Swiss born artist Kurt Seligmann studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. As a painter, he combined a predilection for illusionistic space and clear vibrant color with fantastic narratives. He exhibited with the Surrealists in the 1930s and developed a considerable reputation for etchings such as The Magician and Carnival from the print portfolio Cardiac Protuberances. The whimsical aggregations of objects and marks in these images are reminiscent of the jumbled studio props common in works by Giorgio de Chirico as well as drawings known as “exquisite corpses” produced collectively by groups of Surrealist artists as a kind of parlor game. At times, as in The Magician, the accumulated elements seem to come together to form figures with heads and eyes, while elsewhere they seem more like loose arrangements of heraldic trophies. Seligmann’s interest in magic and magicians was not casual; he researched the topic extensively and eventually published a successful book on the topic, The Mirror of Magic, 1948 (reprinted 1971).