This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Alice Rahon.
Born: 8 June 1904, France
Died: September 1987
Country most active: Mexico
Also known as: Alice Marie Yvonne Philppot, Alice Paalen
Alice Rahon is best known as a poet and painter whose work straddled modern, ancient, and pre-historic cultures. Her poetry, which carries strong, and often candid, biographical details, is dense with Surrealistic imagery and was much admired by André Breton who welcomed her into the Parisian Surrealist movement. But she is today remembered first and foremost for her art and her affinity with Mexico. She established close friendships with many prominent modern artists, not least, Frida Kahlo with who she shared debilitating physical and mental wounds. Her shift to visual art (which overtook her poetry completely) was inspired by her overseas journeys and her encounters with pre-historic, mythological, and mystical cultures and legends. Having settled there permanently, Rahon became an established member of Mexico’s avant-garde community and expanded her repertoire (beyond painting and drawing) to encompass sculpture, marionette theatre, and filmmaking.
Childhood
Rahon was born in Chencey-Buillon, close to the city of Besançon, in Eastern France, Alice Marie Yvonne Phillipot (she later changed her surname to Rahon, keeping her first name as an homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland). She and her sister, Geo, were raised in a humble home by her mother, a cook in a bourgeois household, and her father, who worked as a valet. Rahon enjoyed downtime at the home of her paternal grandparents in the picturesque town of Roscoff, Brittany. Here she was free to play on the sandy beaches and to swim in the sea (she would develop a lifelong love of swimming). Little else is known about her childhood except for the fact that she suffered two serious falls. The first, at the age of just three, resulted in a fractured right hip and required a long period of convalescence, the second, at the age of twelve, resulted in a broken left leg which led to another extended period of rest.
During her convalescences, Rahon passed the time in the garden reading, writing, drawing, and generally daydreaming. Her injuries left Rahon with a limp and she experienced pain and mobility problems throughout her life. This contributed to a dual sense of frailty and resilience and she earned a reputation as a dreamy, charismatic, and gifted young girl. She became pregnant while still in her teens, but her baby was born with a congenital defect and died shortly after birth. Rahon, (like her future friend Frida Kahlo) never fulfilled her wish to become a mother.
Early Career
Recalling her visit to the cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, Rahon remarked, “In earliest times painting was magical; it was a key to the invisible […] the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve”.
Having moved to Paris with her sister in her twenties, Rahon designed hats for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli before opening her own hat boutique. She also modeled hats for photographer Man Ray and appeared in photos exhibited in the Charles Ratton Gallery and published in Harper’s Bazaar. Rahon fell in with the Bohemian scene in Montmartre, befriending intellectuals, artists, and poets, including Spanish painter Joan Miró, Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer, and Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen. Rahon and Paalen, on the advice of Miró, visited the Altamira cave paintings in Spain in 1933.
Chana Budgazad Sheldon, Executive Director of Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, writes, “Rahon got her start in the surrealist movement in Paris in 1934, the same year that she married [Paalen]. During that period, she wrote poems in free verse that were praised by the leader of Surrealism, André Breton, who recognized her creative talents […] Her encounters with Breton and with surrealism were fundamental for Rahon and would influence not only the transition from poetic to visual imagery that occurred with her arrival in Mexico [in 1939], but also the concepts behind her entire artistic production”.
1936 proved one of the most eventful in Rahon’s life. She became the first female poet to be published in Editions Surréalistes, and she published her first collection of poetry, À même la terre (with a print by Yves Tanguy). She also embarked on a love affair with Pablo Picasso. On learning of their affair, Paalen threatened to commit suicide if his wife left him for the Spaniard. She encapsulated this bleak situation in her poem, “Despair”, which opened with the line “the firework has gone off. Grey is the absolute color of the present time”. Before she returned to her husband, Rahon travelled to India with the French Surrealist poet Valentine Penrose. The pair spent two months living together at the foot of the Himalayas in a Hindu religious retreat. The women started a love affair, and allusions to lesbianism appear in the works of both women during this period. Rahon also found inspiration in the Hindu religion and culture which emerged in poems such as Muttra. Historian Christine Frerot writes, “Alice met India, and fell in love with the light, the children, the mysticism, the dances, and the elephants. In these years her writing flourished”.
In 1938 she published a second collection, Sablier Couché (Sleeping Hourglass), which offered reflections on certain ideas of binary opposites (such as sleep and wakefulness), and which was illustrated by Miró. Breton wrote Rahon a letter upon its publication referring to it more of a Surrealist “talisman” than a mere anthology. In May 1939, Rahon and Paalen travelled for the first time to New York. On their return to Paris, Rahon met Frida Kahlo who extended an invitation to Rahon to visit her in Mexico.
The couple, accompanied by Sulzer, made their way to Mexico via Alaska and British Columbia. During the journey Rahon encountered primitive and primeval art objects that ignited her spirits in the same way as the cave paintings at Altamira had. It was during this trip that she turned her attention from the pen to the pencil, initially sketching totems carved from ancestral cedar trees. Having arrived in Mexico in September 1939, the couple were convinced to stay in Mexico City with the onset of war in Europe. The Mexican capital city would become home to other Surrealist war émigrés including Breton, Remedios Varo, Cesar Moro, Esteban Frances, and Benjamin Péret. The art historian Hettie Judah notes in fact that Rahon “shared an interest in magic and the occult with Varo, whose meticulous, enigmatic figures are surrounded by uncanny patterning created with decalcomania – paint transferred from a textured surface – a technique favoured for its chance outcomes”.
Kahlo and Rahon were close friends, bonding over their shared experiences of debilitating injuries. Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer (1946) shares obvious similarities with Rahon’s, The Wounded Cat, produced that same year.
Breton in fact saw Mexico as a natural home for Surrealism, stating, “We are in the land of convulsive beauty, the land of edible delusions, a place for the mutable, the disturbing, the other death, in short, a land of dream, unavoidable by the surrealist spirit”. Rahon and Paalen stayed in the San Ángel neighborhood and while living there became close with Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Juan O’Gorman. Understandably, perhaps, Rahon and Kahlo bonded over their shared experiences of physical disability, but also their inability to have children (and, of course, their use of art to help process their experiences).
Rahon first exhibited her paintings in January 1940 at the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City (it is rumored that she produced her first paintings from unused paint scraped from her husband’s palette). Rahon published her last volume of poetry, Noir Animal, in 1941 before turning her attention fully to painting. Her first artworks (and some of her existing poetry) were then printed in the interdisciplinary journal, DYN, that Paalen founded and edited (between 1942-44). Historian Tere Arcq writes, “At the time, this publication was the only avant-garde journal focusing on modern art, surrealism, and primitive art [and Rahon] was one of the most frequent contributors, with her poems, drawings, and paintings appearing from the very first issue. DYN’s sixth installment reproduced her series Crystals in Space, which evidenced her interest in automatic drawing. Rahon described these designs in white gouache on black paper as ‘a kind of enchantment, like developing photographs in a tray – the forms appear little by little. They become more and more aerial, tenuous, complicated, like the secret work of an insect”. Her first solo exhibition, meanwhile, took place at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1944, and her second at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) the following year.
Having painted initially with watercolors and oils, by the mid-1940s Rahon had started to experiment with other materials and adopted the technique of using sand and sgraffito, first used by Rufino Tamayo. The Sidney and Lois Eskenazt Museum of Art describes how Rahon became close friends with the “renowned Mexican modernist painter” and, like him, “was inspired by the pre-Hispanic cultures of ancient Mexico”. The connection to Tamayo, the museum notes, is further emphasized in “the imagery in Boîte á musique III (1945) which evokes the hieroglyphs and carvings found on Mayan temples and pyramids [and] through her technique of sgraffito, which involved incising lines into the painting’s surface of sand-infused oil paint to reveal contrasting layers of color below”.
Mature Period
Although settled in Mexico, Rahon continued to travel. While in New York in 1945, for instance, she met the French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin, with whom she became very close and to whom she later dedicated an artwork. Around this time, she also met Paul Klee and developed a series of paintings of fantastical cities, inspired by Klee’s own series, The Book of Cities.
In 1946 Rahon gained Mexican citizenship. That year she also wrote and choreographed a ballet, Ballet de Orión. Featuring five characters, including a juggler and androgyne, which she first realized through gouache paintings and marionettes modelled out of wire. Ballet de Orión was a response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as was inspired by the ancient Mayans’ faith in astrological constellations (such as Orion, the hunter).
Rahon frequently visited Acapulco, Mexico, where she enjoyed swimming. It was a low-impact form of exercise that was ideal for her fragile body.
In 1947 she divorced Paalen, renaming herself Alice Rahon (adopting her mother’s maiden name), and married the Canadian filmmaker, Edward Fitzgerald. She remained close to Paalen, however, and acknowledged that “as a painter, I owe everything to him […] from him I learned not to mix the color beforehand but to put it in such a way that it blends in the eye of the beholder”.
She and Fitzgerald (who had worked previously on projects with Luis Buñuel) worked on a film together, about a magician who, following a nuclear disaster, lived in a cave at the bottom of the ocean, titled Les Magiciens (the film was never distributed and is thought to be lost). Rahon designed costumes, contributed to the screenplay, and made marionettes. After the collapse of their short marriage, Rahon spent her time in Mexico City or Acapulco, but on occasion travelled outside of Mexico. She exhibited frequently in North America and in the late 1940s she also worked on other films, including Orion, El Gran Hombre del Cielo (a cosmic puppet ballet inspired by dances she saw on her travels to India) and on productions of ballets, including Mercure with costume and set design by Picasso.
In 1956, she dedicated Ballad for Frida Kahlo to the memory of her dear friend (who died in 1954). Kahlo referred to Rahon by the nickname jirafa (giraffe) (with reference to her large brown eyes, rather than an elongated neck) and the painting represented the pairs happy times spent at town fairs, parades, and other outdoor excursions to ancient sites. Frerot writes, “Some of her most interesting works were created as homages to her artist friends: Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, Wolfgang Paalen, André Breton and, of course, Frida Kahlo […] Emphasizing the tones of blue, green, and red speckled throughout the painting, Rahon paints a magical scene with cats, giraffes, pyramids, and a Ferris wheel. Dark and somber, the painting stands as a magnificent tribute to their friendship and to Kahlo”.
In September 1959, Paalen, who was suffering from intense bouts of depression, took his own life. Rahon painted The Toucan and the Rainbow (1963) because, in the words of Frerot, of her late husband’s “connection with a beautiful toucan [it had been the couple’s pet] whose beak was an unusual array of rainbow colors” and was realized by Rahon through “her masterful use of color”.
Late Period and Death
In 1967 Rahon suffered a third serious fall at a gallery exhibition. She refused any further medical treatment and became all but a recluse, painting rarely and withdrawing from the commercial art world altogether (despite a major retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1986). In 1987 she was forced to move into a nursing home where she stopped eating. Rahon passed away in September of that year, she was 83 years old. Her self-imposed isolation, which removed her from the limelight for the last 20 years of her life, meant that she was effectively overlooked by next generation Mexican artists. However, in 2009, the Museo de Arte Moderno held a new retrospective of her work which did much to raise her profile amongst artists and academics. In 2012, André Breton’s daughter, Aubé Breton Elléouët, also produced a documentary about Rahon’s life and work, titled L’Abeille Noire (The Black Bee), Breton’s affectionate nickname for his friend and fellow traveller.
The Legacy of Alice Rahon
Mary Ann Caws wrote, “Alice Paalen Rahon was a shape-shifter par excellence, who casually changed her date and place of birth (1904 in Besançon, not 1916 in Brittany), her name and nationality, sexual orientation, and artistic genre”. Her art and poetry had its most significant impact on the Surrealist movement, first in Europe through her poetry, and then in Mexico, through her art. And if the saying is true that one’s reputation is built on the company one keeps, then Rahon’s pedigree is beyond question with a circle of friends (and occasional lovers), including André Breton, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Remedios Varo.
Her interest in pre-history and themes of animism and cosmology was complemented by her liking for materials found in the natural world which, in her art, she blended with vibrant colors and symbolic markings. By introducing abstract compositions to the Mexican avant-garde she preceded artists such as Lilia Carillo, Carlos Mérida, and Gunther Gerzso. Historian Christine Frerot wrote, “Her freedom to move from one state to another, from one dimension to another, from reality to dream, from reality to fiction, makes her a heroine of literature […] front and back, intimacy and exteriority, city and nature, mountains and sea, Alice Rahon, the magician performs miracles on her canvas”.