1934 – 1939

Anduze and the rise of Nazism

The Seuphors first settled for a few months in a little house near Nîmes, lent to them by Léon Marsal, a friend and furniture dealer. The announcement of a forthcoming birth led them to look for a house. They finally found it in Anduze, a Cevennes village that was then half empty. It was rather a ruin that they bought for the modest sum of 1500 francs and that they restored little by little.

In December 1934, Seuphor created a new magazine: La Nouvelle Campagne. Suzanne typed the 45 copies to which their friends subscribed. They published 30 issues from December 1934 to July 1939. Despite living far from Paris, the Seuphors maintained links and a regular correspondence with the artists and writers that Michel had met in Paris, in particular with the Arps, the Delaunays, Mondrian etc. Seuphor also collaborated regularly with local newspapers, as well as with the weekly magazine Sept published by the Dominican Fathers of Juvisy. The sale of his articles and subscriptions to La Nouvelle Campagne were the main source of income for the household until 1937.

Seuphor published there his reflections on social issues, his poems, as well as political articles in which he denounced, among others, Hitler and Mussolini, communism and fascism. One of his articles, entitled Force Mauvaise in reaction to the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini, appeared in Sept. 20, 1935. It is a fictitious dialogue between Hitler (alias Force Mauvaise /Evil force) and Mussolini (alias Orgueil / Pride) – at the time they had not yet met – in which he makes them discuss the fate of Europe. Seuphor chose to illustrate his article with a photomontage, executed by Fritz Glarner, his photographer friend, juxtaposing their respective photos.

1939 – 1948

the Maison Claire and the occupation

In June 1939, the Seuphors moved to escape the noise caused by the radio that a neighbor was listening to very loudly. They moved in with an old peasant woman, Mrs. Berthézène, who lived in an isolated farmhouse in the plain 2 km from Anduze, which Seuphor nicknamed « la maison claire ».

Seuphor tried to enlist as a volunteer in the French army, which refused him – he did not yet have the French nationality – and then in the Belgian army, which seemed to be recruiting in Montpellier, but in vain. In reality, the officers had already given up and the people he met seemed to aspire only to the tranquility promised by Pétain. Seuphor was disillusioned: “I was alone in the world to be at war with Hitler,” he wrote in Le jeu de je.

He continued to publish political articles, such as ‘La guerre prudente’ in L’Aube and ‘Le sens de cette guerre: guérir l’Europe’, and ‘Remarques sur la censure’, in response to the ban on the publication of this articles in La Vie Intellectuelle.

In May 1940, seven hundred young Belgian refugees arrived in Anduze. Some of them were housed in the former house of the Seuphor family, who had been appointed to play the role of interpreter and mediator between the Flemish and the Walloons. The Seuphors also welcomed friends, strangers, and resistance fighters at the Maison Claire, notably André Wedren, a Dutch resistance fighter. Finally, he found a way to join the Belgian Resistance in France (Résibel France group), whose center was in Grenoble. He visited the prisons of Nîmes, Montpellier and Bézier to support and transmit messages to the prisoners. He also miraculously escaped the Gestapo twice: the first time when he visited his Swiss friend and resistance fighter, the Pastor Meyer, in Lyon, who was arrested and deported just after his departure. And a second time, when he went to Nîmes on the orders of the Belgian Consul to register for the Obligatory Labor Service. In Le jeu de je, he recalls how, moved by an instinct that he could not explain, he got out of the registration line where he had been put and left without being asked. He would probably never have returned alive. In 1945, the Belgian government proposed to offer him a medal for his contributions to the resistance, but he refused it.

Despite good sales in Switzerland and in Free France, the publisher opposed a reprint and the following novel, La maison claire, which Seuphor wrote in 1941, was published by Stanislas Fumet in 1943, in Lyon, at the Editions du Livre Français, which he had just created. In addition to these books, Seuphor published numerous articles, poems, and translations of poems by Goethe, Hölderlin and Gezelle in several magazines such as La vie spirituelle, Le mot d’ordre, Positions, etc.

In the south, Seuphor bought a lot of books at very low prices, and built up a library of twelve thousand volumes, which he sold on his return to Paris several years later. He continued his study of literature, philosophy, and languages, English in particular. Guy de la Mothe, who had published the small collection Petits vers vifs in 1937, published, at Carnets de l’Oiseau-Mouche, a booklet entitled Michel Seuphor – Simple esquisse suivie d’extraits de son œuvre poétique. It is the first work on Seuphor’s work.

During the summer of 1942, Seuphor made an  encounter that marked the rest of his years in Anduz, that of the young Pierre-André Benoit (PAB), a small landowner from Alès. Almost a year later, on April 9, 1943, PAB visited the Seuphors in Anduze and they formed a friendship coupled with a collaboration. This friendship-collaboration led to the publication of 45 small books by Michel Seuphor, published from 1944 to 1952 by the publishing house that PAB founded under the name Les Bibliophiles Alésiens. In November 1943, PAB also organized the first literary exhibition of Seuphor’s work at the Fléchier school in Alès.

Around the same time, the Seuphors struck up a singular but important friendship with Francis Bernard, a winegrower from Tornac with a love of culture and spirituality, who visited them regularly and became an unconditional admirer of Seuphor.

“In addition to food, he brought us sympathy and admiration for my writing. In our solitude in Anduze – we had been there for eleven years – we had never met anyone like him. It was very important. It was even very important.” (Un siècle de liberté, p 238).

Francis Bernard produced an important monograph entitled Itinéraire spirituel de Michel Seuphor (Spiritual itinerary of Michel Seuphor) dealing mainly with his literary works from the period 1932-1945, and published it in 1947, at his own expense, with S.P.L.E. in Paris. A year later, he also published Michel Seuphor, au carrefour des idées (Michel Seuphor, at the crossroad of ideas), in which he analyzed all the novels and some of the poems that Michel Seuphor had written and published between 1937 and 1945. He later visited the Seuphors in Paris twice, promised to write the sequel to his book, but died of a heart attack shortly after.

In December 1942, Seuphor began writing the aphorisms that he would publish in 1944 in a collection entitled Tout dire. Then, from January to March 1943, he wrote Le visage de Senlis, a new ‘romans à clef’ where fiction is more prominent than in Les évasions d’Olivier Trickmansholm. At the same time, Didier Editions in Paris published Informations in 1944, a collection of fifty texts of thoughts and spirituality written in Théoule-sur-Mer in 1934 and selected by Jacques Maritain. Seuphor continued to publish extensively in various literary magazines such as Positions and Résurrection. Among them, let us mention the issue of Résurrection devoted to the Flemish poet Guido Gezelle, which includes an introduction followed by 22 poems chosen and translated by Seuphor.

While the German army occupied the south of France and troops of the Afrika Corps were stationed in Anduze, Seuphor also wrote a long essay ‘Penser c’est être libre’, which was not published until forty years later, by Hippocampe, in 1984.

1948 – 1953

Paris – New York and abstract art

In June 1948, after selling their furniture and library, the Seuphors left the Cévennes to settle permanently in Paris.

« Our departure from the South was definitive. My desire was to never return. I had as much need to find the sidewalks of Paris, as I had had, fourteen years before, to leave them ». (Une vie à angle droit, p 83)

They lived at first, during one year, at Suzanne’s parents, 2 rue des Beaux-Arts. However, the literary world did not welcome Seuphor as he had hoped. He had returned to Paris with the manuscripts of the collection of aphorisms, Le contradicteur, and the novel Le monde est plein d’oiseaux, but he found a closed door at all the publishers he had expected. He published a few more works with PAB in 1948, including a collection of 12 lithographs of unilinear drawings, Dessins Visagés et Nus dit. He introduced PAB to the literary milieu of the capital, and then, their collaboration was interrupted until 1981.

However, at the same time, Seuphor was very quickly solicited by galleries and art publishers. During the ten years that followed, he would devote considerable energy to writing books and initiating exhibitions that have proven fundamental to establishing knowledge about modern art, particularly geometric abstract art and constructivism.

The day of his return to Paris, Seuphor was warmly welcomed at the opening of the 2nd Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. There, he met the artist Camille Bryen, who introduced him to the Galerie Les deux îles. Very quickly, the owner, Mrs. Bank, asked him to organize exhibitions, which he did for two years with a great freedom of initiative. He was responsible for exhibitions of works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova (Souvenir des temps héroïques), Francis Picabia (Peinture fraîche et Point), Leopold Survage (Grandeur de la petitesse), Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber, Sonia Delaunay and Magnelli (in A Quartet), of Soulage and Fleischmann (in Eloquence of the line), of Hans Richter, Huelsenbeck, Bott, Anthoons, etc

Exhibitions organized by Seuphor at the gallery Les deux îles from 1948 to 1950:

• Peinture fraîche (Expo. Picabia); 1948
• Souvenirs des temps héroïques (Expo. Le Rayonnisme), 1948
• A Quartet (S. Delaunay, S. Taeuber, A. Magnelli, J. Arp), 1948
• Grandeur of Smallness (Expo. Survage), 1949
• Henri Davring, 1949
• Eloquence of the line (Severini, Picabia, S. Tauber, Hartung, Soulages…), 1949
• The end of all (Expo. Point, Picabia), 1949
• Francis Bott, 1949
• Willy Anthoons, 1950
• Henri Davring (Davringhausen), 1950
• Hans Richter, 1950
• Leo Maillet, 1950
• Charles-Richard, Beate and Tom Hulbeck (Hülsenbeck), 1950

In 1949, at the request of Aimé Maeght, the director of the important gallery of the same name, with whom he had begun to collaborate from Aubagnac, Seuphor wrote L’art abstrait, ses origines, ses premiers maîtres. (Abstract art, its origins, its first masters). As the Seuphors were still living with Suzanne’s parents and their belongings were in storage, he had to write from memory, helped by Mikael Larionov and Nina Kandinsky as well as numerous artists and friends who sent him documents and photos. He first assembled the layout on the bed in their tiny room, then worked for weeks on printing the book at the Union printing house (which worked for the Maeght Gallery), with such assiduity that the foreman took him for an employee. The book was published in May 1949, with a cover by Jean Arp, at the same time as the exhibition Les premiers maîtres de l’art abstrait (The first masters of abstract art) opened at Maeght’s, in partnership with the museum of Grenoble. Seuphor also helped to organize it by soliciting the many abstract artists he knew to lend works.

This exhibition and the book that served as its catalog had a considerable impact in France and abroad. Despite its 300 pages, the first edition of 1,000 copies was immediately sold out and a second edition of 4,000 copies was launched. Orders poured in from Stockholm, Rome, and New York. This book marks Seuphor’s entry (against his deepest aspiration) into the field of art criticism. Shortly after, Seuphor became a permanent contributor to the magazine Art d’Aujourd’hui.

In spite of these successes, the material life of the Seuphors remained very precarious. The money from the sale of the furniture and the library in Anduze was dwindling. However, in order to preserve his freedom, Seuphor refused Aimé Maeght’s proposal to become director of his foundation, even though this would have assured him greater financial stability. Providentially, around that time he received a proposal from the United States to write the first monograph on Piet Mondrian. The sponsor was the young collector John Senior Junior, who surrounded himself with a committee of experts (Guitou Knoop, Louis Carré, Lee Hault, Sidney Janis, and Alfred Barr). This monograph was to be published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, directed at the time by Alfred Barr. The invitation came with an advance of $2,500, a fortune for Seuphor who plunged enthusiastically into the project. He began to gather documents, made a first visit to Holland and visited Arp in Switzerland. His work was only interrupted by a phlebitis that immobilized him in November at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for three weeks. During this forced stay, he drawing incessantly, and began to develop his plastic research on the line.

After his recovery, he went to New York in December 1950 to meet Mondrian’s sole heir, Harry Holtzman, and to see the works that he had inherited. During his three months stay, he was the guest, first of Fritz Glarner (his photographer friend) and then, more briefly, of Huelsenbeck. He attended many receptions and exhibition openings, and met the main avant-garde artists, including Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Stamos, Diller, Xceron, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Stuart Davis, Richter, Gallatin, Marcel Duchamp, Miss Dreier, Hans Hofmann, Charmion von Wiegand, Kiesler, Morgan Russell, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newmann. He organized a Jean Arp-Sophie Taeuber exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, which followed a first collaboration for a Picabia exhibition, “Wet Paint”, which had taken place in February 1950. At the same time, he obtained all the documentation he wanted to collect on Mondrian, notably from Harry Holtzman, who, after several weeks, finally came to him and invited him to the warehouse where he kept what was left of Mondrian’s belongings and paintings and gave him Mondrian’s watch.

« Everything in New York […] was unexpected and beneficial to me. I left prodigiously richer, freer, and lighter. I knew that there was another continent that would soon be as good as ours, a continent that would never leave us, that would come closer and closer to us, as if the ocean did not exist. And, in fact, this ocean has disappeared. » (Le jeu de je)

Still following in Mondrian’s footsteps, Seuphor then went to London, and then again to Holland. These trips allowed him to gather an exceptional documentation. In June 1951, back in Paris, he published a special issue on La peinture aux Etats-Unis (Painting in the United-States), which was very well received. It was one of the first times that American modern art was presented to Europeans.

In September 1951, he wrote the manuscript of the monograph on Mondrian, which he sent a month later to Alfred Barr. But it was not until the spring of 1952 that he finally received a reply from Barr, who complimented him on his work but considered it too metaphysical. Later, Seuphor learned that the American publication had turned into a three-volume project, including his own manuscript, another by James Johnson Sweeney (former director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who had known Mondrian in his New York years and was planning to write a book about him since his death), and a third containing his documentation, but with commentaries by Alfred Barr. Seuphor felt humiliated, took back his manuscript and refused to continue the collaboration, even when Alfred Barr finally agreed to publish his book as it was.

Two decisive, albeit difficult years for Seuphor’s artistic development followed. While he could not find a publisher for his Mondrian, he collaborated with several newspapers and prepared several exhibition catalogs, albeit without succeeding in earning a living. The only meager and stable income of the household came from his contract as a Parisian correspondent for the American art magazine Art Digest. He lived with Suzanne and Régis in two small rooms at 5 rue de la Condamine near the Place de Clichy. In spite of the seven floors without elevator that had to be climbed to reach them, “the whole world came” (Une vie à angle droit, p 89).

During this period, Seuphor drew abundantly, often as “a remedy to avoid panic” (the title of one of his drawings of the time), exploring the line drawn in Chinese ink with a pen that his son used at school and ‘Jesus’ paper, of excellent quality, offered by Jean Arp’s niece. Little by little, the discipline imposed itself on him and became creative. Thus began the production, uninterrupted until his death, of what he would call the les dessins à lacunes à traits horizontaux.

« I had started a series of drawings in 1949-50 that I wanted to develop at all costs. Especially since at that time I was following in the footsteps of Mondrian’s late life. I was in close contact with what I had received from him, with the philosophy of the horizontal and the vertical. That was what I was thinking about in 1951. I wanted to apply in myself the essence of what I had received. And through my vision, it had to be the cheap way. The cheaper the means, the richer were the results that could be drawn from it. With pen in hand, this reflection led me to develop drawings in large format. What I called lacuna drawings. » (Une vie à angle droit, p 106)

Seuphor also tells how, having learned that he was drawing, the collectors Burton and Emily Trémaine climbed the seven floors to his apartment and purchased two large drawings for 15,000 francs, an unexpected and very salutary financial contribution in this period of dearth (Une vie à angle droit, p 110).

Seuphor also continued his reflections on abstract art and gave a first important conference in 1953 in Liège on la Mission spirituelle de l’art, à propos de l’œuvre de d’Arp et de Sophie Taeuber. (the spiritual Mission of the art). At the same time, his lacuna drawings  began to be enriched with collages and some evolved into series.

In June 1953, on the initiative of Jean Arp and his future second wife, Marguerite Hagenbach, who lent them the money, the Seuphors signed the purchase of the apartment they would live in for the rest of their lives, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, at 83 avenue Emile Zola.

1954 – 1971

artistic blossoming

In January 1954, Jean Arp engaged the Berggruen Gallery in Paris to hold an exhibition of Seuphor’s lacuna drawings. Arp wrote the preface to the exhibition, which was very well received.

« Michel Seuphor has been drawing for a long, long time. He draws by day, by night, in all seasons. He draws on envelopes, on pieces of paper, on tablecloths, on walls. He drew as a child, as a young man, as an adult, as an old man, and then he started again from the beginning and drew once more as a child, as a young man, until, in the second cycle, he realized, as an adult, that he was drawing well…” (Arp, preface to the catalog Seuphor, dessins à lacunes, Berggruen Gallery, 1954) » (Arp, préface au catalogue « Seuphor, dessins à lacunes », Galerie Berggruen, 1954)

That year, Seuphor met the director of the Hypérion publishing house, who agreed to publish the Mondrian monograph, but wanted him to produce a dictionary of abstract art first. Seuphor worked for several months on this commission, always in very precarious conditions. Unfortunately, a few months later, the editor suddenly died and the double project fell through. But luckily, Seuphor was asked to contribute to a Dictionary of Modern Painting being prepared by Hazan. The collaboration began, and the publication of the Dictionnaire de la peinture moderne in 1954, with a chapter by Seuphor on abstract painting, paved the way for the publication of the Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite, (Dictionary of Abstract Painting), this time written entirely by Seuphor, by the same publisher in 1957.

In 1955, Seuphor gave a new lecture entitled Humanisme de Mondrian at the Mondriaan exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. At the same time, Seuphor’s painter and friend Willi Baumeister put him in touch with the publisher Gutbrot, who was preparing to join the large German publishing house DuMont-Schauberg based in Cologne, and who could publish the Mondrian. monograph. A meeting was arranged in Paris and they agreed to publish the book “for fun”. The German edition came out in the summer of 1956, and the English translation was published by Abrams in New York for Christmas. The long-awaited Sunday Times review appeared in early January 1957 and was extremely positive. The book immediately became an indispensable reference. The original French version was published by Flammarion in the summer of 1957, and an Italian version was published by Montadori in Milan the following year. In 1957, Seuphor gave a new lecture entitled Mondrian Inactuel at the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (which he repeated in Milan and Copenhagen in 1959).

The Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite (Hazan) was published in 1957 on the occasion of a major exhibition entitled 50 ans de peinture abstraite (50 Years of Abstract Painting) held at the Galerie Creuze in Paris. With a few exceptions, all the artists listed in the Dictionary of Abstract Painting were exhibited there. This book was published simultaneously in translations in London, Munich and Buenos Aires and became a reference book.

In 1958, the Mondrian monograph was reprinted for the a.b.c. paperback collection by Hazan, and a Dutch paperback edition, Mondriaan, composities was also published by Boucher in The Hague. Besides, Seuphor also wrote many prefaces to exhibition catalogs and numerous articles on abstract art and its artists, notably in Art d’Aujourd’hui and Art Digest.

The 1950s also saw new developments for Seuphor as an artist. In 1954, the Professor Hammacher, director of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Holland, offered Seuphor the opportunity to have tapestries made from his lacuna drawings. Shortly thereafter, he arranged for the commission of two pieces, Feu (Fire) and Devenir (Becoming), for the new house of the province of Gelderland in Arnhem, Holland. They were made by two Dutch weavers who worked on them for almost four years. The director general of arts and letters of Belgium at the time, Emile Langui, noticed this project and put Seuphor in contact with the weaver Elisabeth de Saedeleer to realize a series of wall tapestries for the Belgian government. Twenty-five tapestries were made there from Seuphor’s drawings between 1959 and 1963.

In 1957, Michel Seuphor’s lacuna drawings were exhibited with works by Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber in Vienna and Cologne.

« It was no small joy for me to see, on all the walls of Vienna, the yellow and white poster with the three names. Is there any more innocent pleasure than to see friendship running down the street and competing on city walls with less pure advertisements? » (Le jeu de je, 1976)

The friendship that Seuphor shared with Jean Arp took a central stage in the post-war period. Seuphor published extensively on his art, including a major exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1954, followed by an article in Art Digest, and a first monograph published in 1957, on the occasion of the exhibition 50 Years of Abstract Painting. Similarly, Arp supported the promotion of Seuphor’s drawings, and he also influenced his art. This is expressed, for example, in the creation of lacuna drawings with collages from torn drawings. This idea was born out of a gesture by Arp, who one day collected pieces of Seuphor’s torn lacuna drawing from the basket in his studio and, in a playful way, proposed a composition from which Seuphor made a new work.

Seuphor celebrated the deep artistic friendship he shared with Arp and Mondrian in his drawings, especially with the two remarkable six-part sets entitled Prajna paramita aux donateurs. (Prajna paramita to the donors).

In 1959, Seuphor’s lacuna drawings were exhibited for the first time at the Denise René Gallery with the two large large wall tapestries Feu and Devenir. A second exhibition was held at the Il Grattacielo Gallery in Milan. During this period, Seuphor also began to compose large assemblages.

In 1958, Seuphor wrote La Sculpture de ce siècle, (The Sculpture of this Century), which was published in 1959 by the Editions du Griffon in Neuchâtel and was a great success. The German translation was published by DuMont Schauberg and the American translation by Braziller in New York. A little later, Seuphor undertook a lecture tour entitled La notion d’architecture dans la peinture contemporaine. (The notion of architecture in contemporary painting ) (Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Zagreb).

During this period, he also actively participated in the organization of the exhibition Construction and Geometry in Painting, which took place in 1959 at the Chalette Gallery in New York and toured the United States in 1960. He produced an important preface entitled The idea of Construction for the catalog of this exhibition, and edited The Spiritual Mission of Art in a bilingual French-English version.

His artistic reputation extended to the United States where he exhibited for the first time, in 1961, at the Esther Robles Gallery in Los Angeles. He also organized an Arp-Mondrian exhibition at the Sydney Janis Gallery.

In 1962, he exhibited at the Lorenzelli Gallery in Bergamo.

In 1961 and 1962, he wrote two new and important works of art history. The first, La Peinture abstraite, sa genèse, son expansion received considerable international attention and was published in French by Flammarion and almost simultaneously in German under the title Abstrakte Malerei: Von Kandinsky bis z. Gegenwart, in an American version under the title Abstract Painting fifty years of accomplishment from Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock; and in a Spanish version under the title Pintura Abstracta and in an Italian version under the title Pittori Astrati.

The second, La peinture abstraite en Flandre (Abstract Painting in Flanders) was commissioned by Maurits Naessens, director of the Bank of Paribas in Brussels, who was introduced to Seuphor in 1960 by his friend the painter Luc Peire.

Rather reluctant at first, Seuphor finally accepted after having obtained the assistance of three collaborators: Maurits Bilcke, Léon-Louis Sosset and Jan Wallravens. For two years, he made numerous trips to Flanders where he visited all the artists’ studios. Maurits Naessens and his collaborators also insisted that his own works be included in this book. In 1963, the book was published in four languages: French for the original edition, English, Dutch and German. Seuphor presented the work at an official celebration at the Royal Opera House in Antwerp, during which he gave a speech in these four languages.

In 1963, he also published a monograph on his friend, the Israeli painter Marcel Janco. In Paris that same year, Michel Seuphor was made a knight of Arts and Letters, while the Denise René gallery published the album Intimes étendues with serigraphs of his drawings and collages, as a premise for a second major exhibition of lacuna drawings. During the latter, a record entitled Quand la mesure est pleine, cantate à 3 voix was released, which was produced by the Centre national d’art français in 1971, based on a poem by Seuphor recited to a very contemporary musical composition by the Franco-Hungarian pianist Paul Arma, itself inspired by an exhibition of Seuphor’s tableau-poèmes (drawing-poems).

In 1963 and 1964, Seuphor went to Greece, especially to Athens (the second time with Suzanne). These trips back to his philosophical and literary sources were very inspiring for the artist, as evidenced by several of his major works, including the poem Prayer on the Acropolis, and many lacuna drawings with Greek inscriptions.

In February 1964, Serge Gauthier, director of the Manufacture Nationale de Porcelaines de Sèvres, contacted Seuphor to offer to transcribe his drawings onto ceramics. For nearly a month, Seuphor worked with the Manufacture’s master craftsman André Plantard to decorate several vases, including two large vases by Maurice Gensoli known as “two meters high,” which he named, in Greek, Ορφεύς (Orpheus) and σωφροσύνη (wisdom, moderation) from lacuna drawings on the Orphic theme. The two vases were acquired, through a commission from Iran, for the imperial court in Tehran. A new, slightly retouched version of the two vases was produced and acquired by the Belgian Ministry of PTT in 1972.

In 1964, the editions Le Seuil published Le style et le cri, quatorze essais sur l’art de ce siècle, (The style and the cry, fourteen essays on the art of this century), in which Seuphor returned on the experience of Cercle et Carré, and which also contains a re-edition of The spiritual Mission of  art as well as an essay entitled Thirty one reflections on a theme, the cry and the style, which he had previously sketched in an article of the same title published ten years earlier, in 1955, in the review Aujourd’hui (however, this book has no direct link with the text Le style et le cri that Seuphor had written in 1932).

In 1965, Seuphor obtained French nationality.

Seuphor also obtained a card formalizing his status as an art critic, in the wake of which he wrote another important essay, Le commerce de l’art. (Art Trade). This clear and insightful work, which sheds light on the motivations of the various protagonists of the art world, was published by Desclée-De-Brouwer in 1966 and, as expected, was shunned by the critics.

On the artistic level, in the 1960s, Seuphor also returned to his poetic production. During his exhibition at Denise Renée’s in 1959, he met the poet and director of the magazine Cinquième Saison Henri Chopin, introduced by Edmond Humeau. Following this first encounter, in 1960-62, Seuphor collaborated with Chopin and the composer and radio producer Maguy Lovano in the promotion and historicization of the experimental poetry of the twenties, of which the journal Cinquième Saison was the showcase. Seuphor published several of his poems in the journal (Nuit sans retouche and Solaire in the number 11, Berceuse and Fugue in the number 12, both of 1961). In addition, his play L’éphémère est éternel (The Ephemeral is Eternal) was reproduced in the number 18, published in 1963. Henri Chopin’s wife, Jean Ratcliffe, of Scottish origin, produced an English translation of the play with the aim of having it performed by students at the Bath Academy in England, but this project did not come to fruition.

In 1964, Seuphor recorded seven poems from 1927 to 1963 in Hommage à Cercle et Carré at the Hug House in Zurich and published them with Six bevelings by Gottfried Honegger at the Adölf Hürlimann publishing house.

In 1966, a major development occurred, when students of the Swiss sculptor Hansjörg Gisiger, a friend of Seuphor’s who had read them some of his -at the time still unpublished- poems, became enthusiastic about Seuphor’s poetry and decided to set up a publishing house under the name of Hanc to publish the collection La Vocation des Mots. Seuphor has stressed the symbolic importance of this publication.

« This book has meant a lot in my existence, because it is a sum which contains examples of all my experiences with poetry » (Une vie à angle droit, p 117)

Two years later, in 1968, the Hanc also published Le Monde est plein d’oiseaux, the novel that Seuphor had brought back to Paris from the south in 1948, and Paraboliques, a collection of which some texts had been first published by the Lorezzeli gallery in Bergamo. The Hanc also organized an exhibition of Seuphor’s work at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel County, accompanied by a creation by the composer Francis Miroglio, illustrating the six-part drawing Concerto. Soon after, however, the group disbanded, and the publishing house disappeared.

In 1966, a more important exhibition was organized at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. This was the first retrospective devoted to Seuphor, where the large ensembles were also exhibited for the first time. On this occasion, the museum acquired the seven-part drawing Abîmes en abîmes.

In the same year, Seuphor gave a lecture in Zurich on Les sources littéraires chez Arp et Mondrian (The literary sources of Arp and Mondrian), and two lectures in Besançon on La fonction sociale de l’artiste (The social function of the artist) and on La tendance à la répétition des signes géométriques simples dans l’art contemporain ( The tendency to repeat simple geometric signs in contemporary art), thanks to his friendship with the professors of the Besançon School of Fine Arts, and in particular the painter Jean Ricardon.

In 1967, Seuphor was invited to exhibit his lacuna drawings at the Sztuki Museum in Lódz, in communist Poland. In the early 1930s, he had contributed to the creation, in this museum, of the very first rooms dedicated to abstract art in Europe. He had donated works from his personal collection (by Vordemberge-Gildewart, Werkman, Huzar, Paul Joostens and Charchoune). He went to the opening and gave a lecture in Lódz and Warsaw on La tendance à la répétition des signes géométriques simples dans l’art contemporain. The catalog, Poezja plastyka, reproduces 8 works by Seuphor and texts in French and Polish by Ryszard Stanisławski and Jan Brzekowski.

Seuphor’s fame grew in Paris. He began work on his first large-scale tapestry at the Gobelins factory, based on a 12-part assemblage entitled Polymnie, a black-and-white work measuring 266 cm high and 614 cm long.

The following year, in 1968, another tapestry Quel destin ? Quel ruissellement d’Etoiles ? Quel spectacle ? of three meters by five was made in the workshops of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, in Paris, for the new Faculty of Law at the University of Bordeaux. In October 1968, Seuphor explained the translation of the dessins à lacunes into tapestries and ceramics in an article published in the journal Leonardo.

The Musée National d’Art Moderne de la ville Paris bought the eight-part assemblage with collages entitled La Mort d’Orphée.

Always responsive to major social events, Seuphor poetically asserted himself as a man of peace and connection. Thus, if he sympathized with the movement of May 68, which took place under his windows, he was soon shocked by the violence of the demonstrations.

“The events of May 1968 did not arouse my enthusiasm. I despise violence, trumpeters, strong words filled with emptiness. I do not believe that the French Revolution was made by the head-choppers, nor by the demolishers of the Bastille, but by the careful drafters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and by the great thinkers of the century that preceded the storm.” (Le jeu de je, 1976)

He recorded his reactions to these events in poetic and ironic form in a small collection, Brefs, which he sent to his friend Paolo Fanci in Milan and which the latter published with Scheiwiller in 1969. It was also in Milan that The Ephemeral is Eternal was staged for the first time in 1968, in Italian, by the experimental group Il Parametro, with three sets created after Mondrian’s 1926 models. Because of the general strike, Seuphor was unable attend the rehearsals, but he did attend the ninth and final performance. During his stay in Milan, he gave another lecture on the Social Function of the Artist.

The Italian collaborations multiplied. In 1969, the Italian art galleries Martano, in Turin, and Lorenzelli, in Bergamo, republished in facsimile the three issues of the magazine Cercle et Carré (1930). These two galleries also published, in 1970, Le chantier, a burlesque poem illustrated with six original woodcuts. At the end of 1969, an exhibition was organized at the Rizzoli Gallery in Rome on the theme ‘the system and the Rule’. Finally, large mosaics were made from Seuphor’s drawings for the Museum of Modern Art of the Fondazione Pagani in Legnano.

Back in France, from January 18 to March 31 1969 Seuphor initiated and organized, with André Berne Joffroy and the technical services of the Louvre Museum, the first major French Mondrian exhibition at the Orangerie Museum, for which he lent works and prefaced the catalog.

In 1970, his monograph on Mondrian was republished in French and a fourth reprint appeared in English. That same year, Seuphor wrote L’archet, a kind of poetic and provocative recital that Maguy Lovano staged in the Parc de Vincennes for the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. He also traveled extensively and returned to New York with Suzanne.

In March and July 1970, Seuphor wrote successively Le don de la parole (The gift of words), a reflection on language, and Les dimensions de la liberté (The dimensions of fliberty), two works of philosophical reflections, which were published in 1970 and 1973 by Mallier.

In 1971, a new meeting with Aimé Maeght led to the re-publication of Abstract Art, its origins, its first masters, and the commissioning of three additional volumes to provide a first overview of abstract art in the world. Seuphor composed entirely the second volume.  He shared the realization of the number 3 with Michel Ragon, which continued for the volume 4. The four volumes came out under the title L’Art Abstrait (Abstract Art) between 1971 and 1974.

In 1971, Seuphor reedited the texts of Cercle et Carré with Belfond and wrote a long preface, in which he gave a detailed account of the history and importance of this movement in the history of abstract art. He also gave a series of four lectures at the Sorbonne between 1971 and 1972: Les sources littéraires chez Arp et Mondrian ; La tendance à la répétition des signes géométriques simples dans l’art contemporain ; Valeur de la figuration et de la non-figuration et La fonction sociale de l’artiste.

1971 – 1981

the decade of consecration

From 1970 onward, Seuphor reached a notoriety that allowed him, at last, to live from the sale of his paintings and even to publish his writings with the publishers and the printers of his choice. He considerably reduced his activities related to the promotion of art: he gave himself entirely to his creation and « lived only for writing and drawing » (Une vie à angle droit, p 89, 151)

In March 1971, a new retrospective of Seuphor’s work was organized at the Museum of Art and Industry of Saint Etienne. Seuphor donated a collage from 1970 entitled Le poète roi to the museum on this occasion.

Several bibliophile albums were produced: In 1971, La Tortue in Paris published Soleil, a poem illustrated with five original etchings by the author. The White Gallery in Lausanne published an album of five serigraphs and the Museum of Modern Art in Ghent an album of serigraphs entitled Portfolio. In 1972, The Sic editions in Paris published Journal intime, a poem decorated with color etchings, on a layout by Anna Staritzky.

During these years, Seuphor wrote many poems, some of which were collected under the title Gosps et Cosnops and published in the magazine Création in 1972. That year, the Martano Gallery in Turin reissued, in French, Italian and English, L’éphémère est éternel, abundantly illustrated with documents of the time.

Seuphor collaborated again with Maguy Lovano to stage, set to music and publish three of his prose poems with the Baconnier publishing house in Paris.

Michel and Suzanne spend three weeks with their son, who worked as a topographical surveyor for a Belgian logging company in N’Vouka in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire during this period). However, even there, Seuphor remained “on his island” of poetic creation and reflections on the themes he loved.

“From the second day, the surprise passed, I found myself on my island with all the usual accessories of my person. I wrote an article of memories for the XXth century magazine and an essay on the game. I filled a whole notebook with little drawings, none of which recall the place where I was. And I even got bored. All this in less than three weeks.” (Le jeu de je, 1976)

He also wrote an important essay, Le jeu, la règle (The game, the rule), with no apparent link to his environment (he reworked it and published it a few years later, in 1975).

Back in Paris, he wrote a preface, entitled The Scepter, for the catalog of the important exhibition Konstruktivismus organized by the Gmurzynska Gallery in Cologne in the fall of 1972.

At the same time, the Mercatorfonds art editions (Belgium) published a first monograph on Seuphor, which includes reproductions of the prefaces written for his first exhibitions of unilinear and lacuna drawings by Sartoris and Arp. At the same time, the Marcel Peeters Center in Antwerp devoted a new retrospective to his work.

In 1973, the Mallier publishing house, which had published Le don de la parole, published a new essay by Seuphor, Les dimensions de la liberté.

Seuphor continued to develop his technique of the lacuna drawings, devoting himself more particularly to large-scale collages with horizontal lines so close together that they give the impression of a black background.

That same year 1973, a new tapestry entitled Comme une musique was created (commissioned by the French state thanks to the 1% cultural contribution for the new faculty of pharmacology in Châtenay-Malabry near Paris).

In 1974, l’éphémère est éternel was reassembled and performed in Macerata (Italy) as part of its theater festival. Seuphor went there several times to attend the rehearsals.

In Nantes, the Convergence gallery, directed by Jean Branchet, devoted an exhibition to Seuphor while in Belgium, Christian Bussy made a 35-minute film for television, Michel Seuphor entre les lignes. In the Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller Museum acquired Les dieux, an assemblage in 16 parts. That same year, 1974, a retrospective of Seuphor’s works was also organized at the Palais de l’Athénée in Geneva. He went there and gave a lecture on Les sources littéraires chez Arp et Mondrian, (The literary sources of Arp and Mondrian), which was published on this occasion by the Classe des Beaux-Arts.

At the same time, Seuphor prepared the exhibition De Stijl; Cercle et Carré which took place at the Gmurzynska Gallery in Cologne. The gallery also published, with his assistance, serigraphs inspired by four of his neoplastic gouaches made in 1929.

Also in 1974, the Hans Bolliger and Adolf Hürlimann publishing house in Zurich published the collection of poems Le jardin privé du géomètre, illustrated by his friend Gottfried Honegger. Scheiwiller in Milan published Trois morales; and the drawing-triptych Célébration du Cercle was published in the form of serigraphs by the Nouvelles Images (NI) gallery in The Hague, with a text by Jean Arp.

In 1975, the Beniamino Gallery in San Remo published, in Italian, on the occasion of an exhibition of Seuphor’s drawings, his essay Le jeu et la règle, (The game and the Rule), as well as the text of his conference La fonction sociale de l’artiste, which Seuphor also gave on this occasion. The French text Le jeu et la règle was later published in the album Mythologies Imaginaires published by Michèle Broutta in Paris.

Seuphor was drawing a lot and became particularly interested in the themes of the great oriental wisdoms, as well as those of Greek and Roman antiquities. He studied Sanskrit, Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters, in order to enter into an artistic dialogue with the great philosophers and ancient poets. He integrated their writings into his drawings.

In February 1975, he gave a conference on Valeur de la figuration et de la non-figuration (The value of figuration and non-figuration ) at the Maison de la Culture de Reims on the occasion of the exhibition 60 years of Abstract art, for which he also participated in the catalog with a text entitled L’art Libre est la conscience du temps. This text was then published by the editions of the house of the Culture of Reims. Seuphor exhibited and gave this lecture the same year at the Attali Gallery in Paris, which published a beautiful album entitled Œuvres de 1974. The Jean Audouin editions published a bibliophile album of his text L’autre côté des choses with 18 illustrations of the author.

Although he devoted much less time to it, Seuphor continued to promote abstract artists throughout the 1970s. Thus, he participated, with Michel Pamart, in the making of a film devoted to Piet Mondrian, which was broadcast by French television on April 13, 1975. He also published monographs on Thépot (Prisme, 1972) and Fleishmann (Hatje 1976), as well as articles on Fritz Glarner, Josef Albers, Marinetti, the Delaunays and prefaces to exhibitions on Otto van Rees (Gemeentemuseum de la Haie, 1975), Torrès-Garcia (Musée municipal de la ville de Paris, 1975), Luc Peire, Jean Ricardon, Gottfried Honegger, Vincent Batbedat, Marcelle Cahn, among others.

In 1976, on the occasion of a new exhibition of works by Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber and Michel Seuphor at the Nouvelles Images Gallery, the latter published a collection of poems by Seuphor, entitled Onze essais de voix pour un chant du soir, with eleven etchings of his making. The following year, L’autre côté des choses, Mythologies imaginaires and Onze essais de voix pour un chant du soir received the international prize Diano Marina, in Italy, for the best illustrated book.

In May 1976, Carmen Martinez had a flag-poem made from a design by Seuphor, which proclaims: « Drapeau mon cœur, ne rampe pas, sois vertical et parle bas, la rose des vents, jetée du ciel, parfumera ta vie » (Flag of my heart, do not crawl, be vertical and speak low, the compass rose, thrown from the sky, will perfume your life). She also published a monograph entitled Michel Seuphor, écrits, œuvres, documents et témoignages, in which we can find, among other things, an original edition of the text of the conference on La fonction sociale de l’artiste.

In the same year, the bibliophile publisher Jean-Michel Place reissued a series of facsimiles, including the complete series of the periodical Het Overzicht, the three issues of Cercle et Carré and the single issue of Les Documents internationaux de l’Esprit nouveau.

All of these publications came along two major retrospectives of Seuphor’s work, the first at the Palais Granvelle in Besançon, and the second at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. The first was accompanied by a catalog entitled Poésie plastique, which Seuphor judged magnificent (Une vie à angle droit, p 159).

The second retrospective, initiated by the Flemish banker Maurits Naessens, included a “friendship room” where Seuphor exhibited most of his personal collection, including Textuel, the drawing-poem made with Mondrian in 1929.

This retrospective came with the publication of a new, very voluminous monograph, composed in The Hague by Herbert Henkels and published by Mercatorfonds in Belgium. This very exhaustive volume presents all of Seuphor’s works up to 1975. It was in this book that Seuphor published his autobiographical account Le jeu de je.

Pontus Hulten, the director who oversaw the founding of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, noticed this exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and asked the French government to present it in Paris for the opening of the Centre in 1977.

The exhibition at the George Pompidou Center was organized by Germain Viatte. It was accompanied by the first French performances of L’éphémère est éternel, in the theater of the center. Seuphor guided the staging of Claude Confortès and was delighted with the result.

« At that moment, the high point of my life (…) it was four unforgettable evenings for me. If we could have rented the hall a hundred times, it would have been full a hundred times. It was fantastic, with the three sets by Mondrian and these fifteen actors between eighteen and twenty-five years old. At first, they didn’t understand anything about the play. And then, as they talked, during the rehearsals, they got and, when they performed it, it was perfect, as if they had been honing the show for years in an enthusiasm, a crazy gaiety. » (Une vie à angle droit, p 157)

He expressed his joy in a lacuna drawing bearing the title of the piece in French, L’éphémère est éternel, which was followed, in 1979, by a series of 8 other drawings, each of which takes up the title inscribed in eight different languages (Ancient Greek, Latin, Dutch, Italian, German, English, Hebrew and Spanish).

That same year, Seuphor received the distinction of the Order of Arts and Letters. Following the exhibition, he proposed a donation of abstract works from his collection to the Centre George Pompidou, which the state accepted, and which was achieved in 1978. It contains works that his friends Delaunay, Larionov, Peeters, Huszar, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russel, Bruce, Janco, etc., offered him. He considered that they should belong to society and be preserved for posterity in museums rather than in private collections. He also included a few personal works.