Alice Rahon

After publishing her final volume of poetry in 1941,the French artist Alice Rahon dedicated herself almost exclusively to creating Surrealist paintings that combined found materials like butterfly wings with fantastical subjects like magic. Rahon made hats for whimsical fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, befriended Joan Miró, and was welcomed into the circle of Parisian Surrealists led by André Breton. In 1939, an introduction to Frida Kahlo in Paris inspired her to move to Mexico City. Her painting Los Cuatro Hijos Del Arco Iris (1960) exceeded estimates and sold at auction in 2020 for $512,000 with fees; that same year, Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco began to represent her estate. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented the first of Rahon’s two museum solo exhibitions in 1945 and she showed regularly at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in her lifetime. Inspired by prehistoric cave paintings and memory, she created canvases with a sandpaper-like surface and used an sgraffito etching technique to expose underlying layers of paint. Rahon became a naturalized citizen of Mexico and died in Mexico City in 1987.