Wolfgang Paalen

Eva Sulzer, Paris (acquired by January 1938)

Isabel de Paalen, Mexico City (acquired from the above)

Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City 

Acquired from the above in July 1970 by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Exposition internationale du surréalisme, 1938, no. 168), no. 168, p. 7, (dated 1936-37)

Paris, Galerie Renou et Colle, Wolfgang Paalen, 1938, no. 2

London, Galerie Guggenheim-Jeune, Wolfgang Paalen, 1939, no. 3

New York, Julien Levy Gallery, Paintings by Wolfgang Paalen, 1940, no. 10

Mexico City, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Homenaje a Wolfgang Paalen, 1967, pp. 9 and 16; p. 33, illustrated in color

Paris, Centre Pompidou, Paris-Paris:  Créations en France, 1937-1957, 1981, p. 77, illustrated, p. 513

Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Wolfgang Paalen, 1993, p. 108, illustrated

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 201, p. 268; p. 270, illustrated in color

André Breton, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, Paris, 1938, p. 64, illustrated

André Breton, “Wolfgang Paalen,” London Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 10, February 1939, p. 5; p. 12, illustrated

Gustav Regler, Wolfgang Paalen, New York, 1946, pl. 3, p. 25, illustrated

Ida Rodriguez Prampolini, El Surrealismo y El Arte Fantastico de Mexico, Mexico City, 1969, pl. XII, illustrated in color

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1973,  p. 49, illustrated in color

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, New York, 1972, no. 187, p. 439, illustrated

Jacques Baron, Anthologie plastique du Surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 206, illustrated in color

José Pierre, Wolfgang Paalen, Paris, 1980, p. 22, illustrated in color; p. 79

José Pierre, L’Univers surréaliste, 1983, p. 175, illustrated in color

Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women, 1990, Cambridge and London, 1990, fig. 5, p. 136; p. 137, illustrated 

Andreas Neufert, Wolfgang Paalen:  Im Inneren des Wals, Vienna, 1999, no. 37.03, p. 92, illustrated in color; p. 190, illustrated (in photograph of 1938 Paris, Galerie Beaux-Arts Exhibition); pp. 191, 195 and 294

Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Surrealism in Paris, 2011-12, p. 261, illustrated (in installation at Galerie Beaux-Arts Exhibition, 1938, Paris)

Andreas Neufert, Paalen, Life and Work. Forbidden Land:  The Early and Christian Years 1905-1939, vol. I, Norderstedt, 2022, p. 255, illustrated

In Fata Alaska, executed in 1937 at the height of Wolfgang Paalen’s involvement with the Surrealist movement in Paris, the viewer is confronted with a haunting and elemental vision: a landscape suspended between icy stillness and subterranean chaos, where towering spires rise from the unknown. One of the artist’s most psychologically resonant canvases, this work is an exquisite example of Paalen’s technical ingenuity, philosophical depth, and command of the unconscious image. Exhibited extensively both during and following the artist’s lifetime, Fata Alaska occupies a critical position within the Surrealist canon and within the artist’s own evolution.

Many of the work’s most prominent characteristics are an invitation to speculation. The name evokes a remote, sublime frontier—an imagined Arctic both frozen and hallucinatory. Its strangeness lies in its novelty; unlike the deserts, oceans, or forests more typically rendered by Surrealists such as Dalí, Ernst, or Tanguy, Alaska was not a common subject in the iconography of the movement. Paalen’s choice of location is not geographic but psychological. “Fata” may refer to fata morgana, the phenomenon in which distant objects appear distorted, suspended, and unreal, blurring the boundary between perception and illusion. While there is no evidence Paalen had visited Alaska prior to the painting’s execution in 1937, Paalen’s travels at that time underscored the artist’s increased contemplation of emigration (though, he would later travel to Alaska in the Summer of 1939). In this context, as the artist grapples with life far away, Alaska may not exist as a literal destination, but a projection of the anxieties surrounding faraway, unknown lands.

Fata Alaska is composed in oil and fumage—a technique the artist pioneered in 1936, mere months prior to the present work, where the soot of a lit candle or kerosene lamp was held close to the canvas, leaving an unpredictable smoky trail. The resulting forms were not purely automatic, but a collaboration between control and chaos. Consequently, the artist extended the Surrealist ideal of automatism beyond the hand, into the materiality of fire and air.

The upper portion of the work presents a cool, luminous sky in gradations of blue, turquoise and violet, across which rise three colossal totemic forms. Atop each stands what appears to be a supernatural, limbless female idol. Their faint anthropomorphism reflects the artist’s interest in ancient fertility figures; their abstracted heads and exaggerated figures recall the Venus of Willendorf. Paalen returned to these forms repeatedly throughout his work. Stripped of limbs, expression, and motion, they are not passive forms but vessels of primal energy.

Below this liminal ice sheer, the painting descends into a darker, more chaotic realm. Paalen’s use of fumage becomes dense and organic, giving rise to a dark underworld of barbed textures and unsettling anatomical forms. The composition unfolds like a cross-section of the psyche—order above, entropy below. It is a visual articulation of Freud’s model of the divided self: the ego represented by calm above the icesheet, haunted by the deeper, unconscious id. Paalen gives that subterranean underbelly form and color, revealing the psychological fault line that separates our constructed reality from the unconscious forces beneath.

The year 1937 marked a pivotal moment in Paalen’s career. Fully integrated into the Surrealist circle in Paris, he was invited to exhibit in Andre Breton’s landmark Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938, in which Fata Alaska was included (no. 168). In 1940, the painting traveled to New York for Paalen’s exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery—one of the earliest American showcases of his work. In the decades that followed, the painting continued to be exhibited widely, including at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (1967), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1981), the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna (1993), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1999).

The painting’s provenance reflects its historical importance. First acquired by Eva Sulzer in 1938—a key figure in Paalen’s intellectual circle and a tireless champion of his work—it passed to Paalen's second wife, Isabel de Paalen. Fittingly, both would accompany Paalen on an excursion to Alaska in 1939. The work later entered the holdings of Mexico’s influential Galería de Arte Mexicano, and has remained in a private collection since 1970. Now marks the first appearance of the work at auction.

Paalen’s position within the Surrealist movement is both central and singular. Though closely allied with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, he carved out a distinct path—one defined not only by formal experimentation but by a deep engagement with science, indigenous cosmologies, and the philosophical dimensions of perception. Where Dalí mined his personal dream life and Magritte played with visual paradox, Paalen was constructing alternate systems of knowledge, creating new realities. Fata Alaska precisely achieves this: it is a cosmology painted in ice and smoke, a mythic vision summoned from the edges of the rational world.

Though Paalen would later emigrate to Mexico and shift his focus toward Pre-Columbian art and speculative philosophy, his Paris years represent the most distilled phase of his Surrealist production. Fata Alaska both encapsulates that critical era and foreshadowed his work to come. Its icy surface and subterranean heat encapsulate the psychological tension at the heart of the Surrealist ethos, in which reality is only a thin crust over the deep well of the unconscious. This work offers no fixed narrative, no stable geography—only a shimmering, fragile map of the mind, where what appears solid may vanish, and what lies hidden is always threatening to rise. It endures not only as a feat of Surrealist painting, but as a rare and poetic document of an artist forging new worlds at the edge of what is visible.