Cosa Mentale: Art et télépathie au XXᵉ siècle

Far from remaining an obscure paranormal fantasy, telepathy continues to intrigue artists throughout the XXᵉ century. Cosa Mentale proposes to reread the adventure of modern art through their fascination for a direct transmission of thought and emotions. From this angle, the project of the avant-garde is less to undo the great illusionist lie of painting than to invent a new, more immediate relationship between the artist and the spectator. Drawing on some of the great figures of modernity, from Edvard Munch to Sigmar Polke, including Oskar Kokoschka, Odilon Redon, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Frantisek Kupka, Vassily Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí and many others, this book shows how telepathy will have an unexpected influence on the birth of the first forms of abstraction or, in the interwar period, on a surrealism obsessed with the collective sharing of creation. Omnipresent in the universe of science fiction, it resurfaces in psychedelic and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, before resurfacing today in the universe of contemporary artists, bewitched by the technologies of «shared knowledge».