What is Magic Art”? In 1953, André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was invited by a prestigious French publisher to explore answers to this question. His resulting analysis is wide-ranging and evocative. Beginning with a literary review of magic and art, Breton draws upon Novalis and Baudelaire before considering the prehistoric rock art of Spain and France, the native art of the Pacific Northwest, the magical grimoires and alchemical symbolism of the Middle Ages, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Antoine Caron, Paolo Uccello, Gustav Moreau, Paul Gauguin and the Surrealists. Through these and other diverse sources, Breton traces . . . .go to book page >>

Penny Slinger is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work investigates the feminine, the magical and the erotic. While studying at Chelsea College of Art in the late 1960s, Slinger encountered Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (1934), initiating an enduring involvement with both the Surrealist movement and the medium of collage. In her first publication, 50% The Visible Woman (1971), Slinger explored the image of woman through a series of often provocative photomontage self-portraits and poetic texts. Such themes resonated keenly with the emerging feminist movement, and in 1973 Rolling Stone noted: this book will become as important on your . . . .go to book page >>

The images of women compiled in this pioneering volume evolved from alchemical philosophy, in which gendered and sexualized concepts are used to describe physical matter and laboratory processes. When alchemical imagery arose in the late Middle Ages, and over the next three centuries, images of women developed in ways that reflected wider social pressures. Building on scholarly studies of the increasing exclusion of women from public arenas in the early modern period, The Alchemical Feminine examines the transformations of alchemical images of women and the increasing masculinization of earlier feminine imagery.
When alchemy returned to the Latin West, metals were thought . . . .go to book page >>