Rahon, Alice (1904–1987)

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Rahon, Alice (1904–1987)

French Surrealist painter and poet. Name variations: Alice Paalen; Alice Phillipot. Born Alice Marie Yvonne Phillipot in 1904 in Doubs, France; died in 1987 in San Angel, Mexico; mother's maiden name was Rahon; married Wolfgang Paalen (an Austrian Surrealist painter), in 1934 (divorced 1947); married Edward Fitzgerald (an American decorator), in 1950 (divorced 1960); no children.

An important member of the Surrealist art movement, Alice Rahon was born Alice Marie Yvonne Phillipot in 1904 to a wealthy family in

Doubs, eastern France. Raised in Paris, where she received an excellent education, she composed poetry and was drawn to the emerging Surrealist subculture of Paris of the late 1920s. This movement of intellectuals and artists who rejected the materialism and inequality of 20th-century Western society and sought a higher spiritual meaning in life was predominantly male. (Other noted female Surrealists include Eileen Agar, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim , and Ithell Colquhoun .) "As a movement it may not question the nature of patriarchy but it at least recognizes its existence," note Grimes, Collins, and Baddeley in Five Women Painters. "The fact that desire and sexuality play a pre-eminent role in much surrealist work, forces an understanding of the presupposed gender of both artist and audience, a recognition frequently subsumed in less overtly masculine art."

In 1934, Rahon married Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian Surrealist painter whom she had met in Paris in 1931. The following year, they became part of the Surrealist movement founded in Paris by André Breton. Under her married name Alice Paalen, Rahon published poetry strongly influenced by imagery of the eastern French countryside of her youth and her travels with Paalen in Spain. In 1936, her first book of poems, On the Same Ground, was published by the Surrealists. Another collection, Hourglass Lying Down, was illustrated by Pablo Picasso and appeared later that year. Rahon was involved in a brief love affair with Picasso which ended in 1936; she then left Paris with another Surrealist artist, Valentine Penrose, and traveled to India.

Fleeing from the threat of war in Europe in 1939, Rahon and Paalen along with the photographer Eva Sulzer traveled to the Pacific Northwest of Alaska, Canada, and the western United States. Rahon's exposure to Native American tribes of the region and their arts and culture would later influence her work. Rahon and Paalen then emigrated to Mexico, settling there in 1940. There they organized the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City. A third book of Rahon's poetry, Animal Black, was published in 1941. She then turned her energies to contributing poetry and articles to the Surrealist journal Dyn, which she and Paalen published between 1942 and 1945. Near the end of the war Paalen temporarily renounced Surrealism, though Rahon would remain a strong proponent of its principles of liberty and higher consciousness throughout her life. In 1947, the couple divorced and Paalen returned to Paris, where he committed suicide in 1959.

Rahon remained in Mexico, settling in the Mexico City suburb of San Angel. There she became a full-time painter and assumed her mother's maiden name of Rahon as her professional name. Around 1950, she married the American decorator Edward Fitzgerald, but they divorced in 1960. Rahon adopted Mexico and its culture to a large degree, using its landscape and symbolism as inspiration for her colorful, abstract, and vibrant paintings, which were exhibited widely in Mexico, the United States, and in Europe until the late 1960s.

Rahon stopped painting in the late 1970s; her last work, A Giant Called Solitude, is a brooding testament to the isolation and emotional depression she experienced in her last years, after outliving most of her family and friends. She died in San Angel in 1987, at age 83.