New York in the 1940s

Among the prominent émigrés from this era was Wolfgang Paalen, a Surrealist artist who spent the 1940s in New York, California, and Mexico. In 1942, Paalen published his essay “Farewell to Surrealism” in the first issue of DYN , an art journal he founded. Publicly parting with the founder of Surrealism André Breton, Paalen devoted his journal primarily to the new generation of American abstract painters—including William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock—who valued Surrealism’s aesthetic paths to the unconscious. Breton, in response, founded VVV , edited by David Hare, with collaborators Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Published in New York, the journal became a vehicle for European artist émigrés to communicate with young American artists.

The nascent New York School took inspiration from diverse sources: the biomorphic and pictographic work of early Surrealists as well as their later, increasingly abstract experiments with automatism; primitive myths and ancient cultures; totemism; and Jungian thought and archetypes. The new American painters, including Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, mined myth and art history for imagery and subject matter that summoned the