50 Drawings to Murder Magic

by Antonin Artaud, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)

A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud’s struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them.

The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud’s death in 1948, changes it’s an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic—the piece that gives the book its title.

“Artaud matters,” wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true—perhaps more than ever.

Genres: Art, Poetry, Theatre

98 pages, Hardcover

First published September 23, 2004

About the author

French surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud advocated a deliberately shocking and confrontational style of drama that he called "theater of cruelty."

People better knew Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, an essayist, actor, and director.

Considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern theory, Antonin Artaud associated with artists and experimental groups in Paris during the 1920s.

Political differences then resulted in him breaking and founding the theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together, they expected to create a forum for works to change radically. Artaud especially expressed disdain for west of the day, panned the ordered plot and scripted language that his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and recorded his ideas in such works as Le Theatre de la cruaute and The Theatre and Its Double .

Artaud thought to represent reality and to affect the much possible audience and therefore used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.

Artaud wanted that the "spectacle" that "engulfed and physically affected" this audience, put in the middle. He referred to this layout like a "vortex," a "trapped and powerless" constantly shifting shape.

Reviews

[kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had really no idea who Antonin Artaud or almost any of the other authors were when I went to what was essentially the publishing house/gallery/store. I just thought it looked interesting and easy enough to finish reading in one sitting. So, I picked it up. And going into something without any expectations into translated poetry, especially when you're not skilled at analysing in the first place, is a unique feeling. I will be honest, I still do not understand it whole. I am fairly certain I missed a lot of things in the words, let alone those that got lost in translation, and the pencil strokes. But I still got the gist of it, felt the magic the Artaud was talking about. And then its quenching. Its not really a book you go out seeking. But it fills the honeycomb cells left void in an otherwise full art/reading space.

[Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

How can you not pick up a book with a name like this? The opening poem/introduction is haunting and a window onto a mind I'd love to know more about. Unfortunately, none of the other drawings/writings are translated, so it becomes a little book of doodles without much of a chance for the reader to enter.