thousands of times, day and night,”3 he became a kind of implicit workshop manager, an organizer capable of distributing tasks in a place that functioned as a permanent assembly hall—Buraglio speaks of an agora—where in spite of everything the disorder had to be orga-nized: “The projects were validated by a General Assembly that was open to everyone. I had installed three or four printing stations; book printers had given us end rolls of paper. We printed at night and hung the posters to dry on clotheslines. We didn’t stop…”4

We can hear the political implications of such an attitude—that of making creation possible through concrete action. At the Atelier Populaire, without knowing it, Seydoux established the foundations of his future professional ethic. For artists, he is and will remain a secret sharer5: someone who, by being at one with the medium whose use he entrusts to others, makes creation possible because he rigorously respects his position in the chain of production. Whereas the artist must hone his or her expressive originality, Seydoux had to hone his ability to work in “complete harmony with his machine.” On this subject, Paul Cox also speaks of Seydoux’s “absolute perfectionism.”6

Seydoux had a singular passion for technique. Beyond mastering it, he wanted to embody it, assimilate it to the point at which acquired skill appears to come naturally. There’s a term for this that comes to mind: the sprezzatura. Baldassarre Castiglione coined the term in his Book of the Courtier to designate this quality which he associates with grace, which is a feigned nonchalance: the art of concealing art, “[showing] that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.”7 Seydoux had the art of making technical mastery seem like a bestowed quality—a grace.

Wanting to become “technique incarnate” wasn’t the obsession of a technician. It fed a thought-out project, not of loving technique for its own sake, but of becoming technique for the sake of art. Being one with his expertise enabled him to assume a responsibility that would ease the task for those who worked with him. The artist thus freed up saw the full range of experimental possibilities displayed before him, or her, in an ample and reliable way. Like at the Atelier Populaire, the success and equilibrium of the workshop depended upon the