Why read Surrealism and Magic?

Book cover of Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity

Book description

Like no other 20th-century movement, Surrealism was keenly inspired by tropes of magic, myth and the occult. In their engagement with the irrational and the unconscious, numerous of its members looked to magic as a poetic and deeply philosophical discourse, related to both arcane knowledge and individual self-empowerment. In their…

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Surrealism

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Why read it?

1 author picked Surrealism and Magic as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Nadia Choucha

Author

This is a wonderful, comprehensive, and lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue which surveys how magic as a metaphor and creative paradigm was used to liberate the imagination in the Surrealist movement.

The essays covering a number of different themes and topics are written by leading scholars and academics of Surrealism and serve to illuminate the processes and ideas underlying magic and how these manifest in the art of some of the most important artists of this international art movement.

Supported by numerous appendices with glossary, notes, bibliography, and lists of works, this book will appeal to the scholar as well as…

From Nadia's 3 favorite reads in 2023.