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Surrealism was a radical, revolutionary art movement that sprung into being at the turn of the 20th century and reshaped the nature of aesthetic experience. Kurt Seligmann’s 1948 oil on canvas painting, Magnetic Mountain, is a surrealist work that ensnares its audience in a haunting atmosphere without any means of escape. The work depicts a unique, captivating scene that startles the onlooker, drawing them in, and implanting a seed of mystery and curiosity within the audience’s wandering imagination. The work is best understood in conjunction with the aesthetic theory of the 20th century German phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger. Magnetic Mountain reinforces (a) Heidegger’s concept of Dasein being “thrown” into actuality, (b) Heidegger’s concept of art as a “happening of truth;” and (c) Heidegger’s contrasting between the “thingliness” and “artliness” of a work of art. When viewed from the standpoint of phenomenology, Magnetic Mountain is a work of art that vindicates Heidegger’s aesthetic theory.
Kurt Seligmann’s Magnetic Mountain is an abstract, disorienting, and haunting landscape weaved together by bright, colorful organic figures juxtaposed with sharp, piercing geometrical shapes. The shapes and figures hover over layers of intersecting, crooked, planimetric surfaces, which, in turn, appear to be either “collapsing-into” a central, unextended point on the canvas, or “bursting out” of this central point with tremendous fury. When first encountering this painting, the audience is unsure as to what they are exactly looking at. They are taken aback, uncertain, and disoriented. The onlooker experiences what Heidegger calls “thrownness;” i.e., he is tossed into a world without knowing whence or wither; and is tasked with making sense of his situation in and through that which appears to him in consciousness. He must approach the artwork with an “artly consciousness” in order for it to speak to him.
The painting, as it initially appears in consciousness, is, prima facie, something without order—a chaotic, unpleasant, and unruly work. However, upon closer examination, the work’s “thingliness” transitions into a vehicle that reveals the work’s “artliness.” The painting pulls the onlooker’s consciousness towards the burst of energy effervescing at the center of the canvas. At this explosive point, emerging out of the jumble of shapes, and figures, a knight on horseback charges out from the center of the piece—disclosing itself to the audience. However, paradoxically, the exact reversal of this is also disclosed! It is equally the case that the knight appears as being forced back into the compact center of the painting; like a genie being forced back into a lamp. A dragon’s wing flaps mid-air, and hovers next to the knight. Could the knight be fighting a dragon? All of these bursts of creative possibility and meaning are hallmarks of the disclosure of truth. This “happening of truth” is just what Heidegger defines as the core tenant of art; writing, “Thus art is: the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art then is the becoming and happening of truth.”1 Indeed, the work’s truth manifests itself in and through its disclosure to Dasein as stories. As Heidegger writes, “Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry.”2 The amount of truth that the painting discloses is, in essence, unbounded and unlimited.
Magnetic Mountain is internally differentiated into discrete and continuous elements that compliment and play off each other. Interestingly, each element has its own “thingly” character, just as the painting itself has its own “thingly” character. Indeed, there is a recursion here. The painting is a “thing” with a “thingly” character and is internally differentiated into “things” that have their own “thingly” character, and so on and so on. Like a line of dominoes being knocked down, as soon as the painting becomes an object of “artly” consciousness, its internally differentiated elements take on an “artly” character, and so on and so on without end. This “fractal-like” pattern that results in the work being a medium whereby truth is disclosed to the audience.
Kurt Seligmann’s Magnetic Mountain is a painting that challenges the audience with a winding stream of twists and turns. Its complexity, originality, and hypnotic, surrealist verve come together into a masterful work of art. With the help of Heidegger’s aesthetic theory, Magnetic Mountain is able to be appreciated, understood, and experienced in a way that reveals the power of art as a vehicle for disclosing truth.
Footnotes
[1] Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Stephen David. Ross. Albany: State U of New York, 1987. 258-87. Print. 284.
[2] Ibid, 285.