Kurt Seligmann - Surrealism

Kurt Seligmann (1900–1962) was a Swiss-American Surrealist painter and engraver. 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. "Among those artists of the second generation of Surrealists, Kurt Seligmann has been largely neglected in recent decades by art historians, although he was highly regarded by curators and critics in the 1930s and 40s. This neglect may be explained partially by his eccentric imagery and by his somewhat academic approach, the latter in fact a reflection of his artistic and intellectual independence. He never identified exclusively with any particular ‘ism’, although he found some more plausible than others. What really concerned him was the quest for a synthesis of abstract and figurative modes within the scope of pictorial concerns."(tephan E. Hauser, author of Kurt Seligmann )