Surrealism and Magical Art

Surrealism and the Occult

by Nadia Choucha

1991 140 pages 1869928164, £8.99/$15 pbk 1869928245

Many people associate Surrealism with politics, but it was also permeated by occult ideas, a fact often overlooked by art historians. This occult influence goes beyond general themes to the movement's very heart. The antinomian stance of Surrealism can be traced directly to the influence of radical nineteenth century magi such as Eliphas Levi, whose Dogma and Ritual of High Magic was widely read by Surrealism's ideologues. Surrealism did not establish itself in Britain until the 1930s but a select few felt something in the air. Almost ten years before the surrealist experiments with automatic drawing, an obscure English artist, Austin Osman Spare had perfected this technique.

'Highly readable...seminal... fascinating' Francis X. King

'alive, with the heady mixture of occult and pictorial symbolism treated with laudable lucidity.' Art Book News

Pan's Daughter

The Magical World of Rosaleen Norton

by Nevill Drury

168 pages, 48 illus,1869928318 pbk, £7.99/$14.95

In the 1950s Rosaleen Norton was popularly known in Australia as the 'Witch of Kings Cross'--a colourful, bohemian figure from Sidney's red light district. A natural trance artist, she experimented with self-hypnosis and as a result of her visionary explorations portrayed a wide range of supernatural beings in her paintings and drawings. Her 'pagan' art plunged her into continuous controversy and was the focus of obsentity trials. Her visionary drawings can be compared with those of English trance artist Austin Osman Spare. This is the first account of at her life as a whole and looks both her magical beliefs and her art and includes a fascinating selection of previously unpublished material.
'...an extremely important document detailing the public and private prices this courageous unsung woman-hero paid for un apologetically 'dealing with life on other planes of being.'

E.I.D.O.S. (Everyone Is Doing Outrageous Sex)

Sickert and the Ripper Crimes

by Jean Overton Fuller

1990, 260pages, 1869928156 £14.95/$25 dollars hbk

In the autumn of 1888 London women lived under the shadow of the Ripper murders - killings perhaps unmatched in their sadistic brutality. Florence Pash, friend and colleague of the painter Walter Sickert and herself an artist, confided to the author's mother when in her late eighties, a terrible story that she had kept even from those closest to her. Jean Overton Fuller draws on the new evidence of Florence Pash, and with her own artist's eye discovers clues in Sickert's pictures, pointing conclusively to the true identity of the Ripper...

'new and important evidence.' Colin Wilson

Art In America

by Aleister Crowley

1869928-040 £2.50/$4.95 dollars pbk 16 pages

Written for The English Review in 1913, this essay says more about Crowley than about American Art. It was much criticized by contemporary American artists for its prejudice and unfairness. Crowley says in his Confessions that he planned other, more positive essays dealing with the present and future of American Art. The essay's lasting value is historical - how differently things have come to look in the intervening seventy years. Aquarian Arrow, No 26...' A sound contribution to the promulgation of Thelema'

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