Kurt Seligmann American, born Switzerland, 1900-1962

Early Years

Born in Basel, Switzerland in 1900, Kurt Seligmann's first employment as a teenager was in a local printer's shop and involved learning to apply color to pictures on glass projected for educational use, a skill he would later employ in his own reverse glass paintings. He took lessons from the traditionalist Ernst Buchner and the modernist Eugene Rudolf Ammann, setting a pattern of concurrent and seemingly opposite influences that would continue in his own work throughout his life. In 1918 he started to regularly participate in exhibitions at the Basel Kunsthalle, and in 1919 he began studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he met Alberto Giacometti. A portrait that he painted of the sculptor at that time now hangs in the Kunstmuseum, Bern.

Kurt's father, Gustav Seligmann, established a successful furniture business in Switzerland, and his mother, Helene Guggenheim, was a member of one of the oldest families in Lengnau; the art collector Peggy Guggenheim was related to the family as well. Kurt's time at the Beaux-Arts abruptly ended when his father became ill and he returned home to assume the responsibilities of running the family business, a role which lasted for eight years. An exhibition at the Kuntsmuseum Basel of the 16th century artist/mercenary Urs Graf was the impetus for him to revisit his artistic pursuits, and in 1926, he resigned from the business. Though it had prospered under his son's management and he had been initially reluctant to have Kurt attend art school, Gustav supported him in the pursuit of his passion and happiness, whatever form that was to take.

Paris and Abstraction-Création

After studying and traveling in Italy for a year, Seligmann moved to Paris in 1929, spending a few months at the school of André Lhote as well as working from models at Colarossi's Académie de la Grande Chaumière and subjects he met in the city. His cosmopolitan life was enriched by frequent visits to the Louvre, his reading of Freud's lectures on psychoanalysis, and the company of other Swiss artists, including Serge Brignoni and Gérard Vuillamy. According to his diary, he purposely sought to find inspiration beyond his intellect and reality, to invent new forms from insight and fantasy.

In 1930 Paris was the epicenter of avant-garde artistic movements, particularly the abstraction groups and Surrealism. Seligmann's style and sensibility demonstrated traits of both genres. The figures within his semi-geometric abstractions set against stark grounds gradually softened to organic forms of strong contrasting color interacting in sweeping curves, which perhaps struck a chord with Jean Arp who invited Seligmann to his studio. Before introducing himself to Max Ernst and André Breton, Seligmann felt he needed to demonstrate his artistic gravitas. That year he was accepted to the third Salon des Surindépendants with paintings and a wood construction. Wolfgang Paalen was among the artists who responded to Seligmann's work, and the two became lifelong friends.

Arp invited Seligmann to join the group he had founded, Abstraction-Création, within which he took active roles, eventually becoming right-hand man to the president, Auguste Herbin, until the group dissolved in 1936. His introduction to Jeanne Boucher by Arp lead to his first solo exhibition in 1932, and thereafter he exhibited in Basel and Bern in shows also featuring Arp.

From the outset, Seligmann's work stood in contrast to the others within Abstraction-Création, with his Surrealist tendencies becoming more evident, and in 1934 he officially became a member of the Surrealist group along with Jacques Hérold, Óscar Domínguez, Richard Oelze and Hans Bellmer. His paintings developed into a unique combination of Surrealism and his Swiss heritage, portraying characters composed of various peculiar shapes and elements. At a show at the Galleria de Milione in Italy in 1935, he exhibited several paintings on reverse glass, employing techniques from his teen years and a traditional Swiss folk art. While straddling the tenets of both artistic groups, the Japanese avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, with whom he had collaborated, believed that Seligmann was the main cause of the split between the abstractionists and semi-abstractionists which eventually lead to the end of Abstraction-Création.

A Shift Towards Surrealism

The city of Basel had an essential significance within Seligmann's life and work, as he recalled growing up with the image of the 15th century mercenary and the subconscious effect his culture had on his artistic ventures. He affirmed the notion that progress first needs a knowledge of and respect for the past. Most notably, the city's Carnival Day, when the citizens would swarm the streets in medieval costume and lavish headgear in an annual revelry of music and kin, left an enduring impression on the artist. In a 1935 interview, Seligmann recalled:

“My entire childhood was impregnated by the ancient ideal of the Soldier of Fortune which since the 15th century has left an indelible mark on Basel. The heraldic ensigns, the armor, the halyards, the drapery, the ribbons, all this anachronistic attire was very much alive for me. It seems to me that I always hear, in the depth of my ears, the deafening sound of the enormous drums that are reserved for Carnival Day. Basel, you see, is still and always Holbein, Erasmus, Frobeinus, Melanchton. It is in the culture of my natal city to which my subconscious always travels whenever I begin one of my compositions, whether abstract or imaginative.” Héraut, Henri, “Artistes d'aujourd'hui: Kurt Seligmann, peintre d'avant-garde,” Sud, Nr. 126, Marseille, 15 April 1935

These depictions are most literally illustrated when his characters are in full regalia, engaged in a dance macabre or haunting procession, waving flags or in a flight en masse. Even within his early abstractions and the later anthropomorphic and vegetal compositions, one can detect the heraldic undertones: swaying ribbons of paint, swathes of drapery, a strength in stance and movement. In the essays accompanying the 1961 D'Arcy Galleries exhibition, French Musée d'Art Moderne Director Jean Cassou called Seligmann's figures “truly baroque,” with the “swirling and “undulating” folds of cloth producing “elegant” results. James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, described his “violence of expression” and “an urgency and fever that brings his work closer to expressionism than to classical repose.” Many observed his relation to his Swiss antecedents, citing the “energy” of Urs Graf (c. 1485-1529) and Nicolas Manuel Deutsch (1484-1530), whose artwork depicted battle scenes and medieval creatures and which can be found reinvented in Seligmann's modern-day combats and fantastical parades. Murdock Pemberton, art critic for The New Yorker magazine, conveyed that “Seligmann reports being especially enraptured by the inner rhythm of battle scenes” of the Italian Renaissance master Paolo Uccello.

In 1935, Seligmann met and married Arlette Paraf, niece of the gallery director Georges Wildenstein, after which they embarked upon world travels together. While in Japan, Taro Okamoto's father organized a one-person show in Tokyo for Seligmann—the first time an artist associated with Surrealism exhibited in Japan prior to the first official International Exhibition of Surrealism in Tokyo, 1937. During their stay at the Hotel Grosvenor in Paris in 1936, Kay Sage, also a guest, discovered Kurt's paintings while peering through an open door. A friendship formed between the three, leading Sage to the Surrealists and ultimately to her marriage to Yves Tanguy.

Kurt and Arlette eventually found a new home and studio in Paris in the Villa Seurat. In 1937, with the encouragement of Tanguy, Seligmann was admitted to the daily meetings of the Surrealists with Breton at the Café Deux Magots, along with Esteban Francés and Patrick Waldberg. Breton wrote in Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, “Kurt Seligmann, who passed through this phase of heraldic symbolism and whose first mission seems to have been to elucidate its mysteries, has moved on to explore all the phosphorescent aspects of the medieval 'night'. From these expeditions he has brought back the pure forms of human anguish and energy…"

A large Surrealism exhibition opened at Wildenstein's noteworthy Galerie des Beaux-Arts in 1938. The exhibition was an experience to be had: a corridor lined with mannequins adorned by the Surrealists, including Seligmann; coal sacks hanging from the ceiling courtesy of Marcel Duchamp; beds surrounding a pond designed by Paalen. Seligmann's earlier works given new Surrealist titles hung amongst those by Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and other Surrealist artists. His objects were also featured, including a soup tureen covered with feathers, a tear-shaped plaster with four human arms, three copies in plaster of a child's portrait bust by the 19th century sculptor, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, and his controversial Ultrameuble—a stool consisting of four female legs in high heels, possibly in a nod to the furniture shop of his past.

Seligmann's involvement with the Surrealists advanced: his collage Les animaux surréalists was included in the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme published by Breton and éluard; he was among the twelve artists invited by Breton to illustrate the Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, also known as le Comte de Lautréamont; and his work was featured in an additional Surrealism exhibition organized by Breton and Éluard held in Amsterdam in 1938.

An exhibition of non-European sources of Western art at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in 1937 was of particular interest to the Surrealists, who were intrigued by tribal art. A Surrealist map of the world was presented depicting the largest land masses as those rich in tribal art, and Seligmann, along with many other fellow Surrealists, acquired tribal art objects. What captivated him was the “totemistic substance” of such objects, symbolizing man's connections to primordial life conditions. Kurt and Arlette traveled to British Columbia, spending three months living in a Tsimshian village and observing their life and legends and their parallels to European tales and traditions. They acquired a sixty-foot totem pole that was shipped to Paris and installed at the entry of the Musée de l'Homme.

New Home in America

In September of 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, the Seligmanns departed France by ship for New York. Seemingly the trip was planned so that they could attend his exhibition at Karl Nierendorf's gallery, though the timing indicates this could have been a strategy for them to leave Europe. Seligmann may have anticipated the possibility for a long stay abroad, as the month prior he had sought storage for his glass paintings with Georges Wildenstein which was already occupied. In fact, as early as 1932, he foreshadowed an inevitable war in a scrapbook he had assembled of articles and images.

The exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery, Specters 1939 A.D.—13 Variations on a macabre theme, reflected the current violence of the time while retaining ambiguous elements and those unique to the artist, such as medieval alchemy, classical myths, Swiss devices, and distinctly modern renderings. Upon the show's conclusion, a return to France was impossible, and the Seligmanns moved from the Plaza Hotel annex to a large studio on 40th Street near Fifth Avenue, where they would reside for the following twenty years.

Their relocation to New York and financial stability proved unexpectedly beneficial as Seligmann was able to assist his fellow Surrealists seeking to emigrate from Europe with the threat of impending danger during wartime. He received requests from colleagues, whether they were Jewish or German nationals abroad, and artists whose work was included in Hitler's Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, for assistance with visas, finances, and reference letters, and he helped to provide affidavits to the Emergency Rescue Committee for Surrealists seeking to depart Europe, including André Masson and Breton. The latter wrote to him from France in 1940, “I am convinced that the future of Surrealism is where you are.”

Surrealist Émigrés

Paalen, who was living in Mexico, wrote to Seligmann in November regarding a show he was organizing with César Moro at the Galería de Arte Mexicano. Breton, who was still serving as military medical staff in France, provided the list of inclusions. Paalen sketched the two Seligmann paintings he wanted to exhibit in the letter to Kurt and informed him that Tanguy had recently arrived in New York. The Paris Surrealists began arriving and regrouping in fall and spring, including Matta, Sage, Duchamp, Masson, Max Ernst, Gordon Onslow Ford and Stanley William Hayter. Their presence led to shows at the galleries of Julien Levy, Curt Valentine and Pierre Matisse, exhibitions at the New School for Social Research, and publications featuring Surrealism. Seligmann was listed as one of the sponsors of View, poet Charles Henri Ford's “poetry paper,” for which he designed a cover and contributed articles on magic.

The 1940s was an active decade for Seligmann. He designed sets and costumes for dance performances, including Hanya Holm's The Golden Fleece and George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. He exhibited again at the Nierendorf Gallery, the New School, Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Modern Art, the Addison Gallery, and the Chicago Art Institute. The art historian Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian became close friends, and at the suggestion of Lillian's brother, Kurt and Arlette explored and bought a 19th century farmhouse in Sugar Loaf, north of New York City. As it would happen, Schapiro sent one of his graduate students, Robert Motherwell, to Seligmann for painting lessons. In 1943, the Seligmanns took a postponed trip to Mexico at the invitation of the Minister of Education to exhibit at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, which allowed them to spend time with friends who lived there such as Paalen and Frida Kahlo.

In his personal technique of automatism in the 1940s, Seligmann strove to attain imagery by pure accident so as to avoid repetition in favor of what he referred to as “the a priori element.” Inspired by a method of Hans Rudolf Schiess, he projected fractured glass onto paper or canvas which he then traced for patterns and cultivated cyclonic forms floating or spiraling up from the ground, a fitting vocabulary for his impressions of the awe-inspiring terrains of the Grand Canyon and American Southwest. For the show European Artists Teaching in America at Andover's Addison Gallery, he wrote, “They are landscapes, but they are not static. I call them cyclonic landscapes.” During his exhibition at the Durlacher Gallery the next year, he further expressed, “This is an interpretation of southwestern American landscape. They are psychological landscapes with anthropomorphic elements; living beings seem to detach themselves from tortuous geological formations. A world in formation—not the heroic landscapes of prehistory, but rather a lyrical one.” In contrast to the long histories of his European homeland, this new world held mystery and unpredictability. In his “Prolegomena to the Third Manifesto of Surrealism—or else,” Breton simultaneously wrote about his theory of invisible present beings called “the Great Transparents,” which also may have been inspiration for some of these forms.

The group of Surrealist refugees continued to exhibit and produce artwork together. A series of etchings was printed on a press in Seligmann's barn/studio in Sugar Loaf, which was destroyed by a cyclone a few years later. Duchamp famously fired five shots at the foundation wall of an adjacent barn, then photographed it and printed it with the bullet holes punched out for the cover of the catalogue for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition of 1942. Seligmann's work was exhibited in that show and at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. He contributed writings on magic and alchemy to the journal VVV, edited by Breton and Ernst, and the surrealism-oriented View, while accumulating his own collection of rare books on magic. As similar to other Surrealists, he was eventually expelled from the group by Breton, stemming from a disagreement over an interpretation of Tarot cards.

This did not curtail Seligmann's work, and he continued to exhibit regularly. Particularly revealing was the artist's statement to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 for an exhibition titled Eleven Europeans in America, that after briefly experimenting with the cyclonic depictions, his subject matter had returned “to the prevailing interest of my work, which is man.” In the later 1940s his theatrical characters were juxtaposed against architectural backgrounds, similar to Matta's planes, perhaps influenced by his stage design work. While most of his colleagues returned to France after the war, he and Arlette stayed and became American citizens. They kept their house in the Villa Seurat and allowed friends such as Paalen and Noguchi to stay. While they visited Paris for his retrospective at Maeght Gallery in 1949, they were happy to return to their Sugar Loaf farm.

Myth and Magic

Seligmann expanded his collection of books on magic, motivated by a desire to stay connected to traditions of Europe and the printing of his Swiss homeland, and his interest in the link of magic, science and the human psyche.

“I am an artist and I think as a painter. This is the true reason why magic attracts me—the completeness of the magical world. For an artwork should as well be complete in itself. There should be a manifoldness of forms, a variety held together by a coordinating law similar to the magical world law spoken of in clear words by the Babylonians, the Egyptian magis and the Greek metaphysicists…the great philosophers have not been able to break through the magic circle…The great axiom of magic: all is all and all is one has haunted our civilized west and the near east for thousands of years.” View, February/March 1942

In 1948 Seligmann's own book, The Mirror of Magic, was published by Pantheon; later under the title of History of Magic, it was translated into multiple languages and has gone through many printings. In magic he saw a metaphor for life. “If all is one, there cannot be a separation between man, the stars, and the invisible. There cannot be anything contrary to the world's harmony.”

In the work of the 1950s, Seligmann increasingly invoked vegetal forms, insects, the elements and cosmos, perhaps inspired by the gardens of the Sugar Loaf farm that he and Arlette enjoyed together, and this harmonious ideal which he sought. His new focus of composition retained his classic elements of figure, billowing imagery, movement and energy, applied to references to nature and even Abstract Expressionism.

In 1950 Thomas Bouchard's film of Seligmann working in his studio, The Birth of a Painting, premiered at New York University and was shown for an extended period at the Museum of Modern Art. Seligmann lectured at the New School and exhibited frequently in New York, and in 1954 he was appointed to the Brooklyn College faculty. He suffered a heart attack but soon resumed painting, writing to the author Harvey Arnason, “I am a romanticist. My world is that of dreams, fantasies, apparitions…It is the strange, the unheard of, the exquisite which attracts me…for nothing in the world would I forgo my day and night dreams.”

On January 2, 1962, while he was preparing to shoot the rats eating from his birdfeeder, Seligmann slipped on the icy steps, and his rifle accidentally discharged, killing him immediately. A neighbor coming to pick him up found him shortly thereafter. Arlette passed away thirty years later, and both are buried in the small family plot at the Sugar Loaf farm.