Not that they weren’t well-connected. Paalen enjoyed an lavish upbringing between Vienna, Styria, and Zagan. Rahon, meanwhile, grew up in the east of France, summering in Brittany. They met in Paris in 1931, in their mid-twenties. Paalen had settled in there after seeking his footing in Cassis, Munich, and St-Tropez. Rahon and her sister were part of Paris’s bohemian scene.
In 1933, Paalen joined the Abstraction-Création movement, formed to counter the Surrealists, who he was involved in from 1935. Rahon joined him that same year. But, Rahon was a poet—she only started showing paintings in 1940, after she and Paalen fled Paris for Mexico City at the invitation of Frida Kahlo, via an inspirational journey down America’s West Coast. As it stands, Paalen’s oeuvre encompasses 350 to 400 artworks, while Rahon made approximately 750 works.
Norris helped organize the official counts for both of these heir-less artists. “I’ve been working with Paalen almost since I started the gallery,” the veteran dealer said told me over the phone. She considers him “the bridge between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.”
“I was late to Rahon,” Norris added. She first noticed the artist at a collector’s Mexico City home in 2018, while acquiring a work for New York’s Museum of Modern Art—Green Tea (1942) by Leonora Carrington, whose market Norris has stewarded since 2004. “Rahon was basically the gallery’s COVID project,” Norris said. “I went to Mexico a couple times, saw as many works as I could, bought as much as I could quietly.” Then came the first Rahon museum show—opposite Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña at MoCA North Miami in 2019—followed by an onslaught of museum acquisitions in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond.
Many of the works in “Worlds Gone and to Come” rarely go on view, consigned here by private collectors. “We try to be really thoughtful of how we release things into the market,” Norris said.
The earliest will be Paalen’s pieces from the 1930s—when he met and wed Rahon, and invented his renowned fumage technique, inviting chance on the canvas by basing compositions on soot emitted from a candle. Paalen’s early paintings will also appear. Norris will include pieces created after the couple separated, too. But, most will hail from their relationship—all organized thematically around Paysage totémique (1937), Paalen’s nearly three-by-four-foot fumage painting bearing layered symbolism portending World War II.
Palpable similarities arise. “These two artists were able to approach similar landscapes and surroundings very distinctively, but in harmony.” Norris said. Their palettes shift simultaneously. After all, love means both changing and letting oneself be changed.
“She was definitely more poetic,” Norris observed. Paalen maintained a more anthropological approach. Both experimented with materials like sand and bark paper, responding to new environs with equal physicality. “I think we’ve been over-intellectualizing his work for a very long time,” Norris said of Paalen. Perhaps her show will provoke a more visceral approach to both artists.
