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Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers - mainly Andre Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, Rene Magritte, Charles Estienne, Rene Huyghe and others - who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism - Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh - became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.
List of contents
Introduction: Art After Impressionism After Surrealism
Ch. 1 Greengrocer, Bricklayer or Seer? Psychoanalyzing Paul Cézanne
Ch. 2 Painting as Propaganda and Prophecy: René Magritte and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Ch. 3 Method and Poetry: Georges Seurat's Surrealist Dialectic
Ch. 4 Between Dog and Wolf: Georges Seurat, Brassaï and the City of Light
Ch. 5 Civilization, Realism, Abstraction: Paul Gauguin and Surrealism, 1948-53
Ch. 6 Dialectic of Brittany: From Myth to Folklore in Paul Gauguin and Surrealism
Epilogue: Disenchanted Ground, or Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud and Magic in 1947
Conclusion: On André Breton
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
About the author
Gavin Parkinson is Professor of European Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK.
