is reflected as a question. In a cartoon published by Ad Reinhardt in the fifties, Paalen's suggestion from Form and Sense is repeated: "Paintings no longer represent; it is no longer the task of art to answer naive questions. Today it has become the role of the painting to look at the spectator and ask him: what do you represent?" Gustav Regler wrote 1946 about this groundbreaking idea: Paalen understood his picture beings as a kind of pictorial version of the ancient choros tragicos, the tragic chorus effect, conceived in Nietzsche's writing on The Birth of Tragedy. It is the deep existential foundation of reality, what he is interested in. Although it becomes common practice after 1947, until this time, nobody had placed so much responsibility on the viewer as Paalen did with his rhetoric and pictorial language. After the war Archeological passions 1946 he divorced Alice and married the Venezuelan designer and artist Luchita Hurtado, whom he had met in New York through his friend Isamu Noguchi. Hurtado moved to Mexico in 1947 to live with Paalen and together they explored the ancient culture of the Olmec, about which Paalen later published a widely respected article in the French art magazine Cahiers d'art. Paalen radicalizes the assumption of his friend and colleague Miguel Covarrubias, that the Olmecs were a culture succumbed and (after hundreds of war-years) finally wiped out by the aggressive Maya civilization, comparing the Olmecs to the ancient European matrilinear civilizations, which underlay invasive and more aggressive patriarchal civilizations some 3000 years ago. Paalen's thesis about the matrilinear social-structure of the ancient societies of Mesoamerica, which he documented with considerable support from his own research, was never substantially challenged and strongly influenced such artists as Alice Rahon, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington in their archaist and feminist themes. His ideas still live on in the archaeological and artistic discourses, the most prominent popular example of recent times being Mel Gibson's cinematic opus Apocalypto). San Francisco, Paris In 1948, one of the two children from Luchita's former marriage died in Mexico of Polio. Paalen decided to move to San Francisco with his new family, where he worked with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican in a newly formed association, the Dynaton group. They settled in Mill Valley and had solo shows in the San Francisco Museum of Art as well as a group show at Stanford University Art