Sur le pont de I’amour

“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 became a close friend (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 4, 1944-1947, New York, 1971, p. 58). 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) (in N. Deffebach, “Alice Rahon: Poems of Light and Shadow, Painting in Free Verse,” Onthebus, nos. 8-9, 1991, p. 180 and 186). 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.
In the late 1950s, Rahon began to dedicate paintings to loved ones—among them Frida Kahlo and André Breton—and Sur le pont de l’amour pays homage to Eulalia (“Lala”) Sevilla and her son Phillipe. Lala had married Antonio Souza, whose pioneering gallery showcased postwar Mexican abstraction—Gunther Gerzso, Pedro Coronel, Lilia Carrillo—in 1963; Rahon held a solo exhibition at Galería Antonio Souza in 1957. A timeless and joyful image of maternity, Sur le pont de l’amour situates Lala and Philippe against a primitive wooded landscape, their figures etched and fading into the ground. They hold each other in a loving embrace, their arms curving into an elongated figure-eight of blue-gray and ocher. Rahon visited the cave paintings at Altamira with Paalen before emigrating to Mexico—“I think I am a cave painter,” she later declared—and the linear scratches and incisions that appear here and elsewhere in her work hint at the affinities that she long felt with prehistoric art (in N. Deffebach, “Alice Rahon,” op. cit., p. 186).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park