Charles Seliger, Abstract Expressionist, Dies at 83
Charles Seliger, whose small-scale, jewel-like paintings of imaginary natural forms made him the most idiosyncratic of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, died in Manhattan on Oct. 1. He was 83 and lived in Westchester County, N.Y.
The cause was a stroke, said his son Robert.
While fellow artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning created high drama with drips and bravura brushwork on billboard-size canvases, Mr. Seliger conjured up his own private worlds on canvases, and later Masonite boards, that rarely exceeded the dimensions of a cafeteria tray.
Strongly influenced by the Surrealists and the idea of automatism — the belief that the artist’s undirected hand could reach deep into the unconscious — he layered skeins of fine, interlaced lines and overlapping luminous forms that suggested microscopic views of human tissue or plant specimens, land masses seen from an airplane or undiscovered worlds exploding into being.
These poetic explorations, increasingly complex and refined, carried him through a career that lasted more than 60 years.
“He was the last link to the Abstract Expressionist movement,” said the art historian Francis V. O’Connor, the author of “Charles Seliger: Redefining Abstract Expressionism” (2003). “He was the last artist fully committed to the methodology of Surrealism and psychic automatism, which he developed in a carefully thought-out way.”
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The cause was a stroke, said his son Robert.
While fellow artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning created high drama with drips and bravura brushwork on billboard-size canvases, Mr. Seliger conjured up his own private worlds on canvases, and later Masonite boards, that rarely exceeded the dimensions of a cafeteria tray.
Strongly influenced by the Surrealists and the idea of automatism — the belief that the artist’s undirected hand could reach deep into the unconscious — he layered skeins of fine, interlaced lines and overlapping luminous forms that suggested microscopic views of human tissue or plant specimens, land masses seen from an airplane or undiscovered worlds exploding into being.
These poetic explorations, increasingly complex and refined, carried him through a career that lasted more than 60 years.
“He was the last link to the Abstract Expressionist movement,” said the art historian Francis V. O’Connor, the author of “Charles Seliger: Redefining Abstract Expressionism” (2003). “He was the last artist fully committed to the methodology of Surrealism and psychic automatism, which he developed in a carefully thought-out way.”