Surrealist Sorcery : Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement

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 combatting rationalism, capitalism, and other institutionalized systems and values that they saw to be constraining influences upon modern life. Surrealist Sorcery maps out how this interest in magic developed into a major area of surrealist research that led not only to theoretical but also practical explorations of the subject. Taking an international perspective, Atkin surveys this important quality of the movement and how it's remained an important element in the surrealist project and its ongoing legacy.

Will Atkin is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Art History at the University of Nottingham, UK

Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University, USA, and joint editor of the Transnational Surrealism series. She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021), editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967 (2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2022).

Krzysztof Fijalkowski is Professor of Visual Culture at Norwich University of the Arts, UK. He has published in the history and theory of Surrealism, and is co-editor of Bloomsbury's Transnational Surrealism series.