Self-Portrait

As a youth in France, Alice Rahon was closely tied to the avant-garde scene: She was a model for Man Ray, a designer for Elsa Schiaparelli, and a participant in the surrealist movement who published a series of poems praised by André Breton himself. She, like many avant-garde artists and movements, became deeply interested in ancient cultures, rituals, and magic. At the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, whom she had met in Paris, Rahon and her husband, Wolfgang Paalen, traveled to Mexico in 1939, where she pursued that interest, now focusing on the pre-Columbian world. As the couple visited small towns and archeological sites, they became more and more convinced that art must explore “superior dimensions”; surrealism, they argued, had to go beyond its “illusionist” phase and concentrate instead on abstraction and psychic automatism, a practice that would provide access to the most elevated states of consciousness. Thus, from the heart of a community of artists and intellectuals who had immigrated to Mexico from Europe, Rahon, under the impact of the Mexican vernacular culture, envisioned new ways of inhabiting the modern world, ways to which the spiritual was fundamental.