Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency.

He became also a well known collector of Old Master paintings with masterpieces, like Francisco Goya's Señora Sabasa Garcia, which he had acquired from the Berlin patron Henri James Simon and is today one of the highlights of the National Gallery, Washington.

As a friend of Wilhelm von Bode and member of the Freundeskreis des Kaiser-Friedrich Museums, Berlin, he also financed the acquisition of the famous Titian painting Venus with the Organ-Player.

The first years of his life Wolfgang Paalen spent between Vienna and Styria where his father had opened the fashionable health resort Tobelbad, in the presence of Franz Joseph I of Austria, to whom he dedicated a memorial still visible today.

During World War I Gustav Robert served both empires, the Austrian and the German, with the organization of food supply and worked closely together with Walther Rathenau and Albert Ballin's Zentral-Einkaufsgesellschaft.

[3] In 1919 the family moved to Rome, where they kept a luxurious household in the Villa Caetani on the Gianicolo and received many guests, such as the German painter Leo von König (1871–1944) who became Wolfgang's first art teacher.

After another year of studies, in Paris and Cassis (1925–26), where he met Roland Penrose, Jean Varda (Janco) and Georges Braque, he visited the art school of Hans Hofmann in Munich and, in 1928, Saint-Tropez.

After a homoerotic affair with a mental healer, his younger brother Hans-Peter died unexpectedly in a Berlin insane asylum, presumably of suicide; the parents consequently separated; their mother's bipolar disposition intensified as a result; the fortune of Gustav Paalen is quashed after the Black Tuesday, 1929.

A small glazed showcase with clay idols called Aux bons soins du navigateur (At the Mercy of the Navigator) was shown, as was Le passage à niveau (The Level Crossing), a wooden root elegantly leaning on a cork wall, along with two other objects made of roots: Le crâne de Voltaire (Voltaire's Skull) and Les cerveaux de Rembrandt (Rembrandt's Brains).

Breton and Penrose included him in the organization of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, where he presented twelve oils, gouaches and objects as well as his first fumage (Dictated by a Candle) representing a ghostly hand performing the act of painting.

[7] The deep crisis of the couple and Paalen's first grave attack of depression led to his first important Surrealist masterpiece, Pays interdit ("Forbidden Land"), an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a female goddess and fallen, meteorite-like planets.

Paalen had designed his personal model of the permeable poetic soul in the form of a cryptic, abyssal landscape, pervaded by a mixture of feminine mystique and romantic ‘shock’ imagery reminiscent of pre-Celtic faerie mysteries and their cosmic allusions, as these are known in the lyrical tradition of Brittany.

It anticipated the barely visible, floating, gliding totemic fairy creatures from his oil paintings with fumage that Pierre Colle would show the following June in his surrealist gallery.

Other critics suggest that the entire installation was meant to imply the minatorial situation of the Surrealist group itself, reflected by the approaching war, as well as a huge mother's womb as vade mecum to fight the causes of the crisis, which were located in the paternalistic fixations of the whole epoch.

[10] Nuage articulé was published later in a more political context in the Surrealist magazine London Bulletin, together with a text by André Breton translated by Samuel Beckett with a comment that the sponge-umbrella would bring to mind another, sadly prominent, umbrella – that of Neville Chamberlain at the 1938 Munich Conference and the failure of the British policy of appeasement.

[11] Besides Nuage articulé, of which two versions are known and preserved[12] In addition to Nuage articulé, Paalen presented other objects in the 1938 surrealist exhibition, such as: Potence avec paratonnerre (Gallows with Lightning Rod), a larger-than-life wooden gibbet with lightning rods and a dedication plaque to the German philosopher and experimental physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; Le moi et le soi (The Ego and the Id); and a version of Chaise envahie de lierre.

In autumn 1939 he organized the International Surrealist Exhibition in the Galería de Arte Mexicano together with the Peruvian poet César Moro, which opened in January 1940 in the new gallery rooms of Ines Amor.

Reporters witness that Paalen at a certain point switched out the light and walked around with a burning candle during the opening, gathered by young American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes and Gerome Kamrowski.

Paalen justified his refusal in a letter to Breton with his general critique on the pseudo-religious paternal fixations of the Surrealists who, in his opinion, didn't dispose of the means to find other ways out of the spiritual hole, the crisis of Marxism has left in their minds, than to look for new political fathers.

[17] Back in Mexico he broke up with his former friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo across political opinions concerning their hard line in communism after the assassination of Leon Trotsky and their return to an open adoration of Joseph Stalin.

More and more isolated from the Mexican intellectual leftists, he held an open household for European and American visitors, such as Roberto Matta, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow Ford, Benjamin Péret, Remedios Varo, Esteban Francés as well as refugees from the stalinist terror, like Gustav Regler and Victor Serge.

During his first period of exile, Paalen concentrated on the verbalization of his ideas on art and, apart from occasional visits to New York, experimented secretly, in his studio in San Ángel, in a new style on pictorial space.

Due to his magazine DYN, his presence and exhibitions in New York City, 1940 Julien Levy, 1945 Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century gallery and 1946 Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin, he influenced significantly the genesis of Abstract Expressionism.

[25]Paalen understood his picture beings as a kind of pictorial version of the ancient choros tragicos, the tragic chorus effect, conceived in Nietzsche's writing on The Birth of Tragedy.

Paalen's thesis about the matrilinear social-structure of the ancient societies of Mesoamerica, which he documented with considerable support from his own research, was never substantially challenged and strongly influenced such artists as Alice Rahon, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington in their archaist and feminist themes.

Together with his new fiancée, the American painter Marie Wilson, Paalen lived for the next 3 years in Kurt Seligmann's atelier-building in the Impasse Villa Seurat in Paris, built by André Lurçat.

[citation needed] With the help of his friends and patrons Eva Sulzer[30] and Gordon Onslow Ford he acquired an old house with studio in the small town Tepoztlán in Morelos, where he mainly lived and worked during the last years of his life.

Paradoxically Paalen produced a number of masterly works towards the end of this last period, as well as theatre plays and short stories, which reflect his ambivalent state of mind and growing depressions.

[41] 2019 the Belvedere, Vienna honored Wolfgang Paalen with a retrospective exhibition, curated by Andreas Neufert and Franz Smola, which opened October 3 and ran through January 19th with remarkable success.

[45] In July 2020 the German auction house Villa Grisebach in Berlin sold Wolfgang Paalen's early programmatic painting Avertissement I (Peinture), 1935 for €387.500.-, setting a new world record price for this artist.