Michel Seuphor Biography
Michel Seuphor (Antwerp, 10 March 1901 – Paris, 12 February 1999) was a Belgian-born French art critic, art historian, painter and poet. His real name was Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers: Seuphor is the anagram of Orpheus. At the age of twenty, in 1921, he founded the magazine Het Overzicht in his native Antwerp. In 1925 he moved to Paris. Here, in 1930, with Joaquín Torres García, he founded the Cercle et Carré movement, which brought together artists of different origins, united by a substantial adherence to abstractionism. The group, which gave birth to the magazine of the same name, was born under the influence of the De Stijl movement of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who joined the movement. The first public release, in the 1930 exhibition at Galerie 23, was attended not only by Piet Mondrian himself, but also by the Alsatian painter Jean Arp of surrealist ancestry and his wife, the Swiss Sophie Taeuber; also the Norman Fernand Léger, the German Kurt Schwitters, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the architect and painter Le Corbusier, and the Russian constructivist Anton Pevsner. The Belgian sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, former co-founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement, also joined the movement; it was he who, in February 1931, gave life to the most famous Abstraction-Création group, which would take up the ideal legacy of Cercle et Carré in the promotion of abstractionism. Meanwhile, Seuphor had left Paris in 1931 for health reasons. He returned there only in 1938. Here he organized other important exhibitions: Les Premiers Maîtres de l'Art Abstrait in 1949, 50 ans d'Art Abstrait in 1958, Construction and Geometry Painting in 1959 and the great retrospective on Mondrian at the Musée de l'Orangerie also in 1959. In 1954 he acquired French citizenship. From the 1950s onwards he dedicated himself above all to his activity as an art historian of the twentieth century and in particular of abstract art. In this capacity he will sign fundamental texts including L'Art abstrait, ses origines, ses premiers maîtres in 1949, the Dictionnaire de la Peinture abstraite of 1957 and Sculpture de ce siècle of 1959. Starting from 1971 he will begin the publication of a history of abstract art in five volumes.
