André Breton, modernism and the surrealist appraisal of fin-de-siècle painting /
Gavin Parkinson.
New York, NY, USA :
Bloomsbury Visual Arts,
2018.
xvii, 352 pages :
illustrations (some color) ;
24 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-337) and index.
Art after impressionism after surrealism -- Greengrocer, bricklayer or seer? Psychoanalysing Paul Cezanne -- Painting as propaganda and prophecy: Rene Magritte and Pierre-Auguste Renoir -- Method and poetry: Georges Seurat's surrealist dialectic -- Between dog and wolf: Georges Seurat, Brassai and the City of Light -- Civilization, realism, abstraction: Paul Gauguin and Surrealism, 1948-53 -- Dialectic of Brittany: Paul Gauguin's `Myth' and surrealist `Celtomania' -- Magic art, folklore and rural tales in Le Pouldu: Andre Breton, Paul Gauguin and Charles Filiger -- Disenchanted ground, or Vincent van Gogh, Antonin Artaud and magic 1947 -- on Andre Breton.
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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.