Dance Without the Dancer

They were some of the strangest creatures ever to cavort upon a stage, those ballerinas in George Balanchine's 1946 ballet, The Four Temperaments. Swaddled with shreds of drapery, bodices bandaged with ribbons, they seemed like cats' playthings, a ragpicker's delight, a macabre masquerade of Martians. Only a slippered leg or two revealed that they were real live dancers, panoplied in fantastic dress by Surrealist Kurt Seligmann. But it was natural that Seligmann would design costumes for diversion. His art always cloaked anatomy in fanciful clothes. In costume design or painting, he could easily subtract the dancer from the dance (see opposite page).

In the Fourth Dimension. Swiss by birth, Kurt Seligmann grew up in Basel, studied art in Geneva, and in 1929 joined the Abstraction-Creation group in Paris. There he worked with Jean Arp in surrealist exploration of a limbo of landscape of imaginary objects utterly divorced from reality. Like Arp, he drew "biomorphs," or lifelike forms--egg shapes, darning sticks, blobs crisply drawn over tempera grounds. To shock the stuffy, he dutifully garlanded a guitar with ivy and epaulets, fitted a stool with four female legs clad in silk stockings. But if he seemed to be trying only to be fashionable, he was nonetheless learning to break down the four dimensions of cubism, and to free art from slavish analysis of natural structure. A show of 47 works that opens this week at Manhattan's D'Arcy Galleries shows how distant he got from nature, yet how close he remained.

In 1935, he married Arlette Paraf, a niece of the great art dealer Georges Wildenstein, and no longer had to run with the pack. Just before World War II, Seligmann, a gentle, elegant, bookish man, emigrated to the U.S., where he and his wife lived on a roomy farm near Sugar Loaf, N.Y. He designed ballet costumes and scenery occasionally, painted steadily, and grew increasingly interested in black magic. He acquired a 300-volume library of occult literature. He even wrote an extensive survey of wizardry, Mirror of Magic, and admitted that his paintings were often a reflection of it. "I have interpreted them in my own way," he said, "endowing them with animal and vegetable life, and with that mysterious growth of the mineral world." He wanted to make his own magic.

Flattened Seligmannikins. Even when he masked human anatomy, Seligmann evoked its posture in a love for man's image. As he developed, his Seligmannikins flattened more and more onto the surface of his canvases. Yet they retained the energy of existence, as if held up by ballooning lungs filled with air. Man's presence in the paintings was as ephemeral as life itself. The figures might exhale abruptly, and in a trice all would collapse like empty clothes falling to a closet floor.

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