This book aims to investigate Surrealism’s precedents in visual tradition and to explore its influence on contemporary art. Taking the ideational power of vision as its starting point, 13 essays examine, from different perspectives, themes essential to the Surrealist avant-garde – dreams, magic, madness – but also mystic visions, hybridity and the ongoing relevance of syncretic figures as protean germinations of the irrational. The book opens with a reconsideration of André Breton’s last book,
L’Art Magic
(1957). The other essays cover a rather wide array of themes from the witches’ iconography in the early Modern period to the contemporary immersive video-installations, with some specific surrealism-related topics brought into focus. Following the file rouge traced by Breton, the possibility of a different narrative on art history clearly emerges.