that time and Paalen also participated in the design of Breton's Galerie Gradiva. There he met and worked with Marcel Duchamp and presented his object Chaise envahie de lierre, acquired in the gallery by Marie-Laure de Noailles, who installed it in her famous bathroom, mentioned and illustrated in Harper's Bazaar in April 1938. Fumage and first masterpieces In the course of his association with the Surrealists and their attempts to transform automatic writing into drawing and painting, he created fumage – a technique for generating evocative patterns with the smoke and soot of a lit candle. Between 1936 and 1937 Paalen developed with these visionary-ephemeral forms on canvas, which he then mostly painted over in oil, a number of mature paintings which soon made his international reputation. The further development in the work of Paalen continues to follow up the idea of a biological-evolutionary-physical-cosmological continuum, in which the human organism can evolve and unfold. Prelude for a series of oil-Fumages within the Surrealist group gave the discreet affair of Pablo Picasso with Alice Rahon which had led to an abortion. 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. This was also the first painting, into which he artfully integrated his fumage, in the extremely fine, crystalline execution of the lower section. In 1937 he realized many paintings in this style, including Fata Alaska. International Exhibition of Surrealism 1938 and surrealist objects Together with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, Paalen was among those responsible for the design of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he produced a floor, with dead leaves and mud from the Montparnasse Cemetery, and an installation named Avant La Mare, consisting of an artificial pond with water, real water-lilies and reeds, beneath Duchamp's ceiling of empty coal sacks. The doll Paalen decorated came with a silk scarf, a giant bat on her head and an eerie, mushroom-covered leaf-dress. It