Enchanted Ground

Shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2020

Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers – mainly André Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, René Magritte, Charles Estienne, René 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 Cézanne, 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.

Author Biography

Gavin Parkinson is Senior Lecturer in European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK. He is the author of Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France 1936-1969 (2015), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (2008), and The Duchamp Book (2008), as well as the editor of Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (2015).