About the Book
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.
Table 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 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).
Review :
Parkinson's extensive knowledge of the field allows him to navigate with ease between continents, following the various developments and reception of modern art in the twentieth century. His ability to modify the length of his focus from detailed textual analysis to wider comparative geographical and art historical contexts makes this book one of the most astute on the movement to date.
Gavin Parkinson had the novel idea to reconsider the canonical figures of late nineteenth century French painting as they appear within the discourse of Surrealism: Cézanne or Gauguin through Breton or Dalí. His gambit pays off brilliantly. He ferrets out a shadow history of French modernism, tracking long-lost interpretive metaphors that shift from positive to negative and back again. The surrealist alternative to traditional criticism generates an unfamiliar constellation of cultural significance. From out of its obscurity, Parkinson reveals the “mythic, poetic or magic resonance” of the practice otherwise known as modernism.
Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat-those canonical modernists we thought we knew-are reinvested with myth, magic and poetry in this lively and polemical account of their 'Surrealisation' in the mid-20th century. Parkinson pulls no punches in voting for the Surrealists as the most perceptive interpreters of this alternative cast of 19th-century precursors.
Enchanted Ground highlights Parkinson's skill in asking unexpected questions of modern art, matched with astute answers; and in taking Surrealism seriously, as a source of vivid and relevant ideas rather than just an art movement. This book's great strength lies in shining a searchlight at its material, not simply to look at Surrealism, but look with it and through it, alert to the refractions that illuminate adjacent histories in fresh ways. Enchanted Ground is on high alert to details, anomalies and the overlooked, using them to unpick received wisdom about Surrealism, modernism and art history itself.
Gavin Parkinson's text is a timely reminder that there are other ways of seeing the founding fathers of modernist painting than through the lens of Greenberg's formalism. He explores the posthumous critical fortunes of Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Seurat in the writings of the doyen of Surrealism, André Breton. Part intricate historiography, gathering together writings that have hitherto been overlooked because dispersed and difficult of access, Enchanted Ground brings us familiar art from an unfamiliar, indeed magical, Surrealist perspective. This is an arresting, ambitious and important book.
