Tessel M. Bauduin - Surrealism, Occultism and Politics

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.

Dr. Tessel M. Bauduin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.

Dr. Victoria Ferentinou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ioannina.

Dr. Daniel Zamani is an Assistant Curator at the Stdel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

Cover image: Leonora Carrington, Are you really Syrious?, 1953. Oil on three-ply. Collection of Miguel S. Escobedo. 2017 Estate of Leonora Carrington, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2017.

In Search of the Marvellous

Edited by
Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou and
Daniel Zamani

First published 2018

by Routledge

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The right of Tessel M. Bauduin, Victoria Ferentinou and Daniel Zamani to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-05433-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14665-2 (pbk)

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TESSEL M. BAUDUIN, VICTORIA FERENTINOU AND DANIEL ZAMANI

PART I
Alternative Modes of Knowledge

CLAUDIE MASSICOTTE

DONNA ROBERTS

M. E. WARLICK

VIVIENNE BROUGH-EVANS

PART II
Myth, Magic and the Search for Re-Enchantment

DANIEL ZAMANI

KRISTOFFER NOHEDEN

GAVIN PARKINSON

GRAINA SUBELYT

PART III
Female Artists, Gender and the Occult

VICTORIA FERENTINOU

MARA JOS GONZLEZ MADRID

JUDITH NOBLE

SUSAN ABERTH

Susan Aberth is an Associate Professor of Art History at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She writes on Surrealism, Latin American Art, women artists and occultism. She is the author of Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries, London, 2004 in English and Spanish). Her recent publications include: An Allergy to Collaboration: The Early Formation of Leonora Carringtons Artistic Vision, in Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (eds.), Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017); Surrealism, Sex and the Poetics of Uncertainty, in Jim Amaral (Bogota: Colombia, 2017); Ingestion and Descent: The Chthonic Realms of Leonora Carrington, in Black Mirror, issue 1 (2016); Leonora Carrington and the Art of Invocation, in Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies no. 6 (2015); Ropa vieja (Les vieux vtements): Leonora Carrington et lautoreprsentation, in Mlusine, no. XXXIII, Autoreprsentation Fminine (2012); and The Theatre of Cruelty: Surrealism and Pain in the Work of Agustn Fernndez, in Agustin Fernandez (Agustn Fernndez Foundation, Paris, 2012).

Tessel M. Bauduin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Amsterdam. Her monograph on Surrealism and the Occult was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2014. She has further published on modern art and occultism, Hilma af Klint, automatism, Surrealism and the reception of Jheronimus Bosch as a surrealist, among other topics. Tessel is a laureate of the VENI-programme for Excellence in Research, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); her current research project concerns surrealist appropriations of the past. She is co-editor of Occult Modernism: The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature and Cinema (2018). https://amsterdam.academia.edu/TesselBauduin.

Vivienne Brough-Evans is an independent scholar from the UK. She specialises in international literary Surrealism, with specific research interests in the comparative history of religions and genre studies. Building upon her PhD thesis at the Surrealism Centre of the University of Essex, her 2016 monograph Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose proposed the concept of an ecstatic divin fou present in the theories of Georges Bataille and surrealist novels by Gellu Naum, Leonora Carrington and Alejo Carpentier. Here, Socratess explanation of divine madness in Platos Phaedrus and Medieval philosophy are used to elucidate such expressions in surrealist literature produced in socially and politically restrictive environments. She is currently researching Skhya philosophy.

Victoria Ferentinou is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ioannina, where she teaches courses on Art Theory and Art History. She obtained an MA in Archaeology from the University of London and an MA in Modern Art and Theory from the University of Essex. She received her PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex in 2007. Funded by a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the thesis explored the proto-feminist appropriation of occult tropes in the visual and verbal output of Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Ferentinous main research interests include surrealist art and its theory, feminist art and criticism, occultism, aesthetics and the visual arts, modern and contemporary art theory. She has lectured about and published articles, encyclopaedia entries and book chapters on the above themes. She is currently researching the legacies of Surrealism in theory and practice in the post-war era and most specifically the oeuvre of Nanos Valaoritis and Marie Wilson.

Mara Jos Gonzlez Madrid is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Barcelona and a researcher at the feminist centre Duoda. Her research interests include the work of artists involved in the avant-garde artistic movements in the historical context of the Spanish Second Republic, and the artists living in Mexico in exile after the Spanish Civil War, as well as the artistic practices related to the recuperation of historical memory. She is specialised in the work of the surrealist artist Remedios Varo, having written a doctoral thesis on the significance of magical knowledge in her practice. She published the book