Occultism in Surrealism on the eve of the Second World War

By the end of the 1930s, Surrealism was taking a distinct turn towards the occult. As this coincided for a large part with the addition of new members to the group, it stands to reason that there must be a relationship between these developments, but I can offer only circumstantial evidence and speculation. As argued earlier, the emphasis upon correspondences, myth and the magical worldview during the 1930s created the conditions for an alignment of Surrealism with occult thought. This may have attracted new artists to Surrealism who had been interested in occultism and/or esotericism anyway; alternatively, it may have provided the perfect climate for some to fully pursue a latent interest in occult matters. Possibly it was a combination of both. Another interesting development is that the personal occult trajectories of the second generation surrealists often differed considerably from that of the first generation. Ernst, for one, had been engaging alchemical concepts and symbols in his work since the early 1920s. Books such as Michelet's La Sorcière and Grillot de Givry's Le Musée des sorciers circulated widely in the group during the 1930s. Still, those who joined in that decade often also showed an interest in contemporary occultism. For first-generation surrealists ‒ Breton first and foremost ‒ the only contemporary template was non-Western tribal (‘primitive’) culture.

The majority of second-generation artists who were integrating occult subjects and study into their work moved away in the 1940s to pursue individual careers outside Surrealism ‒ that is to say, outside of the Bretonian core group. As a result, at the very moment that Breton was fully embracing occultism, that is between 1943 and 1950 (perhaps extended to 1957), artists such as Matta, Brauner, Carrington, Varo and Seligmann, to whom occultism was quite important, were distancing themselves from him. Many of these artists moved on to a form of magical realism, whereas Bretonian Surrealism remained resolutely analytically realist, even cerebral, in its obsession with the unconscious and irrational. Thoroughly grounded in the literature and thought of the (predominantly romantic) past, steeped in the French tradition of intellectual and scholarly engagement with the ‘hermetic tradition,’ magic remained a theoretical exercise for Breton, always located in a historical past and cultural margin.