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.Alice's love-letters to Picasso, practically unknown to the public, are stored in the Musée Picasso in Paris; see also Neufert, p. 181f. u. 250ff., who discovered the letters and gives ample insight into the affair and its literary output. 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.
