Andreas Neufert

    Wolfgang Paalen’s decision to become a painter was made at the age of 16 at the latest, when he took up sporadic instruction with the Berlin Secessionist Leo von Koenig, a portrait virtuoso of the ashen, deathly faces of German nobility. He shunned the Academy after a rejected application and sought orientation in the French tastes of Modernist-minded Berlin salons and galleries such as Cassirer and Flechtheim, undertaking visual studies of Cézanne, van Gogh, and Matisse until, in 1925, he discovered Cubism during his first Paris stay. The profound impact of Cubist pictures of the analytical period, but also of Braque’s later variations, never faded. From then on, like a pilgrim, he sought interface with Cubism on order to unlock for himself the potential latent in this school. Paalen’s premier mental faculties sharpened as he tackled this new challenge. As sure in his ultimate aim as in his judgment, living in Paris, Berlin, and Cassis until 1932, overtaking his actual teachers Hans Hofmann and Fernand Léger, he propelled himself into the imagined constellation of his personal heroes: Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Arp, Brancusi, and Moore. Intensively as he bored into their plasticity problems from his own point of view, he equally quickly established for himself the language mosaic which he wanted to use to reinvent painting.
 

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