Surrealism and Magic

Numerous artists were familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud, including his influential study Totem and Taboo (1913). There, Freud had defined the basic principle of magic as the belief in the “omnipotence of thought.” The idea of the human imagination as a magical force that can actively influence reality fascinated the Surrealists. Accordingly, they propagated the self-image of the artist as a sorcerer, magician, and alchemist who, thanks to his or her imagination, can conjure up new, illusory worlds.

The prologue to the exhibition explores the Surrealists’ engagement with magic and highlights the extent to which their fantastic iconography was indebted to traditional occult symbolism.

An important precursor of Surrealism was Giorgio de Chirico. With his “Metaphysical Painting “he wanted to give expression to the deep-seated enigma of human existence. Many Surrealists adopted de Chirico’s figurative style. In meticulously executed works, the irrational world of dreams and the unconscious was to take on concrete form. Numerous works depict human protagonists who become participants in magical rituals. In addition, themes of transformation and metamorphosis as well as the regenerative forces of nature also play a significant role.

André Masson was a Surrealist of the first hour. In the 1930s, he produced several works in which the female body is associated with magical renewal. His painting Ophelia references the eponymous heroine of Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet.

In its early stages, Surrealism was an exclusively male movement. It was not until the 1930s that it increasingly drew female artists into its fold, amongst them Leonora Carrington. The English-born painter executed this depiction of a red glowing witches’ kitchen as a tribute to her Irish grandmother, who had introduced her to the magical world of Celtic mythology when she was still a young girl.

Like Leonora Carrington, the Spanish artist Remedios Varo also found a connection to Surrealism in the 1930s. Many of her works combine magical scenarios with allusions to science and technology. Varo’s constant recourse to fantastic machines was directly related to her keen childhood memories of the detailed drawings of her father, who had worked as a hydraulics engineer.

In his painting The Lovers, Victor Brauner combined the iconography of two different tarot cards: “The Magician” and “The Priestess.” The meeting of the magically powerful figures is supposed to symbolize the wedding of the alchemical royal couple. This is also referred to by the scepter of the magician, which combines the attributes of golden sun and silver moon.

Leonora Carrington also devoted herself to the motif of the “Royal Wedding”. Like Brauner’s Surrealist, Carrington’s Necromancer is based on the iconography of the tarot card “The Magician.” With black, white, and red, the three symbolic colors of alchemical transformation dominate the picture. In the necromancer’s clothes, black and white also signify the fusion of opposites such as above and below, male and female, day and night – and thus the “Royal Wedding.”

The Surrealists were fascinated by the notion of woman as an irrational and magical being, who is mysteriously connected to the creative forces of nature. Their positive association with the world of the dream and the unconscious was accompanied by cliché-laden stereotyping. Often, the female body is displayed as an erotic object. Female artists such as Leonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning critically countered the images of women produced by their male colleagues.

In Tanning’s work The Magic Flower Game, a young girl appears as a self-confident protagonist and looks challengingly at the viewer. In her left hand she holds a white ball of wool, from which she skilfully produces what appears to be a living flower. The girl is also in a state of vegetative transformation herself: her body consists of a patchwork of flowers, and her green hair and plant-like right arm recall the figure of a forest spirit or elf. The wool symbolizes the thread of fate that the girl courageously and actively takes into her own hand.

The Argentine-born painter Leonor Fini moved in the circle of the Surrealist movement from the 1930s onwards and dealt with themes of femininity and magic in her works. Powerful women or female hybrid beings dominate the motifs of her paintings. They often appear as participants in mysterious rituals or inhabitants of primeval landscapes. In Fini’s works, woman is at the center of a pantheistic universe, where she rules supreme over the eternal cycle of life and death.

In Roberto Matta’s “psychological morphologies,” hallucinogenic structures are supposed to refer simultaneously to the depths of the human psyche and to the immeasurable vastness of the universe. With their energetic charge, these images were meant to reflect the “battlefield of feelings and ideas” that Matta associated with World War II.

The US painter Kay Sage had visited the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938 and made the acquaintance of André Breton in the same year. Most of her works depict fantastic architectural scenes, often located in indefinable, futuristic-looking urban settings.

In many of his paintings, Yves Tanguy used his meticulous, veristic technique to make mineral, rock or cliff formations appear against gently modulated, horizonless backgrounds. The motif harkens back to Tanguy’s childhood memories of the Breton region of Finistère: his parents’ homeland, known for its dolmens and menhirs: monumental stone pillars of prehistoric times that were associated with myths, rituals, and sacrificial cults.

In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929), André Breton called for the “occultation” of his movement: the programmatic examination of occultism and magic. Nevertheless, the Surrealists rejected belief in the supernatural as such. Instead, they understood the surreal as an “absolute reality,” in which the boundary between dream and reality is magically suspended.