About
Kurt Leopold 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.
Born in Basel, Switzerland in 1900, Kurt Seligmann's first employment as a teenager was in a local printer's shop and involved learning to apply color to pictures on glass projected for educational use, a skill he would later employ in his own reverse glass paintings. He took lessons from the traditionalist Ernst Buchner and the modernist Eugene Rudolf Ammann, setting a pattern of concurrent and seemingly opposite influences that would continue in his own work throughout his life. In 1918 he started to regularly participate in exhibitions at the Basel Kunsthalle, and in 1919 he began studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he met Alberto Giacometti. A portrait that he painted of the sculptor at that time now hangs in the Kunstmuseum, Bern.
Kurt's father, Gustav Seligmann, established a successful furniture business in Switzerland, and his mother, Helene Guggenheim, was a member of one of the oldest families in Lengnau; the art collector Peggy Guggenheim was related to the family as well. Kurt's time at the Beaux-Arts abruptly ended when his father became ill and he returned home to assume the responsibilities of running the family business, a role which lasted for eight years. An exhibition at the Kuntsmuseum Basel of the 16th century artist/mercenary Urs Graf was the impetus for him to revisit his artistic pursuits, and in 1926, he resigned from the business. Though it had prospered under his son's management and he had been initially reluctant to have Kurt attend art school, Gustav supported him in the pursuit of his passion and happiness, whatever form that was to take.