Surrealism, Occultism and Politics In Search of the Marvellous Studies in Surrealism Series

This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surrealist discourses on identity, gender, sexuality, utopianism and radicalism.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors
List of Plates
List of Illustrations

Introduction: In Search of the Marvellous
Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou and Daniel Zamani

Part I: Alternative Modes of Knowledge

1 Spiritual Surrealists: Séances, Automatism, and the Creative Unconscious
Claudie Massicotte

2 The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu: Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative Involution
Donna Roberts

3 Palmistry as Portraiture: Dr. Charlotte Wolff and the Surrealists
M. E. Warlick

4 Occulted Un-Knowing: Bataillean Approaches to the Sacred in Gellu Naum’s Ceasornicãria Taus and Alejo Carpentier’s El Siglo de las Luces
Vivienne Brough-Evans

Part II: Myth, Magic and the Search for Re-Enchantment

5 Melusina Triumphant: Matriarchy and the Politics of Anti-Fascist Mythmaking in André Breton’s Arcane 17
Daniel Zamani

6 Esotericism and Surrealist Cinema: Wilhelm Freddie’s Films and the New Myth
Kristoffer Noheden

7 Disenchanted Ground, or Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh and Magic in 1947
Gavin Parkinson

8 Kurt Seligmann, Surrealism and the Occult
Gražina Subelytė

Part III: Female Artists, Gender and the Occult

9 The Quest for the Goddess: Matriarchy, Surrealism and Gender Politics in the Work of Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington
Victoria Ferentinou

10 On the True Exercise of Witchcraft in the Work of Remedios Varo
María José González Madrid

11 Clear Dreaming: Maya Deren, Surrealism and Magic
Judith Noble

12 Harbingers of the New Age: Surrealism, Women and the Occult in the United States
Susan Aberth

Bibliography

Tessel M. Bauduin is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Victoria Ferentinou is assistant professor at the University of Ioannina.

Daniel Zamani is a PhD student at Trinity College, University of Cambridge and an assistant curator at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.