Sunday, April 27, 2025, 19.00 to 20.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

The International Society for the Study of Surrealism would like to invite you to our next event, the book launch of Will Atkin’s Surrealist Sorcery. The author will discuss the book alongside some related recent research on the life and work of Jorge Camacho.

Register for the event here.

From very early on, the surrealists approached magic as a means of bypassing, discrediting, and combatting rationalism, capitalism, and other institutionalized systems and values that they saw to be constraining influences upon modern life. Surrealist Sorcery maps out how this interest in magic developed into a major area of surrealist research that led not only to theoretical but also practical explorations of the subject. Taking an international perspective, Atkin surveys this important quality of the movement and how it’s remained an important element in the surrealist project and its ongoing legacy.

Will Atkin is an Art Historian specialising in nineteenth and twentieth century European art history. His research has focused on discourses of magic and occultism and the legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, as matters that underpin the art and writing of the Surrealist Movement. He is the author of several publications on aspects of the history of the Surrealist Movement, including the book, Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement (Bloomsbury, 2023), and essays in the forthcoming catalogue to the exhibition, Rendezvous der Träume: Surrealismus und Deutsche Romantik (Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2025). He received his PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2017, and was previously awarded his BA and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham 2020–2023, and is now an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art.