This is the first English translation of a key text of the Surrealist movement, exploring the relationship between magic and the creative arts through the ages.
Presented in a newly formatted, expanded edition and produced to the highest standards, this publication by Fulgur Press represents a significant landmark in this emerging field of esoteric studies and presents this text to an English-speaking readership for the first time.
Breton’s late treatise on magic and art appears for the first time in English, complete with citations, commentaries and a bibliography
What is “Magic Art”? In 1953, André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was invited by a prestigious French publisher to explore answers to this question. His resulting analysis is wide-ranging and evocative. Beginning with a literary review of magic and art, Breton draws upon Novalis and Baudelaire before considering the prehistoric rock art of Spain and France, the native art of the Pacific Northwest, the magical grimoires and alchemical symbolism of the Middle Ages, and the work of…
An important new study which analyses Surrealist objects and poetry in the context of talismanic magic. The author approaches the topic with great lucidity and insight, presenting original new interpretations of how different aspects of magic have been used as creative strategies in the works of a wide range of poetry and visual art.
Each chapter examines how artists and poets apply alchemy, talismans, ciphers, myth and ritual magic to create their work. I particularly enjoyed the way the author examined lesser known Surrealists such as Gherasim Luca, Mimi Parent and Jean Benoit, resulting in the opening of fresh perspectives on this complex subject.
Often regarded as an artistic movement of interwar Paris, Surrealism comprised an international community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who have aspired to change the conditions of life itself over the course of the past century. Consisting of a wide range of dedicated case studies from the 1920s to the 1970s, this book highlights the international dimensions of the Surrealist Movement, and the radical chains of thought that linked its followers across the globe: from France to Romania, and from Canada to the former Czechoslovakia.
From very early on, the surrealists approached magic as a means of bypassing, discrediting, and…
This exhibition catalogue was produced to accompany an exhibition in Brussels this year to celebrate the anniversary of the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924). What I enjoyed was the way it revealed the similarities and disjunctions between the Symbolist movement of the 19th century with the Surrealist movement of the early 20th century. The catalogue explores different thematic aspects of these movements to produce interesting clusters of ideas and imagery for the first time. Lavishly produced, this catalogue is both a visual treat and a thought-provoking read.
100 years after the publication of André Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme, The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium celebrate a century of international surrealism with the extraordinary exhibition IMAGINE! From Giorgio de Chirico to Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray and Leonor Fini: the exhibition and accompanying book offer an immersion in surrealist poetry, dream, the labyrinth, metamorphosis, the unknown and the subconscious, led by the great names of the surrealists. (French edition available ISBN 9789464781120) (Dutch edition available ISBN 9789464781113 - idea code 24188)
