Untitled (Surrealist Landscape), plate 19 from Album de 23 Gravures

Kurt Seligmann

Swiss-born Kurt Seligmann moved to Paris in 1929 where he spent a few months at the school of André Lhote and also worked from models at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. While in Paris, he reconnected with friends from Geneva, sculptor Alberto Giacometti and art critic Pierre Couthion. Through Giacometti, Seligmann met Hans Arp and Jean Hélion who admired his biomorphic paintings and invited him to join their group, Abstraction-Création Art Non-Figuratif. The founders of the movement included Jean Arp, Theo van Doesburg, Albert Gleizes, Jean Hélion, Augusta Herbin, Frantisek Kupka, Georges Vantongerloo and Georges Valmier.

Seligmann created his first surrealist work in etching in 1930. In 1933, Chroniques du Jour in Paris published a portfolio of fifteen of his etchings to accompany Protubérances cardiaques by Anatole Jakovsky and the following year published a second portfolio of fifteen etchings, Vagabondages héraldiques with an essay by Pierre Courthion. In 1934, Seligmann was accepted as a formal member of the Surrealist group which included Jacques Hérold, Óscar Dominguez, Richard Oelze and Hans Bellmer

In 1937, four years after doing this image, Seligmann was formally recognized by the Surrealist group co-founder André Breton as being the surrealist authority on magic. Seligmann, like many artist during the depression era, had immersed himself in Spiritualism especially the supernatural and occult. Breton expelled him from the movement in 1943 over the meaning of a Tarot card.

Album de 23 Gravures included work by Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Erni, Justino Fernández, Alberto Giocometti, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Julio González, Jean Hélion, Vasily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Alberto Magnelli, Joan Miró, Ben Nicholson, Amédée Ozenfant, Pablo Picasso, Kurt Seligmann, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Joaquín Torres-García, Gérard Vuilliamy, and Ossip Zadkine. Album de 23 Gravures was published between cardboard, covered with black waxed paper glued to a frame evoking a crocodile skin. L'édition de luxe included prints by these artists as well as an additional print by Marcel Duchamp.