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Lot Essay
“I met her today at an exhibition,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary of Rahon on the day, in May 1945, that the artist’s solo exhibition opened at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. “She is striking in appearance. Tall, dark-haired, sunburned, she looks like a Mexican-Indian woman. But she was born in France.” Rahon had arrived in Mexico in 1939, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with her husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, and the Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer. A protégé of André Breton, who published her first book of poetry, A même la terre (1936), Rahon had earlier circulated among the Parisian avant-garde, posing for Man Ray, designing with Elsa Schiaparelli, and entering into a memorable affair with Pablo Picasso. She turned to painting around the time of her emigration to Mexico, channeling the chromatic abstraction of her poetry onto canvases that embraced the land and its prehistoric past. “Her paintings are completely drawn from subterranean worlds, while her descriptions of Mexico are violent with color, drama, and joy,” Nin concluded of Rahon, who would become a close friend.1 Rahon responded to the postnuclear world in creative work during the mid-1940s—a ballet libretto and, with her second husband Edward Fitzgerald, an experimental film—and she continued to paint, her themes encompassing natural, imaginary, and animal worlds, often rooted in Mexican lore.
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was the key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her Surrealist friends and fellow émigrés Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Rahon believed in the transformative potential, and power, of painting. She rooted this alchemical metaphor in nature—“I use a lot of elements of nature that push like the wind, tragic things in the life of nature”—and evoked its ritual magic in a number of allusive, prismatic landscapes, among them Feu d’herbes (1945), Papaloapan River (1947), and The Wind (1954).2 Although the craggy coast and prehistoric standing stones of Brittany, where she summered as a child, remained an enduring reference, Rahon found new enchantments as she traveled through Mexico, and her paintings evoke memories of the Tepozteco mountains (The Night at Tepoztlán, 1964) and Lake Pátzcuaro (Inner City, n.d.), a favored retreat for the period’s Surrealist circle, among them André Breton and Gordon Onslow Ford.
Like all of Rahon’s landscapes, many of which feature “silhouettes of the pyramids, the profiles of underlying volcanos,” Luna de octubre is based on a specific experience, unmistakably here of the Mexican altiplano under a glowing harvest moon.3 The mountains, suggestively sand swept and shimmering, stimulated the chromatic palette of both her painting and her poetry, notably in a tribute to the famed volcano Iztaccíhuatl, “forever a young giant, white lover of snow and ancient dawns, magical mirror on the scale of the grandest dreams where man has seen himself.” Printed in the first issue of DYN, an art magazine founded by Paalen to which she regularly contributed, the poem teems with sensory color: “amaranth,” “roses,” “unlivable gold.”4 That vivid colorism unfolds in Luna de octubre as well, its autumnal landscape—cast in shadows of amber, auburn, and maroon—set against a swirling violet-blue sky specked with powdery white and mineral light.
Following the debut of her painting at the landmark Exposición internacional del surrealismo, held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1940, Rahon showed steadily over the next three decades across the United States and Mexico. Likening her “mysterious, imaginative language of line and color” to that of Paul Klee, a reviewer for ARTnews observed that “in her almost exclusively rectangular canvases, she has perfected a horizontal expression that lends itself particularly to her dominant interest in landscape. Mixing pigment with fine sand, she achieves shimmering nuances of color and a texture as fragile as snow.”5 In June 1955, she opened her first and only solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie la Cour d’Ingres, a noted Surrealist haunt connected to her sister, Geo Dupin; well received, the paintings then traveled to New York and were shown at the Willard Gallery in October. Marvelously iridescent, Rahon’s landscapes from this time radiate cosmic light and wonder, an alchemical allegory exquisitely rendered in Luna de octubre.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was the key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her Surrealist friends and fellow émigrés Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Rahon believed in the transformative potential, and power, of painting. She rooted this alchemical metaphor in nature—“I use a lot of elements of nature that push like the wind, tragic things in the life of nature”—and evoked its ritual magic in a number of allusive, prismatic landscapes, among them Feu d’herbes (1945), Papaloapan River (1947), and The Wind (1954).2 Although the craggy coast and prehistoric standing stones of Brittany, where she summered as a child, remained an enduring reference, Rahon found new enchantments as she traveled through Mexico, and her paintings evoke memories of the Tepozteco mountains (The Night at Tepoztlán, 1964) and Lake Pátzcuaro (Inner City, n.d.), a favored retreat for the period’s Surrealist circle, among them André Breton and Gordon Onslow Ford.
Like all of Rahon’s landscapes, many of which feature “silhouettes of the pyramids, the profiles of underlying volcanos,” Luna de octubre is based on a specific experience, unmistakably here of the Mexican altiplano under a glowing harvest moon.3 The mountains, suggestively sand swept and shimmering, stimulated the chromatic palette of both her painting and her poetry, notably in a tribute to the famed volcano Iztaccíhuatl, “forever a young giant, white lover of snow and ancient dawns, magical mirror on the scale of the grandest dreams where man has seen himself.” Printed in the first issue of DYN, an art magazine founded by Paalen to which she regularly contributed, the poem teems with sensory color: “amaranth,” “roses,” “unlivable gold.”4 That vivid colorism unfolds in Luna de octubre as well, its autumnal landscape—cast in shadows of amber, auburn, and maroon—set against a swirling violet-blue sky specked with powdery white and mineral light.
Following the debut of her painting at the landmark Exposición internacional del surrealismo, held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1940, Rahon showed steadily over the next three decades across the United States and Mexico. Likening her “mysterious, imaginative language of line and color” to that of Paul Klee, a reviewer for ARTnews observed that “in her almost exclusively rectangular canvases, she has perfected a horizontal expression that lends itself particularly to her dominant interest in landscape. Mixing pigment with fine sand, she achieves shimmering nuances of color and a texture as fragile as snow.”5 In June 1955, she opened her first and only solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie la Cour d’Ingres, a noted Surrealist haunt connected to her sister, Geo Dupin; well received, the paintings then traveled to New York and were shown at the Willard Gallery in October. Marvelously iridescent, Rahon’s landscapes from this time radiate cosmic light and wonder, an alchemical allegory exquisitely rendered in Luna de octubre.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park