Two Surrealist Lives, Reunited on Canvas: Paalen and Rahon Get Their First Joint Show in San Francisco
On 10 September, Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco opens "Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon: Worlds Gone and to Come" — the first exhibition to place the two artists in conversation with each other Artnet. The show honours the 75th anniversary of the Dynaton exhibition that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) hosted in 1951, a landmark presentation that introduced both artists to a West Coast audience.
The couple's story begins in Paris in 1931, when the Austrian-born Paalen met Alice Rahon, born Alice Marie Yvonne Philippot in Chenecey-Buillon, France, in 1904. They married in 1934 Gallery Wendi Norris. Paalen had joined the Abstraction-Création movement — a Paris-based group of artists committed to non-figurative art — in 1933, and by 1935 was involved with the Surrealists Artnet. Rahon, who had published three volumes of poetry before picking up a brush, did not begin exhibiting paintings until 1940 Gallery Wendi Norris.
That shift from poetry to paint happened in Mexico City. In 1939, with war spreading across Europe, Paalen and Rahon fled Paris at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Gallery Wendi Norris. Their exile in Mexico placed them at the centre of a crossroads between European Surrealism and Latin American modernism, where they remained active and influential for years.
The numbers behind the exhibition are modest but newly settled. Paalen's oeuvre — the complete body of work an artist produces — encompasses roughly 350 to 400 artworks. Rahon made approximately 750. Dealer Wendi Norris, whose gallery has stewarded the market for Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington since 2004, helped organise the official counts for both artists Artnet. For Rahon, museum recognition came late: her first museum show ran opposite Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) North Miami in 2019.
SFMOMA is marking the anniversary with its own event. On 10 September, the museum hosts a talk titled "Unsung Surrealists: Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon," featuring curator Megan Kincaid and author Alexander Nemerov SFMOMA. The gallery has also produced a video conversation, "Uncovering Alice Rahon," tied to the artist's first monograph Gallery Wendi Norris.
Paalen grew up lavishly, moving between Vienna, Styria and Zagan. Rahon was raised in eastern France, summering in Brittany. Their paths converged in Paris, diverged into exile, and now, three-quarters of a century after their San Francisco debut, meet again on gallery walls.
