Charles Seliger // by Nicholas Cairns

Charles Seliger (1926-2009) represents an interesting crosscurrent to the general trend lines of what is called the Abstract Expressionist movement. A first generation AbExer, albeit the youngest of the group, Seliger somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls of both the fame and the ridiculous obsession with scale that plagued so many of his contemporaries. Throughout a career that spanned seven decades, he was able to maintain a near monofocus on his interest, which, as he stated very early on, was to ‘apostrophize micro-reality’.

Hidden Skeleton  1945

Creating small paintings that rarely exceeded 30 inches in any dimension, and were often much smaller, Seliger painted an intimate world of kaleidoscopic and biomorphic forms that suggest microcosmic life. In his own words: “My work, even when most abstract, reflects the natural world. Strata of the earth, forms relating to botany and biology and the ocean depths, all figure in the imagery of my work, no matter how abstract. The images are developed with a feeling for the intricacy of the structure of matter. There is a sense of something happening organically among the forms. The images are changing, there is suggestion of movement in the earth, of botanical development, always a sense of growth. A metamorphosis occurs.”

Chrysanthemums  1952

           

In his teens and early 20’s, Seliger developed a close association with two figures who would prove to be instrumental in his maturation as an artist. Seliger first met Jimmy Ernst in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s renowned Art of this Century gallery, where Jimmy was Peggy’s secretary and where Seliger had his first one man show in 1945 at the age of 19. On the first day that they met, Jimmy, after seeing one of Seliger’s paintings, suggested that Charles look at the British publication, London Bulletin, that presented the work of European Surrealist artists like Jimmy’s father, the German painter Max Ernst. The work presented in this magazine, particularly that of Max Ernst, had a profound effect on Seliger and it was through careful study of these Surrealist paintings that Charles began to develop a painting method that used a variety of automatic means to generate a range of unpredictable and non-preconceived naturalistic imagery. It was these processes and the imagery that emerged from them that would serve as the bedrock of his work for the rest of his career.

Luminous Field  1965

It was also during this early period that Seliger encountered Mark Tobey, a Pacific Northwest artist. Tobey, a Bahai, painted on a small scale and with a certain Eastern philosophical or mesmeric/mystical approach that connected to Seliger’s ethos. Tobey had quite an effect on many New York artists of the day, particularly Jackson Pollock, who made a habit of attending all of Tobey’s Willard Gallery shows in NYC, and whose most characteristic work appears, at times, to be simply a scaled up and sped up version of the intricately woven and near-etched paintings of Mark Tobey. But for Seliger, Tobey’s influence was more ingrained. Seliger, through Tobey, must have seen a legitimate alternative to the large scale, often breezy, paintings of the day in NYC, a way of painting that allowed for an attachment to the subject that was intimate and not distant, reflective and meditative, not concept or ‘action’ driven. And the small scale and finely drawn elements in the work of both Seliger and Tobey encourage a certain reflectivity on the part of viewers as well, in effect willing them to stand very close to the work, and to peer into it as one would into a telescope or microscope.

Prophecy 1985

Seliger lived most of his adult life in Mount Vernon, New York, where he maintained a full-time job at Commercial Decal for 5 decades. He painted at night when he returned from his job and, working slowly and steadily, often produced no more than 10 paintings a year. From 1989 to the present, Charles Seliger has been represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on 57^th St. in NYC.

Runic Veil  1989

“'I need not be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it.'  This is a quote from Paul Tillich… It struck me that it is this void I enter when I paint… by making it a part of yourself one can then deal better with the despair. For me the void is the endless changing-changeless world of organic being. Becoming from this void, I try to extract (from my experience during the process of painting) some visual evidence of what I see or feel in the void. No matter how I plan a painting, or try to work the concept out in advance, I fail. Only when I enter the painting as a void where I know nothing but must retrieve from the void evidence of my consciousness – evidence of the struggle of the organism to become, to emerge… only to pass again therein is the never ending cause of despair… but one must carry the void within – and not fear but rather celebrate its beauties, ecstasies and endless complication… beyond our minds. I never seem to know where my paintings come from – or how they come about. One must look into the emptiness and the artist must not come back empty handed." – 1972

Transcendence  1993

Nicholas Cairns is a painter who has exhibited in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Dallas. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, artist Elizabeth Wade. See his work online at www.nicholascairns.com.


All biographical details and quotes are taken from Charles Seliger by Francis O'Connor

           

Francoise Andre

Francoise Andre, 1962

“Andre’s work is full of the sense of what has been lost of certainty and stability in a world full of turmoil.”  (Victoria Donohoe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2003)

“For me, painting is the act of uniting thinking and emotions regarding all that is happening in human evolution, by utilizing the means of all times, and even from more than one civilization.  All this is so terribly enormous, and I am not so amazed anymore to have spent so much time doing it.  I think . . . that man and the earth remain at the core of my research.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)

Jan Cox, 1985, 2.10 x 2.2 m

                                    

When she was just five years old, Francoise Andre announced to her parents, “I want to be a painter.”  As the story goes, the three were standing hand-in-hand in front of Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in the Cathedral of Ghent, Belgium.  The very next day, Andre’s father bought her paints and brushes, and she created her first painting, a tree with a single apple in it.

So began an artistic career that would eventually span almost eight decades and four countries on two continents.  By the end of her life, Andre’s work had appeared in exhibitions in Europe, Canada, and throughout the United States, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle.  Her paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D. C., and the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, among others.

Born in Vendee, France in 1926 to Franco-Belgian parents, Andre was a descendant of famed collector and Hellenist Alphonse Willems, composer Florent Schmitt, French revolutionary Talleyrand, and portraitists from the court of Louis XIV.  When Andre was a teenager in Belgium during the war, she and her family had nothing to eat but beans for a time.  As a result of this deprivation, she developed osteoporosis and dealt with life-long back problems.

She was educated at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Roger Institut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, and studied with Marcel Gromaire at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. 

Landscape, 1988, 24" x 48"

                                          

In 1951, spurred by a chance meeting with Morris Graves at Chartres Cathedral, Andre and her husband, painter Charles Stegeman, left post-war Europe for Canada.  They spent less than a year in the Yukon before moving to Vancouver, where Andre began teaching at the Banff School of Fine Arts, a position she would hold for 19 summers.  Deeply ambivalent about teaching, she later complained to at least one friend about what she saw as a lack of independent drive in her students.  Both she and Stegeman were educated in a time and place when art instructors were hands-off and students were left to motivate themselves and learn largely on their own.  After Banff, she taught very little.  Later, back in Belgium, she took on private students, her only source of income at the time.

In Vancouver, Andre and Stegeman’s personal and artistic relationships with Graves and fellow “mystic painter” Mark Tobey grew. In particular, according to a friend, Andre began using gold leaf in her work at this time, a technique she apparently adopted from Graves. 

Of Andre’s work at the time, Joseph Plaskett wrote, “If we feel an aura in her new work of the mythic, the mystic and the surreal, it came as much from the exoticism from the newly discovered natural world as from influences from Graves and Mark Tobey.  It was born out of a fusion of regional content with Abstract Expressionist manner.  Her contribution was truly personal.  Unlike most of the others, she never abandoned the figure . . . An undercurrent of subdued passion sets her work off from the mandarin refinement of Graves or the virtuosity of Tobey.”

In his article “Art in the Fifties: Design, Leisure, and Painting in the Age of Anxiety,” Scott Watson writes, “Both Stegeman and Andre practiced a kind of surrealism which allies their work to animistic painters.  However, their roots were in European surrealism.  As a result their work often has an intoxicating richness that made it seem overwrought at the time.”

In 1963, the couple moved to Chicago, where Stegeman had received a job with the Art Institute.  In Chicago, both artists showed at the Vincent Price Gallery and counted Irving Petlin, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero as friends.

Six years later, they moved again, this time to Haverford, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where Stegeman became a founding member of the Department of Fine Arts at Haverford College.


Andre remained in Haverford until 1976, when her marriage ended.  After 25 years in the United States, she finally moved back to Europe—to Brussels, although for the rest of her life, she would travel between Brussels and Philadelphia, where she maintained a studio in a 200-year-old stone building in the Manayunk section of the city.

Guardien, 1985 (detail)

“Art never leaves me, even on holiday.  It is a world that is my framework, which is therefore always the real support.  But I don’t “need” to paint.  It is far more than I need, since it is ONESELF.  It is not a part of me, it is me.”  (Francoise Andre, in a 2006 letter to Sophie Orloff, translated from the French)

“Francoise Andre revives a conception of art that has been a long time in eclipse, the ideal of creating a masterpiece . . . The idea of a painting being a controlled projection of all that the artist has mastered, the culmination of a lifetime of learning and experience, has become strange to us, but it is a view that Andre demonstrates, and she has taken risks to do so.  In that sense alone her work is heroic.  It goes against the grain of contemporary mental attitudes.”  (Joseph Plaskett, “Francoise Andre,” 1985)

Portrait of Jack Coleman, 1975, 30" x 40"

                                         

Andre’s preferred subjects were, in her words, “man and the earth”: heads and figures, including many self-portraits, and strange, lonely and mystical landscapes.  Her canvases were often large, and their intense colors—scarlet, turquoise, gold—were frequently juxtaposed with the sensitive and beautiful lines of an artist who could really draw.

Often categorized as surrealist, Andre’s work was informed and inspired by art of the distant past: early Flemish painting, Byzantium, Raphael, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Ingres, and Delacroix.

All this is obvious in the paintings themselves and in her writings about her own work and life.  Through both, she revealed her complex personality, her sharp intellectual focus, and her unwavering commitment to art. 

“The arts escape everything that is tangible and to survive they must have total freedom.  In the meantime, we are floating just above the horizon line and the world tries to find a new direction.  In all this, the quest for an interior space, which is at the heart of what art is about, has disappeared as well, because art is not a mere decoration to a man’s life, but the search for an invisible facet, hidden in all of us, to which we must devote our life.  This is why it’s a “feat” to be conscious of this state as an artist, and to be able to keep on going towards this invisible goal, knowing full well that you are going against the tide—but knowing also that there is no other way to go—we have no choice.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)

Francoise Andre died on December 4^th, 2009, in a nursing home in Paoli, Pennsylvania.  She was 83.

“Facing the world’s true problems, everything is put in perspective.  One must now fight against the inhuman and one of the means, short of physical strength, is to use other faculties.  Painting may appear to be a wretchedly poor force, but it may be one nevertheless.  Not a political force, but a force of communication.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)         

Humain Trop Humain,  1992, 2 x 2.35 m

                                         
See more photos of Andre's work on our Flickr page.                                                                                              

See also:

One Minute with Francoise Andre


More of Andre's paintings, writing, and other material can be found on her friend Frederic Hage's website.

Nauplius, 1993, 1.2 x 1.3 m

                                        

De l'Amour, 1990, 1.2 x 1.5 m

Photo of Francoise is from artistfrancoiseandre.com.

Landscape, 1988, is owned by the Joseph P. Melvin Company in Wayne, PA, and was photographed by Richard Anderson.  Thanks to both and to Christopher Cairns for orchestrating.

All other photos of work are from the 1994 catalogue Francoise Andre. 

Thanks also to Hilarie Johnston for her insights and assistance.

Sources:

Donohoe, Victoria. “Breadth of vision evident in works of Franco-Belgian artist.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 11, 2003.

Exhibition Catalog: Francoise Andre, Brussels: BP Gallery, 1986.

Exhibition Catalog: Francoise Andre, 1994, including “Faces, Landscapes” by Jean-Louis Ferrier, “Ode to a New Humanism” by Sophie Orloff, and “Francoise Andre” by Joseph Plaskett.

“Francoise Andre” (from www.haverford.edu)

Watson, Scott. “Art in the Fifties: Design, Leisure, and Painting in the Age of Anxiety.”  Vancouver Art and Artists: 1931-1983.

www.artistfrancoiseandre.com

Zemens, Joyce.  “Francoise Andre at the Gallery Moos, Toronto.” Canadian Art, #83, January/February 1963.

Tete et Corps, 1990-91, 1.5 x 1.1 m

                                          

Mark Tobey: Excerpts from Two Robert Gardner Films

Filmmaker Robert Gardner made two short films about American painter Mark Tobey, one in 1952, and one in 1973, at the end of the artist's life.  Documentary Educational Resources, from whom both films are available for purchase on DVD, has posted  a short clip of each film online, below.  

This first clip is from 1973's Mark Tobey Abroad, a 28-minute film shot in Basel, Switzerland, where Tobey was living at the time.  Tobey, who was born in 1890, would have been about 83.

About the film, DER's website reads, "With remarkable candor and objectivity, Tobey discusses his work and that of fellow artists, including Picasso.  His keen wit lends humor and bite to his critiques, and his own vitality and spirit make an important statement on his work and on art itself." 

This second clip is from Gardner's 1952 film, Mark Tobey.  Originally titled Mark Tobey: Artist and shot in 16mm, the 19-minute film was shown in festivals in Venice and Edinburgh when it was released.  Tobey, who wrote the music and script, lived in Seattle at the time it was made, and would have been about 62.  

As the DER website explains, the film "tries to show in cinematic language how this man looked at the world;  Tobey himself both performs and is observed.  A unique film in the Gardner oeuvre, the film not only presents an experimental portrait of Tobey, but serves as a window into the American art, avant garde film, and poetic movements of this period."