Michel Seuphor

     Michel Seuphor has been drawing for a long, long time.  He has
drawn day and night, through every season of the year.  He draws on
envelopes, scraps of paper, tablecloths, walls.  He drew as a child,
a young man, an adult, an old man, then he started all over again and
once more he drew as a child, and as a young man, until in this second
cycle, as an adult, he came to realize that he drew very well indeed.
He immediately showed his drawings to Arp, who immediately turned on
his heels, went to Berggruen, and said: "Seuphor draws and he draws
awfully well.  Go and see his drawings, farseeing man that you are,
and exhibit them."  Berggruen didn't have to be told twice, and that
is why, dear visitor, you have a chance to see what perfect drawings
are.
     I am now going to revel in these drawings and note certain things
in my process of discovery:
     Flotillas, their hands full of marble-ringed voices, descend from
infinite heights, emerge from infinite depths.  A tiny universe cele-
brates a holiday for the tiny mother of mothers.  Crosses, wheels,
arrows, lances radiantly slide on ribbons of light.  Rhombuses burst
into moans.  The tribe of rectangles forces its way through the black
depth.  Echoes burgeon.  Keener and keener desires to touch.  Gentle
and even gentler approaches.  Quivers full of rays instead of arrows.
Snow-white wings spread out and meet snow-white fans that stir the air.
Black spaces recall black lightning.  Creatures made of feathers with
live teeth and claws.  Winged shoots.  Geometric plants with serrated
hems.  Combs of light comb the light.  Rectangles reign in all their
spendor, majestically sticking out their tongues.  They look like in-
candescent trees.  Will the square slabs of petrified air that cover
the cosmic page of the abyss shed their leaves?  Most certainly.  But
the orthodox squares will grow back immediately, they who constantly
lose the surface of their faces like leaves that the wind carries off
one after the other from a calendar pad.  I can imagine Seuphor's plea-
sure at seeing how time passes in beauty as he draws; I see him laughing,
leaning his ear against a square cloud for lack of a stopped clock, and
then continuing to draw one page after another without ever tripping
over a theatrical wave.
     If you don't see what I see in Seuphor's drawings, then console
yourself, dear visitor, with the thought that in nuclear physics the
observer has to reconcile either the particle and the field or the cor-
puscle and the wave.  The main thing is that you enjoy these drawings
and realize that we are for liberty in art and opposed to all the pre-
sumptuous babblers, the drivelers who would be very proud to disturb
us in our work, us, the great-great-grandchildren of the builders of
Stonehenge and the cromlechs.  Michel Seuphor is one of the few people
who together with us experienced contemporary art at its very outset.
That is why we should also read his books, which are reliable guide-
posts for leading you through the virgin forest of aberrations in which
you are deliberately led astray by what the parrots of the Renaissance
write about abstract and concrete art.

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