Background
Michel Seuphor was born on March 10, 1901 in Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium. He was born Fernand Berckelaers and adopted the pseudonym 'Seuphor', an anagram for Orpheus, in 1917.
Michel Seuphor was born on March 10, 1901 in Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium. He was born Fernand Berckelaers and adopted the pseudonym 'Seuphor', an anagram for Orpheus, in 1917.
In addition to his literary oeuvre, Michel built a respectable career as an illustrative artist. He built a bridge between the generations with his multi-faceted activities and strove to keep the original meanings of abstract art alive. Seuphor began as a radical Flemish propagandist in Antwerp, but he quickly turned into an international author. Beginning in 1922, along with Jozef Peeters he led the avant-garde journal Het Overzicht with contributions from the European pioneers of Constructivism.
After a few brief stays in Paris, Seuphor left his hometown definitively in 1925 in order to settle in Paris. The group Cercle et Carré, which he established in 1929 with the painter Joaquín Torres-Garcia, brought artists from various disciplines together in order to protect Abstract Art via a journal, manifestos, and exhibitions. As such, in 1930 Seuphor organized the first exhibition that was exclusively devoted to abstract art. In a short period of time, he built up a very extensive network from the chief players of the avant-garde: from Fernand Léger and Jean (Hans) Arp to Jean Cocteau, Sonia Delaunay, and Piet Mondriaan. With the latter, he was very good friends. He even wrote his first monograph. After WWII, a whole series of exhaustive publications on the history of abstract art followed, which were viewed as reference works in the literature on art. They were translated numerous times, reprinted, and were disseminated over the whole world.
Between 1926 and 1929, Seuphor made a number of geometrical abstract gouaches in the style of Mondrian, though destroyed most of them. Only after the 1930’s Seuphor devoted more time to drawing. During a stay in Switzerland, his first uni-linear drawings appeared. During Seuphor’s reclusive life in the Cévennes of southern France, between 1934 and 1948, his illustrative creativity was on the wane because they were overshadowed by his literary pursuits.
A new impulse arose beginning in 1951 with the so-called ‘dessins à lacunes’ or ‘gap drawings.’ In those pen and ink drawings, horizontal straight lines dominated, which were at varying distances from each other, made with a free hand. Via interruptions in the parallel lines, blank forms appeared that seemed to be released from the background. They were executed in hundreds of variations. Starting in 1953, the first collage drawings appeared and Seuphor began to add colour. He created ever-larger series, followed by assemblages and ultimately applied art, with tapestries and ceramics, illustrating the evolution in which he explored the boundaries of space. Ultimately Seuphor found a synthesis between his literary and illustrative endeavours with his ‘tableaux-poèmes’ that he worked on until the end of his life on February 12, 1999.
Seuphor profiled himself expressively as anti-Fascist and anti-Communist. Later he became involved with the Belgian resistance in France.
Quotations:
"As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions. But I also feel a secret and very strong attraction to ambiguous situations... for example, that hovering moment when it is no longer day and not yet night, the shades of emotion between indifference and friendship... (they) are so fascinating because they are so indefinable. That which is pure transition, is all the more appealing to the mind because of its elusiveness. It is the same in the cases of Mondrian, Kandinsky and the Cubists: abstraction and figuration have a common frontier in their work that is so tenuous that we often do not know which side we are on. It is this ambiguity that imports a rare poetic charm to their paintings. Artists like Klee, Miro, and Dubuffet have also pitched their tents on this borderline and constantly travel from one side to the other."
"To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes."
"For if art, like religion, belongs to no country, it is perhaps itself the only country and the only true religion. Only those hear its call who have that siren’s song within them. The inner riches of the eyes bring out the secret virtues of the work, and little by little they begin to speak... Every artist, every work of every artist, establishes, in his or its own absolutely inaccessible way, this contact of the spirit with the spirit. Provided of course, that the viewer is in 'a state of grace'."
In 1929 he established a group Cercle et Carré.
Seuphor married Suzanne Plasse on April 19, 1934. The young couple bought a run-down house in Anduze in the south of France that they gradually fixed up.