Kurt Seligmann and the Poets

I. Kurt Seligmann and Wallace Stevens

     Wallace Stevens’ business career may obscure his lifelong association with avant-garde artistic groupings. Associated before WWI with the New York Arensburg circle that received Picabia and developed into an American Dada formation, he studied Picasso and Matisse tirelessly and was significantly influenced by Cubism and Surrealism. [1]
     Seligmann’s drawings for Wallace Stevens’ “A Primitive like an Orb” represent a thematic concern of great moment to both painter and poet. At the same time as Seligmann was conducting far-reaching studies in occultism and the kabbalah and pursuing the potential of art to fulfil the historic role of magic and indeed of religion, Stevens was developing his idea of art as religious practice and god as a “supreme fiction” with the potential to replace revealed religion which had, he thought, become untenable for moderns.
     For Seligmann only religious language is adequate to the higher aspirations of art. He refers, for instance, to artistic creation not as mere imitation but rather as a “mysterious transubstantiation.” [2] Seligmann speaks of the word (or cosmic laughter, or, one might add, the image) that “was the motor to creation.” The work of art seeks thus to render visible the “intercourse between the limited and the limitless.” In this way “boundless time and the time of human history reflect one another.” [3] Art is to him “impregnated with magic” specifically because it leads to the “world order to which everything the big and the small, the distant and the close submits.” For him the “fundamental theory of all superior magic” is that “all is contained in all.” [4] The “Cabalah” resembles art in that it points toward unity in variety, linking the particular and the universal. [5]
     These ideas are wholly consistent with Stevens’ claim in “A Primitive like an Orb” that, through the process of “apperception” the poet can fix “the essential poem at the centre of things” and render this vision of Ultimate Reality more accessible to human consciousness. Stevens’ attitude toward the “supreme fiction” -- “it Is and is not and, therefore, is” -- mirrors Seligmann’s willful sympathy with magic. To Stevens the “central poem,” what becomes the giant of the cosmos, is revealed by “sharp informations,” which presumably may be couched in words or in images.
     Seligmann produced images for Stevens’ poems by a process similar to that by which he made a mythological series following his work on costumes for Menotti’s ballet The Unicorn,The Gorgon, and The Manticore about which he said “Independent of my costume project – yet stimulated by it, I painted and drew these canvases, my own mythology.” [6]
     The first illustration is clearly situated in imagination, neither realistic nor abstract. The figure represents a take on reality, a recorded state of consciousness, a poem or painting. It is immediately recognizable as Seligmann’s, strutting with assurance and posing even as decomposition seems have to have set in long ago. The gaiety of the carnivalesque ribands is balanced by the frightening ax, shield, and scaly armor. As a take on reality the image can serve for any work of art, asserting itself in the desolate landscape of human powerlessness. Its three legs may seem a secure support but also suggest an uncertain trajectory just as the dynamic points and lines about the head imply attention in every direction as well as confusion.
     One might imagine the second illustration to be Stevens’ giant and an observer though they are clothed in the same graceful forms reminiscent of cut paper. Again, the figures are phantom-like, only their drapery is drawn. The larger figure is posed as though showing itself off, its surfaces ornamented with sketchy patterns suggesting elaborate decoration on a grand gown topped by an imposing hat though remnants of the armor are visible implying the figure’s androgynous universality. Meanwhile the smaller figure, far simpler in pattern and modest in attitude watches, its moon-like crescent-shaped head directed toward the other. The landscape has vanished. One sees nothing but observer and observed.
     While either the drawings might stand alone as the poem certainly may, they also enhance and reinforce each other with a rich suggestivity born of their creators’ similar spiritual quests in these belated modern times. Both found religious revelation and authority had become irrelevant yet neither therefore abandoned searching for enlightenment.
     Stevens says in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that he conceives “the thinker of the first idea” and witnesses “apotheosis.” Though “Phoebus is dead,” in fact “Phoebus was a name for what never could be named” and “the poet is always in the sun.” Seligmann depicts in graphic form the lineaments of Reality similarly convinced that truth is accessible only through the senses and the mind and that art can “corporealize a world system,” [7] and renew spirituality in whatever we might call the era that succeeds the age of anxiety.


1. Though his admiration was qualified. “The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.” Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose (Library of America, NYC, 1997), p. 919.

2. Page 21 (Seligmann’s typescript page 5), Artist Canvas Reality, a lecture of Kurt Seligmann (Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, 2016).

3. Page 4, talk 11 on the topic of Space, a lecture of Kurt Seligmann, forthcoming from the Seligmann Center for the Arts.

4. Page 19 (Seligmann’s typescript page 4), Cave of Montesinos, a lecture of Kurt Seligmann on Magic, Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, 2017).

5. Page 21 (Seligmann’s typescript page 5), Cave of Montesinos, a lecture of Kurt Seligmann on Magic, Seligmann Center, Sugar Loaf, 2017).

6. From Kurt Seligmann, “My Mythology,” in the Weinstein Gallery catalogue, Kurt Seligmann: First Message from the Spirit World of the Object, Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, 2015) p.128.

7. Page 4, talk 11 on the topic of Space, a lecture of Kurt Seligmann, forthcoming from the Seligmann Center for the Arts.





II. Seligmann’s Illustrations of Poetry

     Apart from his paintings and graphic work, Kurt Seligmann produced as well costumes, set designs, and prints for poetry books. In this last category, he illustrated writers regarded as ancestors of Surrealism (Lautréamont and Mallarmé), those active in Surrealist circles (Courthion, Collet, Breton, Hugnet, Goll, Calas, Roditi), including two whose association with Surrealism was not more tangential (Herz and Stevens), and he influenced as well, though they never collaborated on a publication, the American Surrealist Philip Lamantia.
     A chronological list of Seligmann’s illustrations for poetry follows. I would, of course, welcome additions or corrections. My sources are primarily Stephen E. Hauser’s Kurt Seligmann 1900-1962 and the Weinstein Gallery publication Kurt Seligmann: First Message from the Spirit World of the Object. My few comments on these works are unconnected, though I believe that Seligmann thought all the writers shared his vision at least in part. The thematic and stylistic relations I have traced in “Kurt Seligmann and Wallace Stevens” are potentially present for each of the others.


1. Seligmann’s collection of fifteen etchings Les Vagabondages Heraldiques (Editions des Chroniques du Jour, Paris, 1934) is introduced by prose poetry by art historian Pierre Courthion.

2. Breton invited Seligmann to join eleven other Surrealist artists in illustrating a new edition of Comte de Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror (G.L.M., Paris, 1938). Among the other artists who contributed to this volume were Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. Assigned the first song, Seligmann produced a fierce and skeletal figure reflecting the influence of his Renaissance fellow-countryman Urs Graf.

3. Three rather abstract etchings (one with aquatint) of curving organic and drapery forms by Seligmann were included in an edition of Jean-Paul Collet’s 1935 publication of love poems Flaques (Les écrivains réunis series, Paris, 1935). In Hauser’s opinion (119-120) these “solipsistic” images, some suggesting “mating behavior” have little to do with the poetic text, but do form a coherent transition in the development of Seligmann’s prints.

4. Pierre Courthion’s prose poems are accompanied by Kurt Seligmann’s engravings in Métiers des Hommes (Editions Guy Levis Mano, Paris, 1936).

5. Seligmann engraved a frontispiece for André Breton’s Dreams according to the Weinstein catalogue. This is apparently identical with Trajectoire du rêve (or Trajectory of Dream, Editions Guy Levis Mano, Paris 1938).

6. Seligmann contributed a set of ink drawings for Une Écriture lisible (A Readable Writing) by Georges Hugnet, the graphic artist and poet (Editions des Chroniques du Jour, Paris, 1938). Hauser considers this to be a harmonious collaboration (140)and mentions that Seligmann had composed a message to Breton criticizing him for ousting Hugnet from Surrealism, but never sent it. (177)

7. Ivan Goll’s Jean sans terre (Tandem & Nierendorf, NYC, 1940) contained an etched plate by Kurt Seligmann. The French-German author had associated with the original Zurich Dadaists and later, as an exile in New York edited Hémispheres, a journal that published Césaire and Breton as well as young Americans. The poem had been released four years earlier as La chanson de Jean sans terre with pictures by Chagall. Seligmann depicts a striding figure with hair and drapes in the air, pierced and impaled, fleshless, with vertebrae and ribs visible, apparently an image of John Lackland, whose wandering is another version of the type of the Wandering Jew on which Goll had been writing for years.

8. Seligmann made a frontispiece for an edition of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade (The Press of James A. Decker, Prairie City IL, 1940). One may assume this to be Seligmann’s homage to the Symbolists as an influence. His image is appropriately hermetic and underdetermined: wheels revolve through space while water spumes from a fountain to a kind of side sky-roof while only the void occupies the center.

9. Seligmann’s frontispiece appears in Edouard Roditi’s Prison Within Prison: Three Elegies on Hebrew Themes (The Press of James A. Decker Prairie City IL, 1941). Roditi had abandoned Classics studies at Oxford to become a Surrealist, and this association as well as his themes of exile from a Jewish perspective doubtless appealed to Seligmann.

10. William Carlos Williams’ translation of Nicolas Calas’ Wrested from Mirrors included an etching by Seligmann in a limited edition folio published by the Nierendorf Gallery in NYC in 1941.

11. Seligmann produced a series of eleven drawings for his friend Nat Herz’s book Impossible Landscapes. Herz’s work was heavily influenced by Surrealism thought he also practiced photojournalism and become well-known for pictures of progressive social movements. (1944 but it did not appear until 1999 when Herz’s widow Barbara Singer published it). The entire volume is viewable at http://www.barbarasinger.com/rp_ks_1.html#2.

12. Seligmann contributed an engraving in a soft rococo style reminiscent of 17th century title pages, overflowing with portentous images (a snake with the crescent moon in its mouth, a sickle striking a cross, an open heart at the base, prominently featuring the name Lucifer) as frontispiece for Bréton’s Pleine Marge (Nierendorf Gallery, NYC, 1943). The poem had been originally published with other illustrations in 1940.

13. Wallace Stevens “A Primitive like an Orb” was published as a separate volume (Banyan Press: A Prospero Pamphlet, NYC, 1948) with two drawings by Seligmann. The series was edited by John Bernard Myers and associated with View magazine. The New York Times notice did not mention the artist. See my “Kurt Seligmann and Wallace Stevens.”

At the age of fifteen in 1943 American poet Philip Lamantia wrote Breton declaring his allegiance to Surrealism and Marxism. He was immediately accepted by Breton and his poems were published that year in View and in 1944 in VVV. He discovered common interests with Seligmann in alchemy and the occult, and the elder artist influenced his poetry.