his hotel room in the Hacienda San Francisco Cuadra in Taxco, where he sometimes stayed during his depressions, and walked up the hill. The following day he was found dead with a gunshot to his head. Poet and writer Although Paalen is known chiefly as a visual artist, he also wrote poetry in French and German, which he shared with Valentine Penrose, Alice Rahon, André Breton and Paul Éluard. 1941 Breton reacted euphorically to Paalen's poetical diary of his voyage to British Columbia in the summer of 1939: "I have read Paysage totémique, re-read, read in a loud voice, nothing is more adorable, indubitably genial". Paysage totémique was partly published in his magazine DYN. He also wrote three theatre plays and various unpublished stories, such as Der Axolotl, Paloma Palomita; his play The Beam of the Balance, a tragic-comedy, reflects the unbroken power of Stalin's totalitarian terror-regime, the release of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the danger of the unbalanced scientific human mind in general. It was first read publicly in the house of Robert Motherwell in East Hampton in 1946. His play Elorn, A Ballad from Brittany reflects his lifelong passion with pre-Celtic matrilinear cultures. Legacy The complete works of Paalen, canvases, objects and sculptures, were catalogued by art historian Andreas Neufert in his 1999 book Wolfgang Paalen: Im Inneren des Wals: Monography, and Catalogue Raisonné. Paalen's estate in Mexico, including papers and photographs, was donated by the heirs of Isabel Marin de Paalen to the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City. The estate which Paalen left in the care of his close friend, the surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, is administrated by the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, California, which recently restituted Paalen's rich archive of papers, photographs and manuscripts to the heirs of Eva Sulzer, Paalen's only heir and executor. Between May and July 2007 a collection of his work was exhibited at the Frey Norris gallery in San Francisco. In 2014 the Wendi Norris Gallery, also in San Francisco, exhibited major works in the solo-retrospective Wolfgang Paalen, Philosopher of the Possible. Paalen's collected essays on art from DYN, Form and Sense, were re-published in 2013 by Deborah Rosenthal with a foreword by Martica Sawin. 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