About the artist:

Kurt Leopold Seligmann was a Swiss-American Surrealist painter, engraver, and occultist. He was known for his fantastic imagery of medieval troubadors and knights in macabre rituals and inspired by the carnival held annually in his native Basel, Switzerland. He was extremely influential within the Surrealist movement in Paris and particularly in the United States.

Born in Basel, Switzerland in 1900, the Swiss-American Surrealist Kurt Seligmann’s life and work consisted of a fine balance: a gracious respect for his ancestry, past artists, his experiences as a youth, and his studies of magic and ethnographic arts, combined with a pursuit of progression, both in the avant-garde movements and the tumultuous political times within which he lived. His work stands as an amalgamation of an artist keenly aware of and active within his surrounding realities, and on a quest to create a language of characters and imagery to express his intuitions and imaginations.

Seligmann was the first member of the Paris-based Surrealists to relocate to New York in the first months of World War II and was instrumental in helping to rescue many of his fellow artists and intellectuals from Occupied France. From his friendship with Jean Arp and involvement with the Abstraction-Création group, to his induction as a member of the Surrealist circle, to his exile in America and his influence on many of the up-and-coming New York School artists, Seligmann’s rich oeuvre demonstrates the importance of the man and his art in the canon of art history.