Prospect recommends: The Dark Monarch

Surrealism, though the reference books do not always tell you this, was often profoundly informed by the occult. André Breton, the movement’s leader, may have thundered against it from time to time, but the other leading surrealists were passionate students of the western esoteric tradition. This penchant for the magical and mystical was, if anything, even stronger in the British wing of surrealism, most spectacularly in the case of Ithell Colquhoun, who was not merely an artist but a proper, practising witch. (For more on surrealism, see Hermione Eyre, p71) Colquhoun and her cohorts are being given their place in the sun once more by this exhibition at Tate St Ives, subtitled “Magic and Modernity in British Art.” The modernity side will be familiar enough—works by Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth; it’s the magic that will be the novelty. Expect plenty of menhirs and stone circles, ley lines and geomantic patterns—but also to find out, for instance, how Derek Jarman was a follower of Dee and Paracelsus as well as an angry gay polemicist. And for those who care for such things, there is a Damien Hirst piece in untypically whimsical mode: a vitrine display, featuring not a shark or sliced cow but a cute unicorn.

The Dark Monarch Tate St Ives, 10th-October-10th January 2010, Tel: 01736 796 226, www.tate.org.uk/stives