Exhibit revives short-lived but influential art movement with Marin ties

On the surface it would seem like European Surrealism, Indigenous cultures, physics, extraterrestrial life and Zen Buddhism don’t have much, if anything, to do with each other.

But for Inverness artist Gordon Onslow Ford; Lee Mullican, an artist from Chickasha, Oklahoma; and Austrian-born Wolfgang Paalen, they’re the influences that fueled the psychedelic paintings they made while living together in Paalen’s ramshackle Mill Valley mansion during the postwar era, giving rise to what’s known as the Dynaton group, from a Greek word meaning “the possible.”

Onslow Ford, Mullican and Paalen are long dead and their Dynaton movement was short lived, disbanding after a 1951 exhibition, “Dynaton,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the impact they made on subsequent generations of counterculture artists in the Bay Area was huge. A new year-long exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, “What Has Been and What Could Be,” showcases their work and their influence at the time.

While their art was once dubbed “Surrealism for the New World” by Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, their work may not be as well-known now. In fact, BAMFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who curated the show, hadn’t heard of them.

“They’re not as well known as one might think they could be,” she says.

Widholm first learned about them through Wendi Norris, who has a gallery in San Francisco focusing on contemporary and surrealist art. When Widholm discovered that BAMFA had one painting from each of the artists in the eclectic 25,000-work collection, she was excited to learn more about the artists and include their work in the exhibition.

‘Still fresh’

“Their work, I think, is still fresh and interesting to view and consider in a new era,” she says. “I thought it was really exciting to revive their reputation, revive this group and bring more visibility to it.”

Onslow Ford, who died in 2003, may be the famous of the three in Marin. His art collection and archives belong to the Inverness-based Lucid Art Foundation, which he cofounded in 1998 with Robert Anthoine and Fariba Bogzaran, and that explores and supports the intersection of the arts and consciousness with exhibits, artist residencies, webinars, lectures and publications.

Paalen had fled to Mexico to escape World War II and in 1940 began publishing what became an influential avant-garde art journal, Dyn. He and Onslow Ford met there and became reacquainted again when Paalen moved to the Bay Area in the late 1940s. Onslow Ford introduced him to Mullican, who had come across Dyn magazine while he was stationed in Hawaii during the war. It had a profound impact on him.

The three became close friends and each had a one-man exhibition SFMOMA before their 1951 group show.

Writing in one of two essays for the SFMOMA catalogue, Paalen wrote, “Our images are not meant to shock nor to relax; they are neither objects for mere aesthetic satisfaction nor for visual experimentation. Our pictures are objects for that active meditation which does not mean detachment from human purpose, but a state of self-transcending awareness, which is not an escape from reality, because it is an intuitive participation in the formative potentialities of reality.”

Differing styles

Their styles differed. With a background in surrealist automatism, Onslow Ford incorporated lines, circles and dots, believing them to be the fastest forms an artist can produce spontaneously without any effort to produce identifiable objects. Paalen used smoke from candles, known as fumage, in his paintings as well layered dashes and blotches of oil paint. With a background in cartography and tantric Indian art, Mullican featured linear striations using the edge of a palette knife in his mandala-like work.

The last time their work was exhibited together was an exhibition at the Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in 1992.

BAMFA acquired Mullican’s “Fable” and Onslow Ford’s “The Painter and the Muse” more than a decade ago, but an untitled fumage-style painting by Paalen was a recent acquisition, a bequest from the late Tiburon artist, collector and founder of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco Gertrud Parker, who died in 2021.

“I was quite interested in how their work approached abstraction in painting together with Surrealism and kind of breaking free from conventions but in combination with their research onto Indigenous cultures, especially in South America, as well as Zen Buddhism. So, I was interested in the many cultural influences they were feeding into their work,” says Widholm.

And it still speaks to the moment.

“Certainly their interest in Indigenous practices or forms. And abstraction is also having a renewed moment,” she says. “I think there’s an appreciation of what abstraction can offer us in terms of a different kind of art making, a different aesthetic, but also understanding that this work was made in response to World War II. This was made in a highly contentious era of global war and it’s automatic painting. The Europeans wanted to get away from rationalism and tap into something they saw was more intuitive or connected to human nature.”

IF YOU GO

What: “What Has Been and What Could Be”

When: Through July 7, 2024, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Where: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2120 Oxford St., Berkeley

Admission: $14

Information: 510-642-0808, bampfa.org