen penned the bulk of the important material himself—including
a series of densely argued essays on topics ranging from science, to politics, to
artistic vision, and to Northwest Coast art: “The New Image,” “Suggestions for
an Objective Morality,” “The Dialectic Gospel,” “Art and Science,” “Farewell to
Surrealism,” and most importantly for our purposes, “Surprise and Inspiration”
and “Totem Art.” Despite being published contemporaneously in the same organ,
“Paysage totémique” precedes these more expository Dyn pieces. Paalen based it on
extensive travel notes he had taken during his trip where he first worked through
some of the ideas he developed fully in the essays. “Paysage totémique” thus acts as
a kind of literary performance embodying many of Paalen’s theoretical postures. It
is an essay very much in the Bretonian mode: at once autobiographical, lyrical and
theoretically rigorous, it ranges digressively, in seemingly organic fashion, from scene
to scene through a series of surrealist tropes.
The series was published in four installments in Dyn Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 6.
A footnote to the first and second segments states that “plus tard peut-être formeront
un livre”—a project Paalen evidently abandoned. The phrase does, however, reveal
the degree to which he thought of “Paysage totémique” as an ambitious, literary
project. The disposition of elements confirms this. It has a classical rhetorical
structure—the first installment, with its rather wide-ranging introduction of the
theme, acting as an exordium to the narratio of succeeding installments (containing the
travel account proper, though with numerous digressions). The fourth installment,
entitled “Rencontre totémique,” departs slightly from the pattern set by the first
three in that it does not relate episodes of Paalen’s Northwest Coast journey, but
rather takes up his boyhood memories. It is related to other “totemic” aspects of
Paalen’s work, namely the fumage-based paintings of 1937-39 which Gustave Regler,
in a monograph ghostwritten by Paalen himself, described as being fuelled by “the
storm of memories.”4 These paintings feature tree-like, branching forms coalescing

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periodically into bones, skulls, biomorphic presences, skeletal avian forms, and so
forth. The key double number of Dyn 4-5 (the “Amerindian number”) does not
contain an installment of “Paysage totémique,” though Northwest Coast material
is amply represented by Paalen’s lead article “Totem Art.” Here he lays out, in the
context of a rigorously researched and sourced history of Northwest Coast art,
important aspects of his understanding of totemism as a system. As Daniel Garza
Usabiaga has shown, the article takes positions on debates current in anthropology
of the day and can be characterized, among other things, as a strong defense of
the diffusionist theories championed by Franz Boas (given form in Paul Rivet’s
influential 1943 book Les Origines de l’Homme Américain), and as an attempt to push
back the date of origins of the Northwest Coast style to before the advent of the
Russian fur trade.5
At the heart of “Paysage totémique” Paalen places an extended depiction of
the B.C. landscape in which he remains faithful to a pattern of surrealist landscape
depiction that Breton had inaugurated some years earlier. Landscape modes did not
figure prominently in writings by the Surrealists in the twenties, but they had snuck
in by the mid-thirties. Breton features landscape in L’amour fou (1937), structuring
Chapter 5 around a climb from the Orotava Valley up to the heights of the Teide
volcano in the tropical mountainscape of the Canary Islands. In his depiction of
Tenerife’s famous dragon tree, he creates a landscape that remits to a state of human
origins in a way that recalls Paalen’s text:
The immense tree, plunging its roots into prehistory, hurls into the day as yet
unsoiled by the apparition of man its irreproachable mast, which suddenly
bursts apart in oblique masts, radiating out in a completely regular rhythm.
It shoulders with all its strength intact these still living shadows among us
which are those of the kings of the Jurassic fauna whose traces you find once
more as soon as you scrutinize the human libido.6
Jean-Claude Blachère has applied the phrase “lieux-signaux” to the ethnographically-informed landscapes in which Breton depicts a kind of primal nature corroborating the lessons of primitive man.7
As a pictorial and literary convention or a perceptual habit that carries
certain presuppositions, landscape furnishes a suggestive lens through which to read
“Paysage totémique.” Paalen’s literary landscapes tend to dissolve the ego or subject,
and to question the sovereignty of the creative I/eye. If an artist channels unseen
forces outside himself into a divinatory moment of automatism that produces the
work, this cannot be said to be a product of his sovereign ego in the normal sense.
Then too, Paalen seems keenly aware in “Paysage totémique” of the flimsiness of
his own selfhood, which is always threatening to corrode in the immensity of the
B.C. forest. He speaks of being deprived of “that minimum of support, a diver’s

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bell, which one has the right to expect [ce minimum d’appui que même d’une cloche de
scaphandrier on est en droit d’attendre],” suggesting a gloomy, perilous space in which
fictions of the autonomous ego and western reason begin to break down.8 This kind
of thinking is very much in keeping with 1930s surrealist thought generally.
The qualities of Paalen’s literary landscapes that tend to weaken the sovereign
subject are at odds with landscape as a pictorial and literary convention, which
depends entirely on the integral, bourgeois subject. Rather than as a mode of
expression, we must understand landscape as a perceptual habit in the processing
and arranging of the material of the visual world according to agreed schemes.
It is “already artifice in the moment of its beholding, long before it becomes the
subject of pictorial representation,” according to W.J.T. Mitchell.9 Its unity is always
constituted in the privileged observer—the landowner or traveler for whom it
functions as a status symbol, marketable commodity, or “object to be purchased,
consumed, and even brought home in the form of souvenirs such as postcards
and photo albums.”10 Denis E. Cosgrove, in his history of the western landscape
tradition, ties landscape explicitly to the rise of Europe’s bourgeoisie from the
fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. For Cosgrove landscape is defined by the
presence of an observer, always classed, and who always promulgates the interests of
his/her class in creating or consuming landscapes: “[h]uman subjectivity provides the
totality or holism, the synthetic quality, of landscape.”11
The tension between landscape convention and Paalen’s efforts to weaken
the integrity of the subject echoes other obvious tensions—namely, between his
position as an explorer, cognoscente, and collector, and the decolonizing thrust
of some of his philosophical and political postures. Paalen omits from “Paysage
totémique” both his collecting activities and the degree to which parts of the route
he travelled had a significant tourist infrastructure and long history of tourism by
1939. Just as his surrealist colleagues would do in New York some years later, he
collected Northwest Coast art objects avidly during his trip, availing himself of a
network of dealers, agents and curio shops up and down the coast, as chronicled
in his travel journal.12 The verb “collect” which he uses, for example, in the photo
captions to “Totem Art” (e.g. “Collected by W. Paalen near Sitka, Alaska”) hints
at more rigorously ethnographic processes of acquisition. Likewise, Paalen casts
his Northwest Coast trip in “Paysage totémique” as a kind of striking out into the
wilderness, passing over in silence the network of hotels, steamship routes, travel
agents, railways, and package tours that had sold Alaska to wealthy city-dwellers from
the 1870s onward, as Robert Campbell has documented.13 Totem poles and Alaskan
landscapes figured prominently in the photographic albums, magic lantern shows,
and other trophies brought back by returning travelers. Their images were also
fetishized and endlessly reproduced in the literature and ephemera associated with
this tourist trade—postcards, railway brochures, printed steamship timetables, menus,
magazine advertisements and so forth (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1. Tichnor Brothers Inc., “Bear Totem Store, Wrangell, Alaska,” linen postcard, s/f (1930-1945)

Guidebooks to the region had been available since 1893 with the publication
of the Appletons’ Guide-book to Alaska and the Northwest Coast. Paalen himself followed
part of what the Canadian National Railway marketed during the thirties as the
“Triangle Tour of the Canadian Rockies and the Pacific Coast.” It is easy to think
that the tourist infrastructure and the wealthy steamship passengers on summer
holiday from New York or Philadelphia irked Paalen as he sought unpolluted cultural
remains. What is certain is that institutions such as storefront museums, Indian
Towns, municipal displays, and curio shops are absent from “Paysage totémique,”
though some do appear in his notebooks. Though always in a surrealist register,
Paalen engages in activities of exploration, collecting and mapping, activities which
appear to contradict the anti-colonial opinions he expresses elsewhere—for instance,
when he condemns the Canadian government’s repression of aboriginal religious
and cultural practices, i.e. potlatch. Marie Mauzé has characterized his attitude in this
respect as a “straightforward denunciation of colonialism.”14
Totemic Vision(s)
A titanic struggle between the forces of dissolution or death on the one
hand, and generation or life on the other, became visible to Paalen as he travelled
through British Columbia’s temperate rainforests. “Paysage totémique” depicts his
train journey into these forests as a kind of regression into the swampy, teaming

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chaos of biological life. Vegetable structures pile up, superimposed on one another, a
turmoil of life emerging from death and vice-versa, which recall the paintings of his
“totemic” period. Thus he observes “calcified tree trunks, barbed estuaries of dead
branches, debris-dams of wounded stumps silvery, bristling and impassible [troncs
d’arbres calcifiés, estuaires barbelés de ramures mortes, embâcles de souches hérissées argentées et
infranchissables].”15 He further describes:
colossal dead-falls, leaning trunks tangled and arrested in their fabulous
bludgeon-like drops, broken-thighed giants split by lightening, Laocoöns
flayed by the thousand serpent arms of a too-tortured bronze, too furiously
interlaced not to make one doubt the supposed sweetness of vegetable
death-agonies [des colosses de troncs encroués en des chutes fabuleuses sur des massues
monumentales, gigantes écuissées par la foudre, et ces laocoonesques écorchés aux mille bras
ophidiens d’un bronze trop torturé, trop furieusement natté pour ne pas faire douter dé la
prétendue douceur des agonies végétales].16
He depicts the forest in a state of biological strife between dissolution and generation—fecund strife with distinctly sexual or copulative aspects: “Further off are
battles enacted, couplings in mirage [Plus loin ce sont des simulacres de combats, des mirages
d’accouplements].”17 According to Paalen the root-wheels of trees ripped from the
ground are given “in wild liberty, in a great spectacle, undulating in gorgonic nests, in
absurd flutings, phallic rods, monstrous veins, everything grandiosely sexual [en liberté
sauvage se donent en grand spectacle, ondulent en gorgoniques nids, en tuyautages absurdes, verges,
veines monstrueuses, le tout grandiosement sexuel].”18 Death coincides with and is inconceivable without Eros, whose luxuriant biological growth covers the landscape down to
the blue-green moss, “supremely impartial rust” coating every piece of dead wood.19
So Paalen evokes:
the tide of ferns rhythmically surging, flamboyantly gusting on the earth’s
swelling breast as by the very pulsation of its enormous breath. Beyond
every imaginable horizon, wave after wave breaks in always new mountains
and hills with seashell towers and crests, massifs of blue smoke far off, the
eternal assault of moving bulwarks, armies of a life so victorious that as far
as the eye can see its green fire merges with the rumbling of the immense
organ of sap which sings the silence and which is inexhaustible! [la marée des
fougères rythmée en flamboyantes bouffées aux enflures du poitrail de la terre comme par la
pulsation même de son souffle énorme. Par delà tout horizon imaginable, vague après vague
moutonne en toujours nouveaux monts et collines turriculées aux crêtes, massifs de fumée
bleue au loin, l’assaut éternel des mouvantes murailles, des armées d’une vie si victorieuse
qu’à perte de vue son vert incendie ne fait qu’un avec le grondement de l’immense orgue
‘d’une sève inépuisable et qui chante le silence!]20

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Young trees sprout from their nurse logs as from “the emerald dreams of giants
like lost species gobbled up in the slow lust of swamps [le sommeil d’émeraude des géants
comme des espèces perdues engloutis dans la lente luxure des marécages].”21 The train on which
he travels enters a space bathed in muted green light—vegetable green muted by
fog—which he describes as a “chrysoprase halo” or “opaline breath of the first days
[l’haleine opaline des jours premiers].”22 Paalen accords a key significance to this color
and quality of light. It became for him a visual shorthand for the forest’s generative
powers. He mentions it repeatedly in “Paysage totémique” and in other texts, and
employs it as the setting for some of his paintings.
Paalen’s landscape descriptions telescope back into prehistory in this way.
He depicts the train voyage as a regression where, in being carried toward what he
calls the “spice shop of memory,” he conflates his personal psychic genesis with the
origins of biological life.23 He underscores the idea of regression in a fantasy of a
lost world, the train off of the tracks and swallowed by the forest, perhaps subdued
by a netting of vegetation as in the photograph of a locomotive tangled in vines and
published in Minotaure to accompany Benjamin Péret’s essay on nature overcoming
and devouring the artifacts of human progress.24 “The whole train with all hands
was lost in the forest,” Paalen states, “it can no longer find the way out (as a child I
heard tell of a convoy that vanished in this way in some part of Siberia, I have never
been able to verify the story) [corps et biens le train entier s’est perdu dans la forêt, qu’il ne
trouve plus la sortie (enfant, j’entendis parler d’un convoi évanoui de la sorte quelque part en Sibérie,
je n’ai jamais pu vérifier cette histoire)].”25 A sign of technological mastery over Canada’s
wilderness, the train has been overtaken and overcome by the land’s immeasurably
more powerful generative forces.
For Paalen regression toward biological origins implied regression toward
cultural origins. The landscapes he describes in his Northwest Coast material thus
tend to conflate natural elements with carvings he observed, or with first nations
mythological figures he imagines to be part of the scene. Several of the Eva
Sulzer photographs Paalen chose to illustrate his text accentuate the quality of
interpenetration—notably, her photo of an aged and weathered totem pole standing
in close proximity to a living tree, such that the tree’s branches appear to emerge
from the pole itself.26 The carving mingles with its surroundings to the point of
being swallowed by living forest. It is important to note that Paalen went to British
Columbia to view monumental carvings in situ, following in the footsteps of the
painter Kurt Seligmann. Seligmann’s article on his B.C. sojourn in the last issue of
Minotaure was accompanied by a photograph of a woodland scene suffused with
sunlight and with a decomposing Haida sculpture at its center which becomes
confused with the landscape in its decay (Fig. 2).27
Similar visions of interpenetration between the natural and cultural orders
characterize all of Paalen’s written accounts of his Northwest Coast experience.

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Thus, his travel journal notes “trees so mysteriously deformed that they appear as
natural totems (ready-mades) [arbres singulièrement tordus, totem poles ‘naturels’ (‘readymades’)],” and relates looking out the train window to see “in the middle of the
forest a totem pole; I find it so beautiful that I want to call the other passengers, but
perhaps it is no totem but rather a burnt tree, impossible to know for certain [en pleine
forêt, un poteau totémique qui me semble très beau, je veux appeler les autres, mais je ne suis – un
peu plus près – plus sûr si c’est un poteau totémique ou un arbre brûlé. Impossible d’en avoir la
certitude].”28 In “Surprise and Inspiration” he narrates a similar incident while walking
in the forest near the Gitxsan village of Kispiox, B.C., and discovering a grouping of
totem poles:
What was my disillusion when, upon getting closer, I realized that a group
of charred skeletons of tall cedars and hemlocks curiously slashed by the
fire had suggested the entangled profiles of totem-poles. At this moment
something happened that made me stop short: on top of one of the
emaciated trunks perched a large crow who, having shaken his wings, sat
motionless. Venerable crow! I easily recognized you as Yelx, the promethean
crow of the Indian myth…29
This passage mirrors another from his travel journal when he spots “[a] dead tree on
which a raven is standing. At a distance it is impossible to distinguish dead trees from
poles: totemic [Arbre mort sur lequel se tient un corbeau. À quelque distance, impossible de
distinguer les arbres morts des poteaux: totémiques].” 30 For Paalen, the tree and totem pole
are equally totemic, or rather, the totemic qualities of both depend on the degree to
which they are conflated.
Such experiences of equivocal or dual perception constitute Paalen’s
totemic vision. Several threads of surrealist thought connect in his work through
his descriptions, and they are key to the theory of artistic inspiration he summarizes
in the term “surprise.” Paalen remarks in his journal that the experience of dual
perception resembles the processes of automatism and objective chance. “Is this the
solution of the moment,” he asks:
[t]he Altamira buffalos [suggested] by the relief of the cave’s ceiling? The
image or appearance—art objectification of desire, visualization of desire.
All the beginnings of art in this order of automatism? [Est-ce la solution du
moment? [...] Les buffles d’Altamira [suggéré] par le relief du plafond de la grotte?
L’image ou apparition – art objectivation du désir, visualisation du désir. Tout le début de
l’art dans cet ordre d’automatisme?]31
Both objective chance and automatism are cornerstones of surrealist theory,
and both relate to Paalen’s explanation of artistic inspiration. The practice of

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Fig. 2. Harlan Ingersoll Smith, “Two posts carved in the form of men, from which apparently
shaman’s grave has fallen northwest of the modern Haida Indian cemetery near the higher lighthouse,
Masset; 1919; British Columbia.” Canadian Museum of History, 46686. Reproduced in Minotaure 1213 (1939).

automatism—techniques of writing or drawing designed to circumvent the conscious
mind—had been central to the movement since the 1920 publication of Les champs
magnetiques by Breton and Philippe Soupault. Phrases and images emerging directly
from the unconscious were thought to reveal sublimated desire, and thus constituted
a crucial part of the creative process for writers and artists in surrealist circles. As I
have noted, Paalen himself developed the automatic technique of fumage by passing
a prepared canvas over a candle flame and subsequently elaborating the resulting
soot patterns into the designs of a painting. Objective chance was a more recent
formulation within Surrealism. It related to theorizations of the object from the early
through the late thirties when, as Haim Finkelstein observed, the object emerged “as
a central element in a dialectical process of the subjectification of the objective and
objectification of the subjective.”32 Thus unseen linkages between the unconscious

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and the physical world could prompt objects to materialize in response to one’s
desires. “Any piece of flotsam and jetsam within our grasp should be considered a
precipitate of our desire,” comments Breton in Surrealism and Painting.33 On the other
hand, Breton elaborated the idea of hasard objectif proper in his 1937 L’Amour fou to
explain a similar kind of chance encounter, though not with an object but rather with
a person—his second wife Jacqueline Lamba.
Paalen’s suggestion that the experience of dual perception of trees/totems is
an objectification of desire constitutes the earliest statement of his theory of artistic
inspiration. The term “surprise” encapsulates the theory, which he elaborates fully
in the essay “Surprise and Inspiration” in Dyn No. 2. For Paalen the moment of
surprise is a moment of confused recognition in which a visual form presses itself
urgently upon the startled viewer. He explains this theory with reference to his visit
to the Altamira cave some eight years earlier. Due to a failure of the electric lighting,
his guide had been forced to show him the paintings with “an exceedingly primitive
lamp” whose flickering flame revealed, in a shock of recognition or visionary
surprise, what the ancient artist must have experienced when he perceived the form
of a bison in the bulge of the cave’s ceiling: “He marvels. The shock of surprise
has broken the dike of memory.”34 Surprise is that moment of psychological shortcircuiting triggered by the vision of an external provocateur optique which results in
the experience of artistic inspiration. Or, expressed another way, “Inspiration is the
liberation of the torrent of imaginative association through the shock of surprise.”35
We must situate Paalen’s use of totemism in the dual quality of vision
that leads to the shock of surprise. It is true as Marie Mauzé asserts that “Paalen’s
landscapes are ‘totemic’ in the sense that they are inhabited by living creatures
that have the capacity to transform themselves: bears, eagles, wolves, ravens are
both animals and animal crests.”36 But it is important to remember that animals
transmogrify and become symbols as a result of a type of vision that constitutes
Paalen’s idiosyncratic totemism, and, further, that he aspired to make this kind of
vision central to postwar artistic practice. Totemism as a system of thought within
the evolutionary social sciences of comparative religion, sociology, ethnography,
psychiatry was developed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by scholars such
as J.F. McLennan, Robertson Smith, James Frazer, Wilhelm Wundt, Marcel Mauss
and Sigmund Freud. Paalen discusses in detail some of their texts in “Totem Art,”
indicating his familiarity with this discourse. All generally agreed that the system of
clan identification, with tutelary spirits such as animals, plants, and mythical or hybrid
creatures at base, functioned as a mechanism for ensuring exogamy or marriage
outside the group. At the most ‘primitive’ levels of social organization—tribes in
which religion with its incest taboos had not yet arisen—another mechanism was
needed to guard against intermarriage. These thinkers developed the theory of
totemism to supply such a mechanism. The totem did not quite attain the status of a
deity, but was seen almost as an intimate familiar that dominated both the psychic life

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of the individual and the social life of the clan. It was a mythically objectified form
of natural forces. Early Northwest Coast ethnographers such as Franz Boas, who
had done extensive field work along the B.C. coast, provided much of the raw data
used by these social scientists. Ethnographic theories of totemism lost credibility in
the thirties and forties, but Paalen found the notion of the totem useful in defining
artistic vision as a vital communion between the artists, environing nature and the
human collective.37
Through the surrealist procedure of surprise, Paalen re-institutes totemic
vision as the heart of a new, postwar modern art. Magic, for Paalen, rested on an
emotional identification with the woods, its flora and fauna, and with the natural
forces of the cosmos, obviating barriers between the subjective and the objective, as
he explains in “Totem Art”:
All pre-individualistic mentality in whatever race, not distinguishing clearly
between the subjective and the objective, identifies itself emotionally with its
environing world. And it is this affective identification which creates the magic
climate in which the totemic world is to be found.38
For Paalen modern art, once again an instrument of magic, should identify itself
emotionally with its environing world in a sort of modern totemism. Art would thus
once again become a vital medium through which human beings articulated their
relationship to one another and the cosmos—envisioned in his “cosmic” paintings as
an interplanetary space populated by forces and “cosmogenes” made of waves, rays,
and particles. “To a science already universal but by definition incapable of doing
justice to our emotional needs,” he clarified in Dyn Nos. 4-5, “there must be added
as its complement, a universal art: these two will help in the shaping of the new, the
indispensable world-consciousness.”39 Paalen’s landscapes in “Paysage totémique” are
totemic in the sense that they embody this type of totemic vision.
Ruin-Gazing in the Landscape
If, as Mary Ann Caws observed, ruins attracted the Surrealists to Mexico, the
urge to ruin-gaze drew Paalen to the Northwest Coast.40 The monumental sculptures
stand mature within the landscapes of “Paysage totémique” and “Totem art,” as
well as in Paalen’s descriptions and their photographic illustrations. The moment of
their production, long past, is insinuated on the first page of “Paysage totémique”
through the scent of red cedar—“particular odor of a good pencil”—wafting from
the coastal sawmills; or through the sculptural forms “knocked out to the rhythm of
uncountable axe blows precise as a wolf ’s canines battering its prey [Profils d’hommes
et de bêtes … jaillis du rythme d’innombrables coups de hache précis comme le battage des canines
du loup en proie à sa victime].”41 Paalen primarily conceived his totem poles not in their
freshly-cut prime but aged, softened, unpainted, and reduced to a sort of minimal

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purity like weathered bones. More than once he likened them to vertebral columns,
backbones of culture made up of “the myths and landmarks of social life.”42 He
was not terribly interested in the new poles produced by active workshops of First
Nations carvers in the 1930s (which he characterized on one occasion as “dreadful”
and “ugly”) nor in the old poles relocated from villages to westernized towns—even
when the original family had relocated them and thus, it might be argued, their
heraldic functions remained intact.
For Paalen, totem ruins embodied two paradoxical processes. One was
the process of distillation or purification; he thought the carvings reached their
maximum expressive power when distilled or purified by time and weather. The
second was the process of degradation, decay and cultural loss; he mourned the
degradation of Northwest Coast art. At the beginning of “Paysage totémique”
Paalen highlights the quality of purification by using the metallurgical term “scorify”
to characterize the old carvings he found most compelling: “Under the impregnable,
ageless, forest vault… hides the scorified wreckage of one of the strangest cultures
made by those with copper-moon faces [Sous les inexpugnables voûtes de sa forêt sans âge…
se cachent les épaves scorifiées d’une culture des plus étranges faite par des hommes à face de lune
en cuivre].”43 “Scorify” denotes the process by which impurities are removed from
an ore to leave a precious metal. Paalen suggests that time strips away extraneous
elements—such as modern paint, whose garish colors marred the carvings for
him—revealing their formal excellence, the uniqueness and internal coherence of
their sculptural vocabulary. The phrase “copper-moon faces” ties the metallurgic
image to the copper, a type of important and valuable ceremonial object made from
the metal and that functioned as status symbol or unit of currency in the potlatch
economy. Paalen does not develop this aspect of his image, perhaps because the
metal began to circulate only with the advent of trading networks in the 1790s; in
Dyn he was preoccupied with finding and reproducing only objects of the maximum
authenticity, and with no western influence. In the face of strong arguments to the
contrary he dates the development of monumental carving to pre-contact times
in “Totem Art.” It was thought that monumental sculptures required the use of
steel axes that were not widely available until western trade goods began circulating
through the region. Many experts, including Claude Levi-Strauss—whose 1943
visit to New York’s American Museum of Natural History spurred Paalen to write
on the topic— believed that carving on the scale of fully elaborated tree trunks
became possible only with the advent of steel axes. Therefore, the flowering of
Northwest Coast artistic traditions would necessarily have been a nineteenth-century
phenomenon.44 Paalen introduced extensive documentary evidence from sources he
found in Mexican archives to disprove this theory and push the date back. In another
example, he refused to reproduce hybridized objects such as the slate tobacco pipes
carved by the Haida (tobacco was a trade good) in Dyn. Westernized or hybridized
objects represented for Paalen “only the decadent stage at which a great art loses its

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raison d’être and degenerates into trifles.”45
Paalen uses the word “wreckage” in the passage above, which alerts us to the
decayed or degraded aspect of the ruins in his text. Decaying sculptures point to the
disappearance of an entire cultural complex, with its everyday practices, economy,
mythology, religion, and aesthetic traditions. The nostalgia of salvage ethnography
animates Paalen here. As he suggests in “Totem Art,” he seeks the remnant, the
trace—“whatever might remain of those famous tribes of warriors and magnificent
sculptors [ce qui pouvait rester de ces fameuses tribus de guerriers et magnifiques sculpteurs].”46 In
a caption to the same article he describes a building in the village of Mamalilaculla,
Village Island, B.C., as “a half-destroyed old community house” (Fig. 3). Paalen
feels that he has achieved his quest for the essence of a disappearing culture when
“the door of that great ‘community house’ opened as if by magic [s’ouvrit comme’
par enchantement la porte de cette grande ‘maison de communauté’],” admitting him to what
became in retrospect a sort of personal pilgrimage site.47 Another caption to a photo
showing a decayed funerary monument in the same article notes that “[t]hese graves
decay because of moisture, but well preserved funeral objects are sometimes found
in grottos.”48
For Paalen living First Nations peoples share something of the degraded
aspect of ruins. Though they were not his focus, he does evince a clear interest
in the coastal tribes he came in contact with during his journey. A brief sketch at
the end of the third installment of “Paysage totémique,” for instance, records his
initial impression of groups from the Skeena River region. He notes their dwellings,
physical appearance, family groups and especially their children:
The first Indian villages. Poor forest hamlets, rudimentary huts and cabins on
stilts. And poor people. The annual trek to the coast to fish for salmon and
work in the canneries, principal industry of the region, is beginning. Dressed
in shapeless woolen clothing with no discernible cut or color, wearing caps or
balaclavas, loaded down with children, thin suitcases and bundles…. A few
pretty girls in blue braids with complexions that run from ivory to boxwood,
pretty chubby children smashing their noses to the windows. [Premiers villages
d’Indiens. Pauvres hameaux lacustres, huttes et cabanes rudimentaires sur pilotis. Et
pauvres gens. C’est le départ annuel à la côte pour la pêche au saumon et pour le travail
dans les usines de conserves de poisson, principale industrie de la contrée. Vêtue de lainages
informes sans coupe ni couleur, coiffée de casquettes, de passe-montagnes, encombrée
d’enfants, de maigres valises et baluchons…. Quelques jolies fillettes aux nattes bleues au
teint allant de l’ivoire au buis, de jolis enfants tout ronds s’écrasent le nez aux vitres.]49
In the same passage he speaks of a “mob undeniably Asiatic in appearance,” alluding to diffusionist theories of the peopling of the Americas through Asian contact.
Paalen’s mourning of what he perceives to be the colonized, degraded state of pres-

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ent-day Northwest Coast peoples shines through this passage. They represent, for
him, a kind of living ruin: the embodiment of a great, ahistorical, ancestral tradition
that has fallen into the trap of colonialism and history.
Here, in the nostalgia of salvage, we note a tension similar to those I’ve
noted above with respect to tourism and collecting.50 Despite his anti-colonial
sympathies, Paalen downplays First Nations art of the thirties, which is seen today as
the beginning of a powerful mid-century revival, even a renaissance of the form, in
favor of works by long dead carvers who he perceives to be more legitimate. Tension
arises in the fact that, for Paalen, the person best equipped to safeguard this aesthetic
inheritance that is on the brink of falling to dust is the cognoscente, the European
artist/collector. On a certain level Paalen’s project was visionary; he aimed not just to
rescue but to reactivate Northwest Coast arts traditions:
I would not, by my way of comprehending reality, infringe on any of the
‘documentary’ rights which everyone holds as inalienable, and which belong
to the new face, the unknown exterior. […] Let the ethnographer fill the
herbariums indispensable to understanding, and sum up knowledge. It is
for the artist-philosopher to bring to light the sensitive fate of his time, to
embrace in every latitude of thought and space that which without him turns
to a treasure of dust. [Au visage nouveau, à l’inconnu extérieur je ne léserai aucun
de ses droits de “documentaire” tenus pour imprescriptibles entre tous par ma façon de
comprendre la réalité. […] Aux ethnographes de remplir les herbiers indispensables à
la connaissance, à faire le point du savoir. A l’artiste philosophe de mettre au jour de la
fatalité sensible de son époque, d’embrasser dans toute la latitude de la pensée et de l’espace
ce qui sans lui se mue en trésor de poussières.]51
In using the term “documentary” he references debates of the time within French
anthropology, in which the physical objects produced by a culture were seen as the
most faithful documents of that culture—more faithful than the reports of researchers.52 He aspires not to “document” Northwest Coast art but rather to reactivate its
central aspect, the “totemic” relationships it instituted between the artist, the community and the environment. Another facet of the ruin not mentioned previously
is discussed by Benjamin Péret in his article on ruins in the last number of Minotaure. Péret conceives ruins as a series of nesting, genetic dispositions in which past
forms inhabit present forms: within the castle survives the cave of prehistory, within
Versailles and the medieval castle; within the adult who survives the wreckage of
the child, just as, within human society generally there survives the wreckage of our
collective childhood. He writes, “The tiger becomes a wolf and the wolf becomes
a dog. The dog, descended from a dog, recognizes the wolf ’s ruins; the tiger’s are
a mere footprints in the sand, this sand whose ruins he has forgotten [De tigre, il est
devenu loup et le loup s’est souvent mué en chien. Le chien issu de chien reconnaît à peine les ruines

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Fig. 3. Eva Sulzer, “Back wall of a half destroyed old community house in the village of
Mamalilacoola, Gilford Island, B.C.,” 1939. Published in Dyn 4-5 (1943) © Paalen Archiv, Berlin

du loup, mais celles du tigre ne sont plus pour lui qu’un empreinte dans le sable, ce sable dont il
a oublié les ruines].”53 Paalen certainly knew Péret’s text—he contributed to the same
number of the magazine—though how influential it was for him is an open question.
What I would like to suggest is that Paalen read Northwest Coast art as a ruin in the
way Péret read them, as nested dispositions that remain at the heart of modern art
waiting to be reactivated. There is irony in the fact that for Paalen the agents of such
a reactivation should be not the descendants of the original carvers who he sees as
degraded, ruined, colonized, but rather should be European artists.
Mimeticism
Apprehended on the point of their dissolution, the ruins of monumental
carvings draw the reader toward a moment when, entirely reabsorbed by the
medium, they are gone. Paalen saw this as the instant of their fullest presence, and
it held a special attraction for him. He describes it in “Paysage totémique” as the
instant when the interdependency of totemic works and totemic landscapes stands
out with utmost clarity. Totemic landscapes coalesce around totemic works while

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they, in turn, emerge from and are reabsorbed into their landscapes in a sort of mise
en abyme of reversible forms of the cultural and the natural. Paalen employed the
term “specific space” to refer to this quality of interdependency between works and
landscapes. Not coincidentally, I believe, he weaves a third image into one of the
key passages of “Paysage totémique,” the paragraph where he defines these ideas—
that of an “eyed” butterfly whose wings, folding and unfolding, figure a face that
alternately resolves and dissolves marvelously. The butterfly thus becomes a visual
symbol for the shift in focus that allows for totemic vision as well as a representation
of the emergence and decay of a work of totemic art:
Surprise, the flint of the inspiration, for me plays best at the angle of attack
where the thing that flashes once and is gone grows iridescent with presence,
bursts desperately visible. Despite everything that has taken shape from
the hand and thought of man, this final moment is fascinating to me as the
blinking wings of the butterfly whose most beautiful eyes do not see: and so
before dissolving in time, the work is adorned finally with all the brilliance
of its specific space. [La surprise, pierre à feu de l’inspiration pour moi ne joue mieux
qu’à cet angle d’attaque où devient iridescent de présence éclate désespérément visible ce dont
la première apparition ne fait qu’un avec sa perte. Pour tout ce qui de main et de pensée
d’homme prit corps, il est ce dernier moment fascinant comme le clignotement des ailes
du papillon dont les plus beaux yeux ne voient pas: ainsi avant de fondre dans le temps,
l’œuvre se pare une dernière fois de tout le rayonnement de son espace spécifique.]54
In the butterfly creation and decay are simultaneous, a property Paalen underscores
in the phrase “ce dont la première apparition ne fait qu’un avec sa perte.” This particular
butterfly, though, already had a history, both in Paalen’s work and within surrealist
thought writ large. It returns to Roger Caillois’ important theorization of mimeticism
of 1935.
Two years before his Northwest Coast trip (1937) Paalen completed
his painting Toison d’Or featuring the Caligo or Owl butterfly (Fig. 4). Two years
previously Caillois had published in Minotaure his article “Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia,” which also featured the insect. Caillois claims that the butterfly so
convincingly mimics an owl—the eye-spots on the underside of the wings its eyes,
the variegated coloration surrounding the spots its plumage, the insect’s body its
beak—that “the natives of Brazil affix it to the doors of their barns as a replacement
for the creature it imitates.”55 Paalen’s painting depicts the insect with its wings
splayed in the manner of an entomological specimen, head up, “eyes” down, so
that it comprises the upper half of a masked face, with its lower half formed by a
marble neck and chin resting on a pedestal. According to Amy Winter the hybrid
creature that results from the marriage of a work of art and a natural object from
the surrealist cabinet of curiosities comprises a mysterious personage reminiscent of

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Alice Rahon.56 It floats against a sky muted by fog and the uncanny green color of
vegetation that so fascinated Paalen in the woods of the Northwest Coast.
Paalen returns to Caillois’ insect in this passage from “Paysage totémique”
to make the complex nature of totemic vision concretely graspable in a single
image. His choice of the Caligo, specifically, complicates this rhetorical task with
elements from Caillois’s theories on mimeticism. Caillois posits a sort of basic,
biological drive toward dissolution, or as he puts it, “temptation by space” resulting
in the depersonalization of the individual. He traces this process on the three
levels: insect camouflage (detailed examples of which occupy two thirds of his
article); sympathetic magic, a category of primitive religious practice theorized by
nineteenth century anthropologists; and legendary psychasthenia, a psychological
disorder characterized according to Caillois by a disturbance in the relations between
personality and space:

Fig. 4. Wolfgang Paalen, Toison d’Or, oil on wood, 1937 © Paalen Archiv, Berlin

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To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space
pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It
ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the
individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his
senses.57
To substantiate a prehuman, biological grounding for certain features of the human
psyche, Caillois uses examples from the insect kingdom in which mimicry defies
mechanistic explanations such as those offered by evolutionary ecologists. He reads
mimicry or camouflage instead as a kind of evolutionary surplus or excess unexplainable by reference to self-preservation and reproduction.58 It is a “luxury,” states
Caillois,
even a dangerous luxury, for there are cases in which mimicry causes the
creature to go from bad to worse: geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots
of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears. The
case of the Phyllia is even sadder: they browse among themselves, taking
each other for real leaves, in such a way that one might accept the idea of a
sort of collective masochism leading to mutual homophagy, the simulation
of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism in this kind of totem feast.59
Both insects and humans thus find themselves in a state where “life takes a step
backwards,” and where assimilation to space “is necessarily accompanied by a decline
in the feeling of personality and life.”60 Joyce Cheng uses the term “passivity” to
encapsulate the quality of biological life that Caillois was trying to get at, and which
she has identified as a key subterranean tendency of thought in 1930s Surrealism
and its allied groups.61 In the final analysis, insect mimicry for Caillois testifies to
an impulse towards passivity or dissolution which might locate creativity at a level
somewhere below that of the sovereign ego. As Cheng notes, “not only might there
be forms and figures in nature corresponding to the experience of radical passivity,
there might be a direct, causal link between the experience of passivity and the most
creative, art-like phenomenon in nature.”62
The cyclical, emerging and decaying quality of totemic art within the
totemic landscapes of Paalen’s texts shares the quality of passivity evident in
Caillois. Both situate creativity on a level below that of the sovereign ego. The act
of creation Paalen depicts is limited to a kind of intense “affective identification”
with environing nature and takes the form of sympathetic magic in societies he
characterizes as “pre-individualistic.” Such magic depends on mimetic modes of
thought tending toward the erasure of divisions between the subjective and objective.
Paalen argues that sympathetic magic works through a combination of two modes of

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mimeticism. It combines
an active part: assimilation through a sort of somatic mimeticism
(dance movements similar to the movements of animals, all kinds of
mimicry of emotions), with a passive part: mimeticism of camouflage (masks, disguises). These two kinds of mimeticism, active and
passive, are the two poles which release the great current of rhythm
which, going as far as trance, in traversing the individual, effaces his
personal memory in order to conjoin it emotionally with the great
reservoir of generic memory. Thus magic might be defined as a sort
of affective mimeticism through which man identifies himself with the
universe.63
Modern artists have no direct access to the prelapsarian “magic climate.” Their only
recourse is thus to unearth in themselves, in a kind of psychic archeology, the totemic dispositions that might remain as traces of the primitive mentality (to borrow a
phrase from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl). Here the experience of dual perception discussed
above evidences a preconscious tendency toward affective mimeticism or affective
identification. Other, varied instances of resemblance or mimicry also shoot through
Dyn: the fluted cedar timbers of Northwest Coast community houses mirror Doric
columns; the features of a “totonac woman of Papantla” exactly replicate those of a
stone Olmec head; imaginary scenes or landscapes from Paalen’s paintings mimetically duplicate real-life landscapes observed later—a coincidence to which he gave the
name “pre-figurative image.”64 It is worth noting that other Surrealists, Max Ernst
for example, also recognized uncanny similarities between American landscapes and
scenes they had previously painted.65
I do not wish to stretch the comparison between Paalen and Caillois too
far, though certainly Paalen would have been aware of Caillois’ work and of the
importance of mimeticism as a touchstone.66 The two texts are very different, and
Paalen used mimeticism in a much more diffuse way than Caillois. However, the
sculptures and landscapes of “Paysage totémique” exemplify processes by which a
magic worldview—one characterized by the mimeticism of sympathetic magic—is
concretely materialized in objects. These works incarnate the totemic vision with
which the artist (either “primitive” or vanguard) channels unseen forces of the
environment—the myths arising from a dialectical development of a culture in
a landscape, informing a landscape which is itself informed by culture. Through
moments of dual perception, Paalen underscores the ways totem poles acquire a
characteristic of interpenetration with the landscape, are animated by the spiritual
forces of the landscape, and return to the landscape through irresistible decay. As
they vanish at their moment of maximum intensity, in the “specific space” that
constitutes the totemic landscape, they call into question distinctions between culture
and its medium, between the subject and the object.

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1 Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995), 247.
2 The trip began in June, and by August 21 the trio was already in Vancouver preparing to depart
Canada. In summarizing the fragmentary documentary sources, Andreas Neufert has argued that it
is ultimately impossible to determine their exact itinerary. However, based on places Paalen himself
mentions, they certainly visited the following cities and sites: Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka and Wrangell,
Alaska; Masset and other locales on the Queen Charlotte Islands; on the B.C. mainland, the Skeena
River region and Bella Bella; the northern end of Vancouver Island and the archipelago to its east
(Port Hardy, Alert Bay, Gilford Island); and Victoria and vicinity. Andreas Neufert, “Ten Rolls of 8
mm Film Documenting Wolfgang Paalen’s Journey through British Columbia in Summer 1939,” The
Colour of My Dreams: the Surrealist Revolution in Art, ed. Dawn Ades (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery,
2011), 230.
3 For an account of Paalen’s relationship with Newcombe and Emmons, see Amy Winter, Wolfgang
Paalen Artist and Theorist of the Avant-Garde (Westport and London: Praeger, 2003), 160-66.
4 Gustave Regler, Wolfgang Paalen (New York: Nierendorf Editions, 1945), 31.
5 Daniel Garza Usabiaga, “Anthropology in the Magazines Dyn and El hijo pródigo. A Comparative
Analysis (of Surrealist Inspiration)” (paper presented at the Getty Research Institute symposium
Vivísimo Muerto: Debates on Surrealism in Latin America, Los Angeles, CA, June 25-26, 2010).
6 André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987), 73.
7 Jean-Claude Blachère, Les totems d’André Breton: Surréalisme et primitivisme littéraire (Paris: Harmattan,
1996), 93.
8 Wolfgang Paalen, “Paysage totémique II,” Dyn 2 (1942): 46.
9 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), 14.
10 Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 20.
11 Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1998 [1984]), 14.
12 A partial list of the establishments from which he bought is as follows: Max Heilbroner Curios
in Prince Rupert; the Alaska Curio Emporium in Ketchikan; in Sitka “une curio-shop éminemment
russe” whose equivocating proprietress Paalen and his travelling companions baptized as “la tzarine
des grandes circonstances”; also in Sitka Haley, an old gold miner who approached Paalen on the
street to sell him objects; in Juneau the Winter & Pond curio shop and Photography Studio; in
Wrangell the two shops run by Waters including the Bear Totem Store, as well as the Wrangell market.
Wolfgang Paalen, “Voyage sur le côte Nord-Ouest de l’Amérique,” Pleine Marge, 20 (1994): 8-33.
13 Several passages display Paalen’s fascination with wilderness. In his travel journal he admits to
having been an avid reader of boyhood adventure books about the frozen northland (“Voyage NordOuest,” 27-8). In “Paysage totémique” he relates bits of boyhood wood-craft, remarks on the frontier
aspects of the Canadian West, and meditates on our modern-day fear of isolation as compared to
the old settlers such as the grandfather of his friends the McKinleys, who moved to a more isolated
homestead when, a days walk from him, others began building cabins (“Paysage totémique II,” 42,
45). For a wonderful cultural history of tourism on the Northwest Coast, see Robert Campbell, In
Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007).
14 Marie Mauzé, “Totemic Landscapes and Vanishing Cultures Through the Eyes of Wolfgang
Paalen and Kurt Seligmann,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2:1 (2008): 20.
15 Ibid., 42.
16 Ibid., 45.
17 Ibid., 45.

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18 Ibid., 45.
19 Ibid., 45-6.
20 Ibid., 45.
21 Ibid., 46.
22 Ibid., 46.
23 Ibid., 46.
24 Benjamin Péret, “La Nature dévore le progrès et le dépasse,” Minotaure 10 (1937): 20.
25 Paalen, “Paysage totémique II,” 46.
26 The photo has been reproduced in a previous number of Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. See
Mauzé, “Totemic Landscapes,” 19.
27 For accounts of Seligmann’s activities in B.C. see Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 23-26, and Louise
Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 164-69.
28 Paalen, “Voyage Nord-Ouest,” 16.
29 Wolfgang Paalen, “Surprise and Inspiration,” Dyn 2 (1942): 6.
30 Paalen, “Voyage Nord-Ouest,” 17.
31 Paalen, “Voyage Nord-Ouest,” 17.
32 Haim N. Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979),
6.
33 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, Trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Rowe,
1972), 283.
34 Paalen, “Surprise and Inspiration,” 6.
35 Ibid., 8.
36 Mauzé, “Totemic Landscapes,” 18.
37 For a history of the totemic idea, see Robert Alun Jones, The Secret of the Totem: Religion and Society
from McLennan to Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
38 Wolfgang Paalen, “Totem Art,” Dyn 4-5 (1942): 19-20.
39 Wolfgang Paalen, “Untitled Editorial Statement,” Dyn 4-5 (1943).
40 Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 178-79.
41 Wolfgang Paalen, “Paysage totémique,” Dyn 1 (1942): 48.
42 Paalen, “Paysage totémique,” 50; “Totem Art,” 12.
43 Paalen, “Paysage totémique,” 46.
44 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History,”
Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (1943): 175-82, cited in Winter, Wolfgang Paalen, 165.
45 Paalen, “Totem Art,” 18.
46 Paalen, Ibid., 34, my emphasis.
47 Paalen, Ibid., 34.
48 Paalen, Ibid., 20. The photo referenced appears in another issue of Journal of Surrealism and the
Americas. See Mauzé, “Totemic Landscapes,” 18.
49 Wolfgang Paalen, “Paysage totémique III,” Dyn 3 (1942): 28-31.
50 On salvage ethnography, see James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1986), 112.
51 Paalen, “Paysage totémique,” 48.
52 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 62-67.
53 Benjamin Péret, “Ruines: ruines des ruines,” Minotaur 12-13 (1939): 57.
54 Paalen, “Paysage totémique,” 49.
55 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois
Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 91.
56 Winter has previously noted the Caillois connection with respect to Paalen’s painting Toison d’Or,

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though she draws out different threads than I do here. Winter, Wolfgang Paalen, 62.
57 Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 99.
58 Joyce Cheng argues that Caillois’s publication in Minotaure of both “ Mimétisme et la psychasthénie
légendaire” and his explanations for insect cannibalism in “La mante religieuse. De la biologie à
la psychanalyse” (1934) should be seen as “the search for figures that evidence the possibility of
intelligence without thought, creativity without art, and agency in the absence of the (human) agent.”
Joyce Cheng, “Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis: Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism in the
1930s,” Modernism/modernity 16.1 (2009): 72.
59 Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 97.
60 Caillois, Ibid., 101.
61 Cheng, “Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis,” 65.
62 Cheng, Ibid., 74.
63 Paalen, “Totem Art,” 20.
64 Dyn 2, 14 and Dyn 6, 27 respectively for the first two examples. With regard to the third, Paalen’s
earlier paintings appeared to him as premonitions of the forest landscapes he observed during
Northwest Coast journey: «the landscape more and more astonishingly resembles that of my paintings
[le paysage ressemble de plus en plus étonnamment à celui de mes tableaux].” Paalen, “Voyage NordOuest.”
65 An anecdote about Max Ernst encountering a previously-painted landscape appears in Jimmy
Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life (New York: St Martin’s/Marek, 1984), 216, cited in Samantha Kavky, “Max
Ernst in Arizona. Myth, mimesis, and the hysterical landscape,” RES-Journal of Anthropology and
Aesthetics 57/58 (2010): 15.
66 Scholars like Taussig, Cheng, Potolsky and others have argued that mimeticism was in the air in
the thirties and forties, with thinkers as distinct as Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois
and Theodor Adorno appealing to different formulations of the concept in very different kinds of
arguments. Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), Michael Taussig,
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).