It was a life full of tensions and unexpected twists that led the son of an Austrian-Jewish merchant from Vienna during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph through Sagan, Rome, and the abyssal Berlin of the 1920s to the Paris of the Surrealists. In 1938, Wolfgang Paalen achieved breakthrough success with his smoke paintings (Fumagen) and his collaboration with Marcel Duchamp at the famous "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" in Paris. In 1939, he went into exile in Mexico at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and put his thoughts into a series of explosive essays published in his own magazine, DYN. With this, Paalen initiated a revolution in artistic thinking, rising to become the secret figurehead of young American painting in the 1940s, although he exhibited shortly after Jackson Pollock in Peggy Guggenheim's gallery "Art of the Century" in 1945.