Parkinson’s extensive knowledge of the field allows him to navigate with ease between continents, following the various developments and reception of modern art in the twentieth century. His ability to modify the length of his focus from detailed textual analysis to wider comparative geographical and art historical contexts makes this book one of the most astute on the movement to date.

French History

Gavin Parkinson had the novel idea to reconsider the canonical figures of late nineteenth century French painting as they appear within the discourse of Surrealism: Cézanne or Gauguin through Breton or Dalí. His gambit pays off brilliantly. He ferrets out a shadow history of French modernism, tracking long-lost interpretive metaphors that shift from positive to negative and back again. The surrealist alternative to traditional criticism generates an unfamiliar constellation of cultural significance. From out of its obscurity, Parkinson reveals the “mythic, poetic or magic resonance” of the practice otherwise known as modernism.

Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and Director of Center for the Study of Modernism, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat—those canonical modernists we thought we knew—are reinvested with myth, magic and poetry in this lively and polemical account of their 'Surrealisation' in the mid-20th century. Parkinson pulls no punches in voting for the Surrealists as the most perceptive interpreters of this alternative cast of 19th-century precursors.

Linda Goddard, Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies, University of St. Andrews, UK