Kurt Seligmann's Initiation Rites

I've recognized the name Kurt Seligmann (1900–1962) for a few years, but it wasn't until I scanned his 1943 View cover (fourth one down) that the initiation took place.

It seems like the German book Kurt Seligmann, 1900-1962: Leben und Werk is the best catalog of his work. There are also two mind-blowing "cyclonic" images in the 2-vol. Guggenheim monster Two Private Eyes (I always find something new in those books). Most of the images here come from a 1993 catalog.

May 2015 update to this 6-year-old post: Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco is presenting Kurt Seligmann: First Message From the Spirit World of the Object, May 9 to June 13, 2015!

Kurt Seligmann, Game of Chance No.2, 1949

Kurt Seligmann, Acteon, 1944

"In the classical myth Ovid accounts at length in his Metamorphoses, Actaeon is a young prince who, while hunting, accidentally encounters the chaste goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing. Diana punishes Actaeon by turning him into a stag. He is then pursued by his own hounds and is torn to pieces. In Seligmann's interpretation the unfortunate hunter has already grown antlers and is about to be devoured by the animated landscape forms which surround him."

Kurt Seligmann, Carnival, 1950

Kurt Seligmann, Le cocon, 1941

"The novel features of the American landscape, especially in the Far West, fascinated many of the European artists in exile. In the early 1940s Seligmann painted a series of landscapes in which tornado-like or cyclonic shapes dominate the scene."

Kurt Seligmann, Initiation, 1946

"While living in New York, Seligmann assembled a library on magic which eventually comprised several hundred volumes."

Seligmann, in "Eleven Europeans in America" (MoMA Bulletin, 1946):

Though my interest in magic can hardly be brought into immediate relationship with my work as a painter, there is something about magic which fascinates me. It is not in vain that we speak of magical arts. Magic philosophy teaches that the universe is one, that every phenomenon in the world of matter and of ideas obeys the one law which co-ordinates the All. Such doctrine sounds like a program for the painter: is it not his task to shape into a perfect unity within his canvas the variety of depicted forms? The presuppositions of high magic: 'All is contained in All,' and 'All is One' are the basis of my forthcoming book. (Mirror of Magic, 1947; reprinted under various titles, like Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion and The History of Magic)

Kurt Seligmann, La Colonne, 1940

Seligmann, in "Eleven Europeans in America" (MoMA Bulletin, 1946):

The past has given a physiognomy to the European landscape, where civilizations lie buried under every acre. I was soon aware that the American landscape has opposite features. In America nature does not bear man's imprint. You may travel many miles through unsettled land, unchanged by the young civilization. This nature is virginal or indifferent, untouched by the ghosts of past cultures.

For the Europeans this is a novelty and an attraction, which in my case found its expression in a series of geological or 'cyclonic' scenes. I have abandoned this, not because my interest is slackening, but for the prevailing interest of my work, which is man.

Kurt Seligmann, La recontre des elements

"In the early 1940s Seligmann frequently painted on the reverse side of glass, a folk art he learned as a young man in Switzerland. The technique requires that the artist paint in reverse; instead of working from general forms to specific details, the artist begins with foremost elements in an image, filling in the larger shapes behind... To paint a dark background on glass would rob the frontal detail of its translucence. It is believed he occasionally smoked the glass from behind, a process perhaps inspired by the fumage technique which Wolfgang Paalen devised in the late 1930s, to achieve the luminous darkness which permeates these compositions."

Kurt Seligmann, Saraband, 1949

"A sarabande is a slow, stately, court dance of the 17th and 18th centuries... Many of Seligmann's paintings of the 1940s are based on dance forms and indeed, the artist was active in ballet theater. In 1941 he provided costumes for Hanya Holm's balled The Golden Fleece; the complex headgear worn by the dancers is directly related to the forms of his paintings. In 1946 he designed costumes for George Balanchine's ballet The Four Temperaments, based on music by expatriate German composer Paul Hindemith."

Kurt Seligmann, L'abysse, 1940

"One process [Seligmann] utilized to encourage the discovery of new forms was to enlarge photographs of cracked glass, or to project cracked slides on a screen, and then trace the forms on paper, altering them as he drew."