Sandstorm
- Material
- Oil on canvas
Alice Rahon, French (active Mexico), 1904–1987; Sandstorm, 1947; oil on canvas; 35 1/8 x 57 1/2 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer Jr. 240:1954; © Alice Rahon
A version of this blog originally ran in 2016. It has been updated in celebration of artist Alice Rahon’s birthday.
In the late 1930s and ’40s, Mexico had an immense allure for Surrealist artists, many of whom fled the advance of Nazi forces across Europe. Not only were Mexico’s entry procedures for foreigners relatively relaxed, but after a 1938 visit, French founder of Surrealism André Breton declared the country, with its dramatic landscape, idiosyncratic customs, and vibrant indigenous culture, “the Surrealist place par excellence,” according to author Rafael Heliodoro Valle in “Diálogo con André Breton.”
French Surrealist poet Alice Rahon and her Austrian husband, painter Wolfgang Paalen, traveled to Mexico in 1939 on an invitation from artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. That year, the official outbreak of World War II led Rahon to settle permanently in Mexico, where she remained for the rest of her life. She showed three watercolor paintings in the influential 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Mexico City, which included the work of European and Latin American artists. Rahon helped her husband organize the exhibition along with Breton and Peruvian poet César Moro. In the next few years, many more European artists joined Rahon in Mexico, including Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, and Luis Buñuel.
In France, Rahon was known among Surrealists for her poetry, which was well received. Her 1936 book À Même La Terre (On the Bare Ground) was the first volume by a woman released by the publishing company Editions Surréalistes. In Mexico, however, she began her transition from poet to painter, a shift Rahon herself attributed to the vibrant colors of Mexico.
Alice Rahon, French (active Mexico), 1904–1987; Sandstorm, 1947; oil on canvas; 35 1/8 x 57 1/2 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer Jr. 240:1954; © Alice Rahon
Stippled with touches of dusky purple, mauve, and burnt orange, Rahon’s painting Sandstorm confirms that her work was steeped in the intense hues of the Mexican environment. The painting, given to the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1954 by Joseph Pulitzer Jr., is on view at the Museum in Mae M. Whitaker Gallery 212. In the imagined landscape of Sandstorm, mountains emerge from an atmosphere of shifting color, representing swirling sands thrown about by the wind. A large, hot sun is visible through the storm, hanging low over a pack of cattle or horses. Rahon later claimed, “Sandstorm coincides with my discovery of the Mexican landscape—I made a series of landscapes where I tried to give that impression of infinite space, and dramatic scale where humans are too small to be visible,” according to a letter to Joseph Pulitzer dated March 27, 1958, quoted in Charles Scott Chetham’s Modern Painting, Drawing & Sculpture Collected by Louise and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr.
Like much of Rahon’s work, Sandstorm is also informed by prehistoric paintings and petroglyphs. The animals grazing in this amorphous environment may reference animal paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period found on the walls of the Altamira Cave in Spain, which Rahon visited in 1933. In the catalog for a 1951 exhibition at the Willard Gallery in New York, Rahon wrote: “In the earliest times, painting was magical; it was the key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve.” This ability to envision new worlds may be, perhaps, what Rahon strove for in her own work and the reason why, when asked by a reporter to what school of painting she belonged, Rahon responded, “I think I am a cave painter,” according to scholar Nancy Deffebach’s Alice Rahon: Poems of Light and Shadow, Painting in Free Verse.
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