American painter, commercial designer, sculptor and writer born in Switzerland. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva (1920) and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (1927). In 1929, Seligman moved to Paris, where he joined the Surrealists and became a member of the Abstraction-Création group. He was influenced by the work of Arp and Le Corbusier, who drove him to explore biomorphic imagery. Although he did not officially join the Surrealist movement until 1937, Seligman participated in a number of their exhibitions during the 30s. His themes are very suggestive, apparently based on mythology or taken from a purely magical sense of transformation. His interest in religion, in the history of the occult, in ethnology and anthropology were close to the intellectual concerns of Breton and other Surrealists, although the artist was always considered a little on the fringe of the movement. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States and took American citizenship. He met with other exiled European artists, particularly those associated with the Surrealist movement. His work became lighter and more elegant. He designed costumes for ballet and modern dance, showing a rather Surrealist interpretation of the arts and his own sympathy for literature and illustration.
