Ferrandou Christine, Poussard Laurence, Bréchot Gaëlle, Alice Rahon : poète, peintre, artiste voyageuse, Saché, TFV Production, 2012
Alice Rahon : una surrealista en México (1939-1987), Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico, 2009
French Painter and Poet.
Hoping to disarrange the landmarks of her biography, Alice Rahon said she was born in 1916 in Brittany, where she spent her holidays. Of all of her names, she kept only the first, in homage to a heroine from a Lewis Carroll novel, whom she identified as, in one of her rare self-portraits (Self-portrait, 1951). Rahon is her mother’s maiden name, which she adopted in 1947 after her divorce from the Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen, whom she had met in 1931. All of her poems were published under her married name. In 1936, she released her first collection of poems, À même la terre, published by the Éditions surrealistes, which caught the attention of André Breton. In 1938, after a long journey in India, where she met the poet Valentine Penrose, she published another collection, Sablier couché. In 1939, she embarked on a long journey in North America on the path of totemic art with her husband and their friend and patron, photographer Eva Sulzer (1902–1990). At the outbreak of World War II, the trio was in Mexico. The young woman published Cristaux d’espaces (1942–1946), poem-paintings and gouaches in the magazine Dyn, founded by her husband.