Wolfgang Paalen and Robert Motherwell: A Contact Point between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in "Dyn"
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Mizuki Kishi [1]
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[1] Waseda University
Waseda University
Japón
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- Localización: Estudios de arte español y latinoamericano, Nº. 18, 2017, págs. 27-40
- Idioma: japonés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Although many of the Surrealists took refuge in New York during World War II, Wolfgang Paalen chose Mexico City as his destination. Robert Motherwell met Paalen for the first time when he visited Mexico witth Matta in 1941, and the two artists maintened a close friendship even after Motherwell returned to New York. Motherwell played an active role in Paalen's magazine "Dyn" (1942-44) as a translator and contributor. Although it is well known that Motherwell served as a mediator between the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists in New York, his relationship to Paalen in Mexico and the conceptual framework they shared in the first half of the 1940s have been left unexamined.
Focusing on the articles of Paalen and Motherwell in "Dyn", this essay first locates their shared attitude towards modern art: they both tried to redifine Automatism, associating it with "the socialization of the ego" and "the objective value of the community". Additionally, it is illuminates the ways in which John Dewey's aesthetics in "Art as Experience" (1934) and his other social theories had become one of the contexts of their discussion. Finally, by exploring Paalen and Motherwell's works in light of their experiments of the new Automatism, this essay argues that despite their stylistic differences, their working methods both reflect Dewey's concept of "form". In so doing, this article presents the possibility of an alternative perspective other than the Modernist view of the stylistic development, such as "from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism" or "from the representational to the abstract".
