2285-d, experts emphasized that the real legalization of gambling in Ukraine is impossible without fulfilling two fundamental conditions: 1. To step inside a concrete or metaphorical circle where special rules apply.Īt the stage of discussion of the draft law No. He died in 1962 in a freak gun accident (he was attempting to shoot rats attacking his bird feeder and slipped on the ice), and when Arlette passed away in 1992, she left his estate to the Orange County Citizens Foundation. It now runs the Seligmann Center in his memory at his farm, and through it his legacy of esoteric knowledge and fantastical art continues. In Language of the Birds, his spirit is temporarily resurrected in New York City, like a phantom conjured through a magic circle.As we discussed in a previous article, the concept of a Magic Circle in play is Seligmann and his wife, Arlette, later moved upstate to a farm in the hamlet of Sugarloaf in Orange County, New York. Yet he remains obscure, possibly due to his occult associations, as well as his falling out in 1943 with Surrealist founder André Breton some say it was due to a public disagreement over tarot cards. ![]() With their tornadic, abstract figures - influenced in part by carnivals remembered from his childhood - and dreamlike Surrealist imagery, Seligmann’s paintings remain powerful and strange, although not well known. Weinstein Gallery, which is loaning the works on view in Language of the Birds, hosted a retrospective of his work last summer, and in 2014 he was a focus of the Surrealism and Magic exhibition at Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art. Such doctrine sounds like a program for the painter: is it not his task to shape into a perfect unity within his canvas the variety of depicted forms? Magic philosophy teaches that the universe is one, that every phenomenon in the world of matter and of ideas obeys the one law which co-ordinates the All. He saw magic as connected to his art - not a deliberate part of each work, but rather a way of centralizing knowledge of the universe. As he wrote in 1946: He helped many other artists travel over the Atlantic, including some in the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)exhibition of 1937, and encouraged the Surrealist movement to flourish in a new American home. Seligmann was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1900, and arrived in New York in 1940 as one of the first Surrealists to flee the Nazis for the United States. That said, it felt important to have a room in the show which felt like one grand magical working, so that’s how the ‘Altar’ evolved.” “We have several works in the show that are not only about magic, but which purport to be spells themselves. “The primary thesis statement, so-to-speak, of Language of the Birds is that art is a form of magic making,” Grossman explained. Kurt Seligmann, “Sabbath Phantoms (Mythomania)” (1945), oil on canvas, 51 x 36 3/4 inches (courtesy Weinstein Gallery) (click to enlarge) ![]() The show is an impressive assembly of some of the most influential artists to interpret the occult, such as Aleister Crowley with his trance portraiture and Paul Laffoley with his painted guides to metaphysics, as well as artists less often associated with magic, like Kiki Smith and Francesco Clemente. There is so much going on in it, and in many ways, it is a big energy axis around which the entire Language of the Birds exhibition rotates.” It is a circle of balance and sacred alignment. It is an offering of thanks by Bransford, Salmon, and myself to those occult artists who came before us. “The whole ‘Altar’ room feels like a spirit chamber, and I find it a very moving place to be,” curator Pam Grossman, who’s also the creator of the blog Phantasmaphile, told Hyperallergic. John Dee and Edward Kelly depicted in a magic circle, “invoking the spirit of a deceased person.” A version of the illustration was included in Kurt Seligmann’s ‘The Mirror of Magic.’ (1806) (via Wikimedia)
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