ABSTRACT
The notion of 'magic art' within surrealism may therefore seem self-evident. At the beginning of his study, Breton therefore draws upon Novalis, who coined the term 'magic art'. At the end of 1957, the Club Francais du Livre published an impressive work entitled Magic Art. Magic art is the form this 'mental alchemy' assumes which, being joined to Rimbaud's well-known 'alchemy of the word', means that any poet, any authentic artist, cannot be content to experiment with or innovate forms. In this respect, rituals and magical practices seem related to certain religious rituals, which also aim to 'bind' people with natural and cosmic forces. But is above all a clairvoyant whose art, recovering the very principle of ancient magical practices, whether immemorial or traditional, seeks to penetrate the mysteries of the external the internal world in order to transfigure them and, hence, 'transform the world and change life'.
