Country prohibits (Forbidden Land) is a surrealist painting by Wolfgang Paalen , qui in the final release of 1937 shows a drop-shaped stylized idol of femininity with tentacle-like arms, That stands in precarious proximity to an abyss opening unexpected in dark-crystallin forms to the observer. Three spherical space-bodies hover in front of them, two of which are shaped like falling, burning meteorites. The painting is the first oil painting by Paalen, which is artfully based on his surrealist technique of smoking . It explores the theme of mortal fears and primordial femininity with a hermetical iconography. The painting is actually a private collection.
Background
Paalen started to work on this picture during the first two weeks of October 1936 after a severe psychogenic crisis. In August 1936, he had to learn that Pablo Picasso with his wife Alice ( Alice Rahon ) had a pregnancy and abortion. [1]My vision has gone out. I now can say rightly, I contemplate like the old pagan Apollonius, from within. “[2] Back in Paris after a realigning journey to Greece in October 1936, he began to work on the mysterious picture that would occupy him until the following year and should Apollonius of Tyana : an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female deity and falling meteoric planets. Forbidden Country is also the first oil painting in which smoking is elaborately worked into the fine crystalline structures of the lower part. Paalen designs his personal model of the permeable surreal soul-image in the form of a fragmented landscape, pulsating with a mixture of feminine mysticism and romantic shudder, reminiscent of pre-Celtic fairiesand their cosmic allusions as they are known from the lyrical tradition of Brittany . The poet friend André Breton spoke in this prototype for the later. visionary, but of all those mysteriously alluring entities that lurk beneath the surface of the creations of “primitive” art (…) Paalen’s secret lies in having succeeded in seeing, in letting us see the inside of the bubble . ” [3]
Description
Striking in this picture is the color in the upper part – subtly graded green tones, which looks as if it is painted on gold – and in the lower part of a fine growing of growing crystalline spatial structures, suggestions of mucous membranes and moist inner tissue. The Smoking-spots are only visible in some places like black holes. The arm- and the body-part of the balloon-shaped body-belly, breasts and head Eva Sulzer, to whom Paalen refuged during the crisis with his wife: as a kind of Eva of the future, a woman, who was not born, but owes her life directly to the divine forces. Even unintentionally, she embodies the navel of the world where the future is touching, a unity of womb, uterus and mother, or as James JoyceHe said: “Heva, Naked Eva, She had no navel, look.” [4] Paalen had previously visited the oracle in Delphi with its Omphalos , the rounded, symbolic stone column for the navel of the world, which reportedly fell from the sky as a meteorite triggered by lightning and subsequently used as a sacrificial stone altar of the goddess Gaia . [5]Delphi is devoted to the earth goddess Gaia (from “delphos” – Greek womb), and with her oracle, reconfigured by the female priestess Pythia, was surely one of the dreamers on the inner map of the artist, looking for deep symbols for birth and linguistic forms for an original femininity communicating directly from the uterus. Paalen’s friend, the German writer Gustav Regler, spoke in the image of his “realm of Amazons”: “We have a planet, that is circling around the great streets, quietly and musingly, lies the realm. (…) Far from there, he speaks to women, as if they belonged to his distant stars. (…) And he calls one queen, since she can not hide herself; a floriferous homage, she looks to the mountains, as if they were her palaces; Shores are for her strips of blessed amalgamation with the sun. The sea receives her like a repatriate, every time she betrays the shore, and it seems as if she were now living in the element that breathes on the pulse of the stars; (…) / Time is to him invasion of space and is to be measured according to the number of comets that hit upon her element, that made her visible and luminous, that consumed and nourished her. But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (…) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (…) like meteors in the desert. ” and it seems as if they are now living in the element that breathes on the pulse of the stars; (…) / Time is to him invasion of space and is to be measured according to the number of comets that hit upon her element, that made her visible and luminous, that consumed and nourished her. But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (…) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (…) like meteors in the desert. ” and it seems as if they are now living in the element that breathes on the pulse of the stars; (…) / Time is to him invasion of space and is to be measured according to the number of comets that hit upon her element, that made her visible and luminous, that consumed and nourished her. But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (…) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (…) like meteors in the desert. ” But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (…) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (…) like meteors in the desert. ” But the gods are creatures of these rustling streams, fragments of the falling stars, (…) His feeling that we are always on the brink of infinity, that the abyss accompanies us as a faithful shadow. (…) like meteors in the desert. “[6] The fertility symbolism of the figure and the larger, alliances for the earth, femininity, erosion and an enfolding pre-birth space stand together in a compositional harmony thicket of the terrestrial abyss. The idea of the meteorite attacks HAD Perhaps come from the reading of Camille Flammarion ‘s visionary novel The End of the World in qui Eve Was Destined to contemplate the dying earth after-meteorite impact has up to her own icing. [7]
Literature
- Andreas Neufert : Wolfgang Paalen. Im Inneren of the Wals . Springer, Wien and New York 1999 (Monography with Catalog raisonné).
- Dieter Schrage (1999), “Paalen, Robert Wolfgang” , Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (in German), 19 , Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 733-734 ; ( full text online )
- Amy Winter: Wolfgang Paalen. Artist and Theorist of the Avantgarde Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 2002.
- Andreas Neufert: Auf Liebe und Tod. Das Leben of Surrealisten Wolfgang Paalen . Parthas, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86964-083-9 .
References
- Jump up^ Alices love correspondence with Picasso in the archives of the Picasso Museum, Paris, have been rediscovered recently by the art historian Andreas Neufert who gives insight and interpretation to it in his biography on Paalen, Neufert 2015, p. 321ff.
- Jump up^ WP, unpublished fragments, notebooks EP 9/1, 1937 (?), Cit. Neufert 2015, p. 270
- Jump up^ André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York: Harper & Row 1972, p. 78
- Jump up^ James Joyce, Ulysses, London 1922, p. 54
- Jump up^ Strabo, Geographica cit. Meineke, Augustus, ed. (1877). Strabonis Geographica. Lipsiae: BG Teubneri, p. 5f.
- Jump up^ Gustav Regler, WP Portrait, unpublished typoscript, March-April 1945, p. 7, cit. Neufert 2015, p. 274
- Jump up^ Camille Flammarions popular scientific novel about a collision of the earth with a comet (The End of the World, Paris 1894) was published in 1925 in an illustrated edition of Max Ernst.