The objet surréaliste and surrealist magic: Surrealist Sorcery

Will Atkin’s new publication is a nuanced, well-argued and deeply researched study of a topic that has not always been uncontroversial in Surrealism Studies: magic. In particular the book focusses on magic in French and France-related international Surrealism, discussing activities, works and figures ranging from 1929 to 1976.

For decades the presence and role of magic in Surrealism, both as a practice and a discursive idea, was disparaged in scholarship, considered as something that came to play a part only late in the life of the movement and then mostly as a discursive performance. At times the Surrealist investment in magic, thought of as atavistic, even regressive, was noted as having hastened the movement’s end. Over the last two decades, however, several studies have deeply excavated individual Surrealists’ and collective Surrealism’s engagement with it, as well as with sibling practices witchcraft and alchemy and with the knowledge traditions of (Western) esotericism and occultism, showing magic’s integral contribution to the Surrealist paradigm.

What is magic? Although Atkin offers descriptive indications, he chooses not to provide a formal definition of it—nor of Surrealism—at the outset of the book; not least, in the case of magic, to avoid qualitative judgements, as well as to not circumscribe its ever-evolving conceptualisation in Surrealism (p. 11). This pays dividends throughout the five case study-driven chapters that follow the Introduction, as it allows for deep dives into the oftentimes idiosyncratic theorising and/or practice of magic as put forward by individual surrealists. For the one magical practice is about influencing, that is to some extend controlling, things or forces in the world around them through art or poetry; for the other it serves as a conceptual frame to identify ineffable sacred forces and effects.

Leaving definitions aside, one still needs a way to grapple with what magic in the context of Surrealism is and does and here the author has made an inspired choice. The book’s main premise is that Surrealism and magic meet in the object, that is the surrealist object. Atkin’s consistent start from, and analysis of objects in each chapter allows for novel insight into a by now slightly overdetermined subject (“Surrealism and magic”, or, “and occultism”, if you will). It furthermore brings the sometimes quite divergent case studies together in a relatively consistent matter. In the Introduction Atkin notes the disservice paid to the complex and nuanced conceptualisation of “l’objet surréaliste” by later scholarly and curatorial views of it as, reductively, ‘the antithesis of a useful object’ (4). Building instead upon the Surrealists’ “perception of the object as a vital, powerful instrument of change”, the author set outs to explore the “theoretical and practical applications” of the object in “the sphere of magic” (6).

Atkin starts conventionally with discussing the 1929 call for ‘“he occultation” of Surrealism and related alchemical language in chapter one, but then showcases his fresh approach in the suggestion that it can hardly be coincidental that around that time an interest in the alchemical practice of transmutation, both in a metallurgical sense and in a psychological sense, converged with the practice of object making and the Surrealist object’s power as fetish; the one may well have had a transformative effect on the other, so is argued here.

He really broaches new terrain in chapter two, exploring the black magical objects of Ghérasim Luca, Bucharest-based (and bound) in the early 1940s, that is during the Second World War. Luca, and to some extent also his fellow poet Gellu Naum, reconfigured the Surrealist object, barely a decade old, as a site of, among other things, bewilderment and unhinging. The objects, small assemblages closely associated with vampirism and Satanic influences, are “unintelligible cyphers” with a “monstrous visceral presence” that deny interpretation (73). They are geared towards destruction, negative bonding and metamorphosing, which, as Atkin makes clear, suited the war-torn context of Bucharest Surrealism and its mode of revolutionary nihilism very well. The author’s eye for the Surrealists’ prerogative to (re)define Surrealism in accordance with their situated experience pays off here. The Bucharest Surrealists “repurposed Surrealism”, the objet surrealiste in particular but also, I would add, its proclivities for the gothic, “to fit the world-ending moment in which they found themselves” (74). This contrasts strikingly with the magical work of another Romanian: Victor Brauner, now in France but still during the war. Brauner’s circumstances were unremittingly bleak, as well, and in an attempt to thwart the regime’s eye he turned to making objects intended to function as amulets and talismans. That makes his practice of magic, rather than “black” (maledictional), almost exclusively apotropaic (protective) in objective, which proceeds from a much more positive (“white”) view of magic and what it can accomplish.

Chapters four and five can be read as pendants as well, both taking on Surrealist ethnography but from opposite ends. Although magic has a long tradition in the West, it was increasingly positioned—especially by Breton and his school—in relation to the ethnographic concerns of that time, that is to say associated with non-Western cultural traditions and practices. Chapter 4 discusses Breton’s and Benjamin Péret’s investigations of Global Southern myth and magic traditions in the 1950s. Of course Breton’s relevant but not unproblematic intervention in art history exploring magic’s inherence in art, L’Art Magique (1957), passes review too. Although Atkins is clearly cognisant of the exoticism and primitivism in their thought, one might have expected a more prolonged engagement with the deeply problematic nature of looking for another culture’s magical mystery to redress your own culture’s apparent failure of the symbolical order. Still, Atkins is very well at home in the (French and Francophone) anthropological debates of the time and Surrealism’s position in and vis-à-vis it. In the last chapter, this provides a deep contextualisation for other magical objects and work in Surrealism that have previously been rather understudied, namely Mimi Parent and Jean Benoît’s thoroughly researched and elaborately structured magical masks and rituals in the 1960s.

The book’s aim is to chart a “lineage of magical objects in the Surrealist Movement”, the discursive and the practical use of these objects, and their theorists and practitioners (7). With the proviso that this is limited to a selection of Surrealists from the Global North practicing and theorising in Europe, especially France, Atkin succeeds admirably in this goal. He is similarly successful in showcasing how diverse and idiosyncratic indeed the conception of magic and especially the magical object in European Surrealism was. Overall the main contribution of this relevant study lies in its bold approach to the topic. Proposing novel interpretations of Surrealist objects it challenges trite conventions about l’objet surréaliste. Focussing on the nexus of the object with magic turns out particularly profitable. The book hasn’t quite shed all its former skin as a PhD dissertation—it can be dense and unnecessarily complex in places—but perhaps that is only to be expected. Readers not well-versed in the histories of occultism, esotericism and magic will not find the answers to what those are here, but they can turn to other recent works, such as the more lightly palatable 2022 catalogue Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (Guggenheim, Venice & Museum Barberini, Potsdam). For those interested in an object-based investigation of “magic as an area of critical conceptual importance” (1) in Surrealism Atkin’s Surrealist Sorcery offers plenty and more.