UNPUBLISHED DRAWINGS FOR THE PORTFOLIO KURT SELIGMANN Impossible Landscapes<>.
Suite of 11 pen and India ink drawings, 1944. The Sea Horse Sleeps, He is War<>. Titled in ink, lower center * Poem for a Golden Eagle<>. Titled in ink, lower right * Was It His Blood that Filled the Shadows? (Suicide Is Not Enough)<>. Titled in ink, lower center * Suicide Is Not Enough<>. Titled in ink, lower right * Untitled (Suicide Is Not Enough)<> * The White Horse Mourns<>. Titled in ink, lower right * Untitled (The White Horse Mourns)<> * They are Calm and Terrible (I Walked to the Tower Slowly)<>. Titled in ink, lower right * Untitled<> * They Walk in Dripping Gardens (The Wire Men Move Softly)<> * Cover/End<>. Each approximately 508x407 mm; 20 1/2x16 inches. Ex-collection Nat Herz, New York and Barbara Singer, New York. With letters of authenticity from Dr. Stephen E. Hauser, Basel, Switzerland; to be included in the English edition of the catalogue raisonné by Dr. Hauser.
Four of the drawings exhibited in "Kurt Seligmann, Ein Retrospective", Kunsthau Zug, Zug, Switzerland, March 1-May 3, 1998. Exhibited in "Impossible Landscapes of the Mind" at Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York, September 13-October 16, 1999.
With--KURT SELIGMANN and NAT HERZ. Impossible Landscapes (originaly titled Janus)<>, the hand-bound book maquette with one tipped-in etching frontispiece, from The Myth of Oedipus<>, title page, index, colophon, 1 tipped-in typed poem, and 5 pen and ink sketches, 1944. 331x265 mm; 13x10 3/8 inches. * Original paper wrapper and string * KURT SELIGMANN and NAT HERZ. Impossible Landscapes<>, modern press facsimile. Edition of 100. Published by Stinehour Press, New York.
In 1944, Nat Herz, a young American photographer and poet, asked Kurt Seligmann to illustrate a group of his poems. Seligmann had already collaborated with other writers including the art critic Meyer Shapiro on the The Myth of Oedipus<>; from which the print that serves as the frontispiece was taken. This project was never realized, never published and was forgotten. The only record of its existence was in one surviving letter from Seligmann to his collector Earle Ludgin of Chicago in March of 1944.
The drawings had been kept in a roll by Nat Herz, and his widow, Barbara Singer, undisturbed since the 1950s. As a whole, the group gives us a unique view of the creative processes of the artist in the collaboration--his choices and intentions. Of the group of 11 drawings, it is clear that one was intended as a cover design, 7 as illustrations--with 3 possible variants of "Suicide is not enough".
According to Hauser, the theme of "Suicide is not enough relates to the Surrealist inquiry which was first published in 1925 in issue 2 of "La Revolution Surréaliste": 'Il semble qu'on se tue comme on rêve. Le suicide est-il une solutuion?'". Both Herz and Seligmann explored this very existential question, which Albert Camus made famous, in their own Surrealist language. Upon their discovery in 1997, Dr. Hauser wrote "not only do the drawings stand for themselves in aesthetic terms, they also happen to form a missing link within my concept of the morphology of Seligmann's graphic development." Both Seligmann's themes of cyclonic landscapes from 1940-41 and a figurative Surrealist character are explored. Indeed, the drawings were exhibited next to Seligmann's important painting Borealis Efflorescence<>, 1941, reproduced on the cover of the catalogue, at the retrospective exhibit in Zug, Switzerland.
