Mark Bloch’s Year-End Surrealist Centennial Wrap-Up starring Kurt Seligmann (1900-1962)

Kurt Seligmann's painting “Amphitrite” from Kurt Seligmann: Beyond The Quotidian, 
Curated by Elliott De Cesare
. October 14th, 2022 through the present at The Kurt Seligmann Center, 25 White Oak Drive. Sugar Loaf, NY. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

By MARK BLOCH, December, 2024

2024 has been the year of  the Surrealist Centennial. André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. I did not want this year to end without giving a shout out to, yes, Breton, but also to Mr. Kurt Seligmann who I would like to nominate to be the new King of Surrealism, pointing the way forward, as it enters its second century.

Seligmann was not only a great surrealist painter but an expert on the alchemical in art and what to do with it, a truly fascinating character with many remarkable elements in his story, such as bringing a 60-foot totem pole from Alaska to the anthropological Museum of Mankind (Musée de l'Homme) in Paris where Claude Lévi-Strauss was an anthropology researcher and the interim director 1949–1950. (1)

And so I nominate Seligmann for the top position on the surrealist totem pole. After all, it was Seligmann who grabbed Breton's ideas about “occultism” in all caps in the Second Surrealist Manifesto in 1929 or as Seligmann called it, “magic,” and ran with it. Breton expelled him abruptly after an argument about the Tarot card called “The Fool” but we can see now Seligmann was the expert—clearly among the most knowledgable scholars on such topics, then and now, both inside and outside of Surrealism.

He spent the rest of his life manifesting his vision, putting to work in painting (and printmaking) what he had uncovered in his research into the marginalized corners of the world's cultures.  

Celia Rabinovitch, a knowledgable Seligmann scholar and the author of a wonderful book on Duchamp and chess called Duchamp's Pipe described Seligmann's major book on these esoteric subjects that are called by many names, his international encyclopedia of things mystical, published in 1948, this way: “In Europe, he began a collection of rare books on magic and the occult, further expanding his library that now resides at Cornell University. He was a source to surrealists interested in the 'primitive' and in non-western art, in ancestors, in the totem, in indigenous religion and occult magic. Using his cherished library as well as his ethnological research, his research culminated in The Mirror of Magic.” (2)

Seligmann himself said this: “If you expect now a definition of magic I must disappoint you… It is the character of magic to be mysterious, and I cannot but be mysterious when speaking about it… Magic operation is the application, the practical use of wisdom… acquired in contemplation of the inner self and of nature… Magic endeavors to explain every phenomenon in life and of nature…in the invisible world.” (3)

 Left: Seligmann letter to Katherine Kuh with marginal drawing of totem pole, 1946, Sheet: 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches, Collection Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Katherine Kuh in memory of the artist, 1962. Right: Kurt Seligmann in front of a Gitksan Totem Pole, British Columbia, 1938. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gražina Subelyte, another Seligmann scholar, was the curator (with Daniel Zamani) of Surrealism and Magic, Enchanted Modernity, an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2022. She calls that major exhibit “inspired by Seligmann,” who was also the subject of her doctoral thesis at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. I second her emotion when she states, “Therefore, my dissertation will lead to a renegotiated position of Seligmann within Surrealism.” (4) Of the eleven essays in the catalog for the Venice show which covers the entire history of Surrealism, one, hers, is dedicated exclusively to Seligmann's story.

In that chapter, “The Alchemy of Painting: Kurt Seligmann,” she wrote about a particular Tarot card: “In The Mirror of Magic, Seligmann emphasized the Fool’s vagabond, innocent character: 'dressed like a king’s jester, carrying his bundle on a stick or spoon, he walks dreamily, unaware that a dog is biting his thigh.' In his painting, the Fool is portrayed gazing at the sky, with the stick in one hand, while he is raising the other hand toward what seems to be a full moon on the upper right.”(5) It is time that this complicated symbolism, perhaps indicative of the struggle between Seligmann and Breton, be resolved so that Seligmann's expertise, not to mention his dexterity in painting, can be appreciated. We will return to their struggle momentarily.

Subelytė also described his book: “In The Mirror of Magic, Seligmann uncovers a comprehensive history of magic from Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Roman Empire, through the medieval period to the eighteenth century. In Seligmann’s own words, his aim was 'to present to the general reader a condensed account of the magical ideas and operations in the civilized Western world.' In more than four hundred and eighty pages, the book offers the 'mirror' of a magical conception of the world through the ages, explored through topics such as alchemy, Gnosticism, the divinatory arts, witchcraft, kabbalah, black magic, chiromancy, the tarot, and astrology—subjects that vastly interested the Surrealists and informed the iconography of many of their works.” (6)

And so in this year-end article commemorating Surrealism's founding, I will attempt, at last, (for I have wanted to do this for a long time) to survey the small, jagged Seligmann landscape in this, the sixty second year since he mysteriously died on January 2, 1962 at the age of 62. This numerological coincidence is as good an excuse as any for me to not ignore my desire any longer to call attention to the people and things that call attention to Seligmann, his work and his story. (Please note that this is just the tip of the iceberg, meant to share only a small portion of what I have learned about this underappreciated artist.) I rediscovered him a couple years ago through a chance brush with The Kurt Seligmann Center, a magnificent place in Sugar Loaf, NY, an hour or so north of Manhattan and the collective caretaker of his legacy. My talented and dedicated friend Elliott De Cesare, one of the faithful,
 has curated a wonderful exhibition there, Kurt Seligmann: Beyond The Quotidian, 
which has all led to interesting synchronities, before, during and after, with this article being only one of many unexpected results.

Breton's two manifestos, 1924 and 1929. In the latter he said,  “I expect people to ask me how one can bring about this occultation...It is merely a question of approaching these sciences with a minimum of mistrust... to have a precise—and positive- idea of the calculus of probabilities. The only thing is, we must never under any circumstances confide to anyone else the task of making this computation in our place.”

But before we get to Seligmann, let’s briefly recap the timing of the manifesto and the word “surrealism” which first appeared in Paris on May 18, 1917 in Guillaume Apollinaire's program note for the ballet Parade by Diagalev's Ballet Russes. In reference to a scenario by Cocteau, with décor by Picasso and music by Erik Satie, “a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today,” struck Apollinaire with the need for a new term, in response to what Cocteau had called merely “realistic.”

And so,  pleased with his new coining, Apollinaire also applied “surrealist” to his old, unstaged 1903 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias that summer of 1917 that was then being revamped for its first performance Sunday, June 24, in Montmartre, which André Breton attended with his idol, Jacques Vaché, setting a reaction in motion. (7)

The French-German-Jewish poet Yvan Goll (1891 – 1950), (born Isaac Lang) and Breton both published surrealist manifestos in October 1924. Goll's was first. As has always seem to have been the custom with Surrealism (and Dada), two rival groups then formed, in this case each claiming to be the inheritor. Goll's and Breton's conflicting beliefs later led to a physical altercation at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées over the rights to the term. Basicaly, Breton and his greater number of supporters and superior tactics won, although Goll’s rival publication on October 1, 1924, was not only first but also better looking—with a cover designed by another of my favorite kings of the serial 20th Century “isms” (with his wife, Sonia), Robert Delaunay, seen below. Furthermore, Goll published his Manifeste du Surréalisme in the only-ever issue of the journal “Surréalisme” with Dada-esque (and what would become Fluxus-like forty years later) lettering. (Goll had been a friend of the Zurich Dadaists.) By the way, a previous story of mine, commemorating the Dada Centennial— click here —concluded with an exploration of how Surrealism was spawned by late Dada. Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara and others, including Delaunay and Pierre Reverdy, were included in Goll's surrealist group.

Yvan Goll's earlier Manifesto of Surrealism that you probably never heard of.

Two weeks after Goll, on October 15, Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme was published by Éditions du Sagittaire naming Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard and René Crevel, and others—mostly poets—as members.

By 1929, Breton published his Second manifeste du surréalisme sending letters to surrealists asking them to evaluate their “degree of moral competence” and expelling Robert Desnos, André Masson and others while adding Louis Aragon, René Char, René Crevel, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy and by then, even Tristan Tzara. (A group of “the expelled” founded the magazine “Documents,” edited by Georges Bataille.)

Seligmann (whose mother was related to the Guggenheim family), joined the surrealist group in Paris in November 1934, the year before he married Arlette Paraf, the niece of the art dealer Georges Wildenstein. According to art historian Peter Selz, a friend of Seligmann's and admirer who attended the first American retrospective of Seligmann's work in fifty years at the Weinstein Gallery in 2015, “Jean Arp and Max Ernst were his best men.” The well-connected couple then travelled on a honeymoon trip around the world visiting Japan, Tahiti and New Guinea.

Artists in Exile group photo of Surrealists, New York, 1942. Left to right, first row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann; second row: Max Ernst, Amédée Ozenfant, André Breton, Fernand Léger, Berenice Abbott; third row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian.

In 1937, Seligmann started participating fully in Surrealist activities. He was formally accepted into the Surrealist meetings by Breton, who acquired his work for his personal collection. In 1938 he participated in the renowned Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (January 17 – February 24) at the Galérie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and other important Surrealist shows. In the thirteenth and last issue of the French Surrealist journal Minotaure, in May 1939, Breton, introducing the newest recruits to Surrealism in an article, “The Most Recent Trends in Surrealist Painting,” praised the objects of Seligmann.

Seligmann was moving in the right direction. Had he continued in Breton's good graces indefinitely, one can only imagine where he might have helped steer the Surrealists and/or the culture at large. Celia Rabinovitch has written, “The Mirror of Magic was a wholly original contribution to the fields of comparative mythology and religion. It attempted a global view of magic without western bias, and offered insights from a religio-aesthetic perspective. Seligmann’s The Mirror of Magic prefigured writings by Mircea Eliade, whose Patterns in Comparative Religion was published ten years later, or Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, also published by Pantheon, 1949. These comparative mythologists sought a primal or 'monomyth' behind mythology.” (8)

Meanwhile, Kurt Seligmann had previously commented on the deep Swiss sources of his imagery:

“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, Frobenius, 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.” (9)

Celia Rabinowitz has pointed out he absorbed “elements of the fantastic art and symbolism of earlier Swiss artists such as Füssli and Böcklin.” Martica Sawin, author of Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, pointed out comparison to Seligmann's 16th Century countrymen Urs Graf, and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, whose “Dance of Death” adorns stain glass windows in Berne, Switzerland.

 Kurt Seligmann, Sabbath Phantoms (Mythomania), c. 1945 Oil on canvas 36 3/4 x 51 in 93.3 x 129.5 cm. Weinstein Gallery.

Kurt Seligmann was born the 20th of July 1900 into a turbulent, potent mix of a family furniture business, anti-semitism, Jewish parental expectations, Swiss artists and a lot of that local Basel history reaching back centuries, and not in that order.

In 1917–18 he took private painting lessons with two local artists. Then at the Kunsthalle Basel in November 1918, he saw a show that first introduced him to the avant garde called Das Neue Leben (The New Life) featuring two fellow Swiss artists who would later become his friends, Jean (Hans) Arp and Sophie Taeuber. In addition to the work of the Arps, Francis Picabia and the organizer Basel painter Fritz Baumann (1886–1942), who took his own life at age 56, more than 250 works were presented in the exhibition. The rather loose group exploring a zone between between awakening and melancholy “Das Neue Leben,” also included Alice Bailly and Augusto Giacometti, and made their first public appearance a few days before a general strike, while the Spanish flu was raging everywhere. Their claim that there should be no differences between free and applied art, between high culture and everyday culture, and their campaign for radical innovations in art with manifestos and exhibitions impressed Seligmann.

 Kurt Seligmann, Le Combat (de Tancrède et de Clorinde) (1934). © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In February 1929, he left for Paris where he rented a small room in the Hôtel des Écoles and enrolled in painting classes. His work, Le Combat (de Tancrède et de Clorinde) (1934), completed after Seligmann's arrival, points to the direction he would take, partial to the centuries-old lore and Swiss painters he revered. That was the same year as the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), in which Breton declared that the goals of the surrealists were akin to those of alchemists. The Alsatian artist and sculptor Arp soon introduced him to Surrealist art and became a mentor. Through Arp, he also made the acquaintance of another Surrealist, Max Ernst.

Covers of annual yearbooks for the Abstraction Creation group that Seligmann was part of. Their work was more abstract and geometric, an alternative to representation.

Seligmann’s painting then was organic and anthropomorphic yet sculptural, geometric and formal, employing elegant, flowing imagery, that was also polished and academically sound. He had arrived at a point of almost complete abstraction and yet not quite, reflecting the influence and aesthetics of his countryman Arp and a group he was part of, one of the lesser known “isms” of the early 20th Century: Abstraction-Création, a group Seligmann was also asked to join, prior to his joining the Surrealists. From the years 1932 through '36, you can see below, he appeared in the annual Abstraction-Création yearbook. However, about half way through, in 1934, he also officially joined the Surrealists.

 

Closeups of the covers of annual yearbooks (above) for the Abstraction Creation group showing the names of Seligmann among other participating artists.

In September 1939, he was the first of the European Surrealists to arrive in the US as the Second World War began. Two years of overlap between the Surrealists and the Abstract-Creation group, then three years of only Surrealism in Europe preceded this emigration. Then, remaining a Surrealist, his European friends slowly joined him. Thus, from ’34 to ’43, nine years in all, he was part of the movement after Breton’s Second Manifesto set him on a course towards the supernatural that also unknowingly became a collision course with Breton who booted him out, justifiably or not, in ’43. But first, Seligmann, the second-generation Surrealist and first to move to the USA, subsequently helped his colleagues, including Breton, escape the war-torn European continent.

  Kurt Seligmann, “Microcosmological Chart of Man,” View Magazine, Issue 4.4 (December 1944), pg. 129.

This was all documented in the 1995 book by Martica Sawin, in which Seligmann and his wife played a huge part, as captured in an obit of Sawin at the age of 95 by Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann in June of this year:

“In the 1980s, the distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro (with whom her husband studied at Columbia University) asked her to help Arlette Seligmann, widow of the Swiss Surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann. In the Seligmann barn in Sugar Loaf, New York, she discovered a trove of 'mildewed and mouse-eaten papers,' as she herself described them, which formed the impetus for a book she would write called Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, published by MIT Press in 1997. To this day that book remains the definitive account of how the European Surrealists sought refuge in New York during the years of World War II and, through their sojourn, irrevocably changed the course of American Art, helping to establish it as the preeminent form of visual expression for several subsequent decades. Detailed accounts of interactions between artists like Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, André Masson, (and) André Breton... are ingeniously interwoven into a narrative...,” via the Seligmann trove of memorabila and ephemera, “with Americans like Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock,” (10) who grabbed the baton from the surrealists on behalf of a new generation of artists.

Vitrine of objects and documents from Kurt Seligmann: Beyond The Quotidian, 
Curated by Elliott De Cesare
. October 14th, 2022 through the present at The Kurt Seligmann Center, 25 White Oak Drive. Sugar Loaf, NY. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Indeed, it is a compelling tale whirling around Seligmann and his wife. Sawin said on a 2015 Seligmann panel at Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco that she regreted not dedicating her book to Seligmann. She also described coming across the receipts for Seligmann's instruction of the young Motherwell, also arranged by their mutual friend Meyer Schapiro. Motherwell went on to oversee the publishing of many influential books on the Surrealist era artists including his important The Dada Painters and Poets.

Celia Rabinovitch has summarized the Seligmann's importance in getting artists out of Nazi Germany which was dramatized in a well-done 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic inspired by the story of the International Rescue Committee:

“Seligmann assisted the young American classicist and diplomat, Varian Fry, in the Emergency Rescue Committee of the Red Cross to bring endangered European artists and intellectuals to North America. Between 1940 and 1942, Seligmann maintained contacts between the artists, Fry and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art to release artists from Nazi occupied Europe including Max Ernst, André Masson, André Breton, and Marcel Duchamp. He petitioned Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern in New York, to provide letters and visas to come to the United States for those hidden by Varian Fry near Marseille in the Villa Air Bel. He urged Barr and his wife Marga Scolari Barr, to invite André Breton to lecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Everyone knew that this invitation provided a visitor’s visa, and once in the United States Breton would stay. The range of Seligmann’s work to bring others to safety in World War II remains uncharted, because his archives at Yale are not catalogued.” (11)

Artists in Exile group photo of Surrealists, New York, 1942. Left to right, first row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonora Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann; second row: Max Ernst, Amédée Ozenfant, André Breton, Fernand Léger, Berenice Abbott; third row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian.

I am sure that as Seligmann's papers at Yale are combed through, more information and Seligmann insights will prevail. The work of the The Kurt Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY has been pivotal in slowly bringing Seligmann's narrative to the surface. Contributions by several individuals in the unearthing of Seligmann's story are indispensible. The late theater and Happenings artist Robert Whitman was a huge fan of Seligmann and frequented the Center in Sugar Loaf and created programs there. (12) Jungian artist and furniture maker Dan Mack (13) and others have been instrumental in programming, promoting and  even publishing efforts to get Seligmann materials to a wider audience, including the publication of  an occassional “zine” from the unpublished typescripts of his lectures. Stephen Robeson Miller, another enthusiast from that region, befriended Arlette Seligmann after her husband's death and Miller has created valuable timelines of his activities. (14)

I am particularly fond of this drawing from Seligmann's papers (below). Both in style and content it seems to be decades ahead of its time. In his papers are a number of lectures he prepared for outlined talks at the New School. This diagram accompanies one of them.

Kurt Seligmann. Diagram, circa 1950s.© Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There is much more to Seligmann's story. Briefly, he would remain in the US until his shocking death from an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound that took place on his own idyllic upstate New York farmland on the 2nd morning of 1962, using the same gun that his friend Marcel Duchamp had fired into the foundation of Seligmann’s barn, a performative gesture that graced the cover of the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition catalog.

First Papers of Surrealism catalogue with shots fired by Marcel Duchamp into Seligmann's barn highlighted on the back cover (right).

But in 1938, before all that, Seligmann and his wife Arlene went to Alaska, before their move to the USA. (Alaska was not yet an American state.) “His ethnographic travels allowed him to explore mana, totem, and taboo and led him to describe his experiences in a 1939 article in the surrealist review, Minotaure.” Both Rabinovitch and Subelytė attribute importance to mana within Seligmann's world. By the way, “anthropologists refer to the energy of magic as mana, a transferable power that flows in and through people and things... Mana refers to a supernatural or sacred force that inheres within natural things, and that can be directed or manifested by those able or qualified to use it.”(15)

“There is a movie reel (16) of the Seligmanns' journey to the Northwest Coast of British Columbia, where, as true ethnographers, they immersed themselves in the life of a Tsimshian village, became members of the tribe and even took tribal names to cement their committment. They then acquired a totem pole by the Native American Gyaedem Skanees, now in the collection of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. Seligmann was, in fact, the first of the surrealists to visit British Columbia to explore such indigenous cultures and religions. His fascination with tribal art is captured in the distinctive painting Alaska (1944), in which the totem pole, deprived of its imagery, was abstracted to an almost pure form.
” (17)

 Kurt Seligmann, Alaska, 1944. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rabinovitch explains in The Artist’s Experience: Kurt Seligmann and the Spiritual in Art, “On his ethnographic trip in 1938, Seligmann had arranged for the totem pole for the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, for Claude Lévi-Strauss who worked there as an anthropologist.” She explained that in addition, “Seligmann campaigned for Breton’s American visitor’s visa after the start of the war in 1939.”

Finally, “in the summer of 1941, both Breton and Lévi-Strauss arrived on the boat, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle from Europe to Martinique and then New York. Lévi-Strauss associated with the surrealists in New York and... like Breton, he worked for Voice of America.”

By this time Seligmann had many friends among the Surrealists, Yves Tanguy, Duchamp, Ernst and others in addition to  Levi-Strauss and Breton.

According to Celia Rabinovitch, “André Breton recognized Seligmann as the surrealist authority on magic...immersed in studies of the occult and supernaturalism...in 1943 Seligmann contributed an engraving, 'Magic Circle' as the frontispiece to André Breton’s poem, Pleine Marge published by Nierendorf Gallery in New York. Seligmann’s creative achievements pointed to the embrace of a great intellectual and artistic community, but this was not to be the case.” (18)

According to Meyer Schapiro, what happened next was, “there was a falling out between Seligmann and Breton. Breton was the head of a surrealist circle, which met regularly to have discussions and to listen to talks on subjects selected by Breton. At one meeting he included instructions for the group's next project: to occupy itself with the subject of magic. He wanted them to try and create a new twentieth-century set of Tarot cards, which would symbolize moral states, practical states, social manners, and politics. When Breton was explaining his plan to those who knew nothing about the Tarot, Seligmann, who knew a great deal about magic and later wrote a scholarly book about it, corrected him. For this, Seligmann was ostracized by Breton and forbidden to attend further meetings. I heard this story from Seligmann himself, who was an outspoken man, very serious, but was amused by the situation...” (19) 

And according to Gražina Subelytė, “In his seminal book L’Art magique (1957), tracing magical art through the ages, and seeing it as culminating in Surrealism, Breton never mentioned Seligmann’s name. All these facts are astounding, given the similarities between Breton’s and Seligmann’s thinking on the occult.” (20)

 Kurt Seligmann, Le génie de la conviction, 1943, Mixed media on masonite, 46 x 58 in, 116.8 x 147.3 cm. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

And so, “by the end of 1943, the surrealist activities in New York excluded Seligmann. Weaker colleagues ignored him to avoid Breton’s disapproval, including his former student, Robert Motherwell, according to Schapiro. Seligmann was declared persona non grata.”

“Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy art collector whom Seligmann worked with on the Emergency Rescue Committee... who was a distant cousin, compounded this rejection by pursuing a painting by Max Ernst that the Seligmanns owned. When Arlette and Kurt refused to sell it to her, she threatened to expunge Seligmann’s art from her collection, and in 1946 made good on her word

...”

“These events drove Seligmann’s sense of personal exile, first from his native Switzerland, then from Paris, and now from his surrealist colleagues.” (21)

Later, it was a two hour drive from Sugar Loaf to Litchfield County in western Connecticut where, later, others in Kurt and Arlette's circle would settle: Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage in Woodbury; Andre and Rose Masson in New Preston, Hans and Friedl Richter in Southbury; Arshile and Mougouche Gorky in Sherman; Naum and Miriam Gabo in Middlebury; Alexander and Louisa Calder and David and Susie Hare, both in Roxbury; and the gallerist Julien and Muriel Levy in Bridgewater. They gradually rebuilt relationships.

But Seligmann, about a year before he died, wrote to a friend,  “I have been a fellow-traveller, never subscribing body and soul to the manifestoes, Trotzkyisms, convulsionisms, expulsions, inclusions, reconciliations and all that nonsense ... it’s nice to be in a group”.

But then he added, “It’s fine to be alone and to rely on painting.” (22)

Vitrine of objects and documents from Kurt Seligmann: Beyond The Quotidian, 
Curated by Elliott De Cesare
. October 14th, 2022 through the present at The Kurt Seligmann Center, 25 White Oak Drive. Sugar Loaf, NY. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Between the fragments of The Mirror Of Magic, emerging from the funereal or spectral figures of his paintings, Seligmann returns to the Jewish mysticism from which he was exiled, first by assimilation, then from political necessity during the war, and finally from himself…Seligmann‘s art suggests that he was more steeped in the Kabbalah than he otherwise revealed, perhaps due to his precarious position as an émigré from France and an artist in exile in America.” (23)

While he may have been uncomfortable publically calling attention to his Judaism, he did grow up with it. Rabinowitch has wondered if Seligmann had possibly seen Jewish bodies prepared for burial, reminscent of one of the many periods of his work spotlighting wrapped figures. “In 1918 and 19, drawing draped figures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva co-mingled with draped furniture in his father’s store.” (24)

During the 2015 panel discussion at the Weinstein Gallery, the private art dealer Timothy Baum, an audience member, who was instrumental in arranging the show, addressed Seigmann's eerily shrouded figures: “He wrapped things in cocoons… not competing, just evolving. The funny thing about the cocoon is that I think he periodically entered his own cocoon and then he’d come out at the other end and something new would come out of him. So what’s wonderful about this man... he’s totally timeless. And he’s one of the very few artists that I know of who represents equally the past, his present, and the future. There’s no real dating here... With so many artists they represent a certain period and you think of them always in that period. This guy goes right out to outer space. He goes right back to primeval things. And that’s what makes him so extraordinary.” (25)

Seligmann did veer in and out of timeless approaches to both research and art, always portraying language that evaded expression and figures that were not quite figures. What alchemical formulae was being utilized in his work, using painted marks to convey the ineffable? He circled ideas from many cultures but there are representative insights to be gained by focusing on a few of his comments related to Judaica:

He is quoted in The Mirror of Magic, “In the Book Zohar we read: …There are figures, signs by which we may know the secrets and most profound mysteries… These brilliant characters are the letters with which God has formed heaven and earth.” (26)

Photograph of a “Magic Evening” (“Soirée Seligmann”) in Kurt Seligmann’s New York studio, 1948. Kurt Seligmann and Enrico Donati in a magic circle. Photograph by Bernard Hoffman.

“The Hebrew letters in which the sacred texts are written, are not just signs invented by man for the recording of things, events, and thoughts. Letters and numbers are reservoirs of divine power.” (27)

“To the cabalist, the Word is not with God, but is God.” (28)

“What is the Aleph? The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the breath, an exhalation, the creation of the world, the source of life, embedded in all. As with the Aleph, so with magic…the infinite creative will.” (29)

How do glyphs, alphabets or mysterious figures made of abstract shapes painted on surfaces connect ideas to his inner life and the hopes and dreams of all humans?

In Grazina Subelytė‘s Preface to The Mirror of Magic, she quotes one of his unpublished manuscripts, “It was all-encompassing, far-reaching, and ultimately it represented a metaphor for existence itself,” stating that, to him, magic had “the most profound possible meaning.” (30)

“The fact remains that magic upheld the great civilizations of the ancient world.… a stimulus to (man's) thinking… his capacity to imagine and kept awake his dreams of higher achievement.” (31)

Paraphrasing Freud in her thesis, Subelytė suggests, “Art and aesthetics were the only domains of modern civilisation in which the 'omnipotence of thoughts' had retained some of its potency.” She then quotes Freud from Totem and Taboo, a 1913 book Seligmann had in his library: “We rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the artist to a magician.” (32)

The elegant Seligmann studio as it looks today, fully restored and a place for exhibitions in upstate New York, where the 55-acre farm was doinated to the people of Orange County New York by Seligmann's widow. A portion of 110 prints and 20 paintings by Kurt Seligmann, as well as an archive of the couple’s photographs, letters, and personal effects are housed there. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

She quoted Seligmann's faith in magic as increasing after visiting the tribes of the Pacific Northwest: “During my stay I realized that in these primitive societies magic is almost the exclusive impulse given to creativeness.” (33)

Citing The Golden Bough: a study in magic and religion, Sir James Frazer‘s early 20th Century 12 volume study, which spotlights religion as an intermediate step in the evolutionary process from magic to science, Seligmann embraced notions that, yes, “Magic was a lie,” but believing in its creative impulses, “had beneficial results: social and scientific progress.” (34)

Finally, just as Seligmann may have infused his images with apotropaic properties with the power to prevent evil or bad luck, he also seems to have made peace with the world's negativity, leaving the responsibility not in the world of magic but of people. “Magical operations constituted, a discipline which permitted man to go about life’s daily business to overcome the oppression of hostile reality through… supernatural forces…of course, the magicians power could serve evil purposes, too, for evil was ruled by the same laws as good, and the temptation was ever present to bridal the occult forces with destructive intent. This fact, however, is not inherent in magic alone. In every society leaders may use their influence for various ends.”  (35)

Left: Seligmann painting nature-related canvasses he turned to later in life. Right: Installation view, Kurt Seligmann: Beyond The Quotidian, 
Curated by Elliott De Cesare
, The Kurt Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, NY. © Orange County Citizens Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Seligmann was no stranger to the dark side. He kept a foreboding scrapbook of clippings between World War I and II where he practically predicted the coming calamity in Europe. Then decades later, after a lifetime of painting and teaching, on January 2, 1962, he mysteriously died from an accidental gunshot wound to the head from the same .22 caliber rifle Duchamp had used to shoot bullets into his barn. He was going out to kill squirrels or rodents who had gotten into a birdfeeder on an icy day. He had plans with a neighbor who came by later to give him a lift to a car repair shop. He and his wife, who died in 1992, are buried on a plot on the Sugar Loaf farm where they made their home.

The only comprehensive monograph existing on Seligmann was published in German only. It is Stephan E. Hauser’s study Kurt Seligmann, 1900-1962: Leben und Werk (1997). WM

 Kurt Seligmann, Evocation, 1955, Oil on canvas, 72 x 49 in, 182.9 x 124.5 cm, Weinstein Gallery

Footnotes

(1) For more about the totem pole aquisition see Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1995. p. 26.

(2) Celia Rabinovitch, from a 2014 exhibition at Cornell University, Surrealism and Magic. The guest essay was by Celia Rabinovitch: Surrealism Through the Mirror of Magic https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/surrealismandmagic/essay.html, 2014. Accessed July 26, 2023.

(3) Seligmann, Kurt, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World, Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT, 1948, 2018. From Grazina Subelytė's Preface, pg. ix. She quotes his “On Magic” unpublished typescript, pg 3-4.

(4) Gražina Subelytė's thesis:  Subelyte, Gražina, Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and Occultism. Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2021. pg. 14.

(5) Subelyte, Gražina, “The Alchemy of Painting: Kurt Seligmann” in Surrealism and Magic, Enchanted Modernity, exh. cat., 2022, pg,192. The show was in Venice April 9 to September 26, 2022 and at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam October 22, 2022, to January 29, 2023.

(6) Ibid, pg. 191.

(7) See Brandon, Ruth. Surreal Lives
: The Surrealists 1917-1945, 
Grove Press. An excerpt in the New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brandon-surreal.html, accessed December 28, 2024.

(8) Celia Rabinovitch, from 2014 exhibition at Cornell University, Surrealism and Magic. The guest essay by Celia Rabinovitch: Surrealism Through the Mirror of Magic https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/surrealismandmagic/essay.html, 2014

(9) Héraut, Henri, “Artistes d'aujourd 'hui: Kurt Seligmann, peintre davant-garde,” in Sud, Nr. 126, Marseille, 15 April 1935, p. 28ff.

(10) In Memoriam, Martica Sawin, Francis M. Naumann, Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2024, https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/in-memoriam/Martica-Sawin/

(11) Celia Rabinovitch, The Artist’s Experience: Kurt Seligmann and the Spiritual in Art by Celia Rabinovitch from Kurt Seligmann The Lectures Talk 5: Artist Canvas Reality by Kurt Seligmann, 2016, Kurt Seligmann Center. Pgs. 6-7.

(12) https://visionhudsonvalley.org/seligmann-center/

(13) Two videos featuring Dan Mack are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFvA4QuOA1E&t=4259s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C95X2eV6q6A&t=0s.

(14) Weinstein Gallery Round Table on Kurt Seligmann, May 9, 2015. See https://www.weinstein.com/video/9-kurt-seligmann-roundtable/ and https://vimeo.com/129806878. I am grateful to Stephen Robeson-Miller, Stephan E. Hauser, Rowland Weinstein and Kendy Genovese for their comments.

(15) Celia Rabinovitch, from 2014 exhibition at Cornell University, Surrealism and Magic. The guest essay by Celia Rabinovitch: Surrealism Through the Mirror of Magic https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/surrealismandmagic/essay.html, 2014.

(16) This a review of a show and a catalog in 2015. The exhibition was Kurt Seligmann: First Message from the Spirit World of the Object, San Francisco: Weinstein Gallery, 9 May-22 August 2015 and the catalogue is Kurt Seligmann: First Message from the Spirit World of the Object edited by Melanie Cameron and Kendy Genovese, San Francisco, CA: Weinstein Gallery, 2015, 181 pp., 70 colour and 5l b. & w. It features essays by Meyer Schapiro, Stefan Hauser, Martica Sawin, Stephen Robeson-Miller and Timothy Baum.

(17) Review by Subelyte, Gražina, Art History, Volume 39, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 170–173, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12222 Published: 13 January 2016

(18)  Celia Rabinovitch, The Artist’s Experience: Kurt Seligmann and the Spiritual in Art by Celia Rabinovitch from Kurt Seligmann The Lectures Talk 5: Artist Canvas Reality by Kurt Seligmann, 2016, Kurt Seligmann Center. Pg. 6.

(19) Meyer Shapiro in James Thompson and Susan Raines, A Vermont Visit with Meyer Schapiro, Oxford Art Journal-17: 1 1994 pgs. 5, 6.

(20) In Gražina Subelytė's thesis Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and Occultism, 2021, pgs. 13-14, she cites several events that did not include Seligmann but with footnotes cited two documents in Breton’s archives online that mention Seligmann’s name: Legrand’s preparatory notes for L’Art Magique list mentions Seligmann’s View article on page 14 and a typescript (authored by Legrand, Breton, and José Pierre) listed images for the 1965 edition of L’Art Magique that includes Les Environs du Chateau d’Argol by Seligmann on page 10 . She adds, “for an in-depth discussion of L’Art magique and its importance in understanding surrealist art, see Gavin Parkinson, 'Toward L’Art magique: Surrealism and Magic in the 1950s,' in Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, (her) exh. cat., 2022.”

(21) Celia Rabinovitch, The Artist’s Experience: Kurt Seligmann and the Spiritual in Art by Celia Rabinovitch from Kurt Seligmann The Lectures Talk 5: Artist Canvas Reality by Kurt Seligmann, 2016, Kurt Seligmann Center. Pgs 7-8.

(22) Seligmann, Kurt, Letter to a Murdock Pemberton, December 26, 1960, quoted from Gražina Subelytė's thesis Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and Occultism, 2021)

(23) Celia Rabinovitch, in the introduction to The Mirror of Magic, Pg. vii.

(24) Seligmann, Kurt, The Mirror of Magic, Pg. v

(25) Weinstein Gallery, Seligmann Round Table, (Q and A): https://vimeo.com/129806878, May 9, 2015. Thank you, Mr. Baum, the quiet Seligmann expert.

(26) Seligmann, Kurt, From “Magic of the Arts” View: vol 7:1 Fall 1946, pg 15-17---- Pg. vii.

(27) Seligmann, Kurt, The Mirror of Magic, Pg. 343.

(28) Ibid, Pg. 358

(29) Ibid, Pg. VIII

(30)  The Mirror of Magic, From Grazina Subelytė's Preface, pg. ix. This follows a quote from his “On Magic” unpublished typescript.

(31) Seligmann, Kurt, The Mirror of Magic, pg. 483.

(32) Gražina Subelytė's thesis Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and Occultism, 2021, pg. 83.

(33) The Mirror of Magic, From Grazina Subelytė's Preface, pg. x.  From his unpublished typescript, “The Magical Stimulus,” pg. 2.

(34) Seligmann, Kurt, The Mirror of Magic, page 481.

(35)  Ibid,  page 483.

Kurt Seligmann photograph of the totem pole packed for shipment, 1938. Mail art?