Alice Rahon (1904–1987)

The Spirit of the Bird.
Alice Rahon, a poet turned painter in the creative heat of Mexico, did not paint nature as it looks, but as it feels.

In Vuelo del Quetzal (1960), she commits a beautiful act of surrealist subversion. The Quetzal is known as the most vibrantly colored bird of the Americas. Yet Rahon renders it without color. The bird becomes a ghost, a transparent entity absorbing the landscape behind it—the golden sun and the deep blue horizon.

Using her signature technique of mixing sand with oil and incising lines directly into the paint (sgraffito), she turns the canvas into something akin to a prehistoric cave wall.

Why it matters: Unlike her smaller intimate works, this is a substantial canvas (over 90 cm tall). It perfectly illustrates Anaïs Nin’s observation that Rahon’s paintings are "drawn from subterranean worlds." A tactile, mystical work verified by Dr. Salomon Grimberg.