The first monograph on the French-Mexican surrealist painter and poet Alice Rahon (1904-1987) has just been published in English. Alice Rahon , a book published by Gallery Wendi Norris, offers new research on the artist who arrived in Mexico in 1939.
In the first essay, Tracing the marvelous , Mexican Tere Arcq, an expert on the life and work of Rahon, provides a series of keys to a better understanding of his creative impulse. Like his poetry, Rahon's painting is loaded with mythology and magic, memory and meaning. The artist was motivated by prehistoric cave painting and the surreal environment in which she lived and worked in Europe. He wove symbols, colors and textures in figurative and abstract combinations of a narrative nature.
The Mexican researcher and curator Daniel Garza Usabiaga links, in his essay, Rahon's work with contemporary art practices and reveals his relationship with Mexican modernism. The academic Maggie Borowitz, focused on art and feminism in Mexico City, explores the meaning of the materiality and artistic processes of the painter.
The book reproduces the works of Rahon between 1939 and the 70s.
Next June, The New York Review of Books will publish the entirety of Rahon's poetic work, translated from French by Mary Ann Caws. Includes newly discovered letters and poems by Picasso, Bretón, and Paalen, among others.
The Getty Institute is about to acquire the artist's archive, while the Art Institute of Chicago owns and exhibits two of her paintings, Peau de soleil (1944) and Self-portrait and autobiography (1948).
Rahon arrived in Mexico with her husband, the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), and the Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer. Here he stayed, he even became a Mexican national in 1946. The Paalen couple had been invited to the country by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. It was in Mexico that Rahon became a painter.
The little known about Rahon's childhood reveals an independent and charismatic person of prodigious talent. Very young he moved to Paris, where he created hats for Elsa Schiaparelli, a designer influenced by surrealism. She was presented with the photographer Man Ray, for whom she modeled, and made friends with Joan Miró. In 1931 she met Paalen, who introduced her to the circle of surrealists, headed by André Breton. Rahon and Paalen married in 1934.
Between 1936 and 1941 he published three volumes of poetry.
