The earliest works in Marie Wilson’s survey “A Poet of Forms and Colors” are dated 1952-1954. From this fact and from their appearance, we can surmise that Wilson was profoundly influenced by a 1951 exhibition at the old San Francisco Museum of Art titled “Dynaton,” featuring five artists who operated under the aegis of a post-surrealist manifesto that proclaimed a new spiritual awakening of mystical and cosmological significance.
Although Wilson’s paintings were not included in the Dynaton exhibition, she quickly became an unofficial sixth member of the group after developing a relationship with Wolfgang Paalen, the Austrian-born painter with whom she traveled to Paris soon after the close of the exhibition. Paalen was the Dynaton group’s leader and chief theorist as well as its most representative artist, having fused Jungian ideas about psychological archetypes with Freudian theories misconstrued but nonetheless adopted by the Surrealists.
Wilson’s paintings from her Parisian period echo Paalen’s influence, but they also reveal exposure to other Surrealist artists operating both in and beyond Andre Breton’s circle, in particular Paul Klee. For example, in “Angel Stretching its Wing” (1952-54) a translucent being is rendered in overlapping steams of pointillistic dots, surrounding a smaller figure as if to provide a protective shield. It is a dreamy revisitation of the way ancient Egyptian painters portrayed the goddess Sekhmet, here incorporating sand to give the work a textured surface that amplifies its luminosity. The blue and orange colors of this work are subdued when compared to the bright yellow-oranges in “Portrait of the Poet in a State of Delerium” (1952-54) or “Creation of the World” (1952-54), both ebullient fantasy-scapes reminiscent of the early work of Joan Miró. Even though these effervescent works are small, they feel much larger than their dimensions would suggest.
In 1960 at age 38 Wilson relocated to Athens, then returned to the Bay Area seven years later, and returned to Greece intermittently thereafter, and where she would pass away in 2017. The majority of the 22 works in this exhibition are from this period, earmarked by bright kaleidoscopic color and symmetrical, Rorschach-like compositions.
Wilson bears affinities with the work of Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. Like him, she was influenced by the ornamental forms in indigenous Mexican painting and architecture and shared a degree of his spiritual anguish. But these are all source materials. The significance lies in how Wilson created fantastical forms from those sources to actualize pulsating mandala-like compositions, vaguely maniacal in character, that are suggestive of psychedelic apparitions or the conjuring of demons. For example, in “The Birth of the Celestial Monkey” (1957), we see an insectile figure that appears as a sinister moth centrally positioned at the center of a yellow-orange field, wings raised in the manner of a threat display. The figure is translucent, revealing a small riot of interior shapes that flow like electricity through elaborate circuits. More complex is “Spirit of the North Star” (1957-81), downplaying any figural allusion to emphasize something that looks like a vertically positioned centipede flashing kaleidoscopic plumage.
Another treat in “A Poet of Forms and Colors” is a selection of seven small drawings on paper from the years 1970 to 1991. Like the paintings from the post-1957 period, their imagery comes off as a series of refined explorations of symmetrically positioned forms that look like bland protoplasm coalescing into demonic apparition. “Snow Woman” (1970-71) incorporates felt-tip pens and colored pencils to articulate an ornamental crown sitting atop an ominous, not-quite-human face. It is the only one of the works on paper that has any color, the rest either pencil on paper or, in the stunning “Rising Fury” (1980-81), a sgraffito carefully pulled up from black coated paper. The resulting white image looks like something conjured from an H.P. Lovecraft story, a nocturnal spirit entity manifested in indistinct, phosphorescent outlines that infer an animation — only scarier and not at all cartoonish.
