ANDRÉ R. BRETON, THE FRENCH LEADER OF SURREALISM

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí.

 

Jordi and The Grandma love literature, and they have been talking about André Breton, the French writer and poet leader of surrealism, who was born on a day like yesterday in 1896.

André Robert Breton (18 February 1896-28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet.

He is known best as the co-founder, leader, principal theorist and chief apologist of surrealism. His writings include the first Manifeste du surréalisme of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism. Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as Nadja and L'Amour fou.

Those activities combined with his critical and theoretical work for writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in twentieth-century French art and literature.

André Breton was the only son born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, France. His father, Louis-Justin Breton, was a policeman and atheistic, and his mother, Marguerite-Marie-Eugénie Le Gouguès, was a former seamstress. Breton attended medical school, where he developed a particular interest in mental illness. His education was interrupted when he was conscripted for World War I.

During World War I, he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide when aged 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

More information: The Art Story

Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine No. 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The flat on rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art. Like his father, he was an atheist.

Breton launched the review Littérature in 1919, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also associated with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924, he was instrumental in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

In Les Champs Magnétiques, a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste from that year on. A group of writers became associated with him: Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.

Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933. Nadja, a novel about his encounter with an imaginative woman who later became mentally ill, was published in 1928.

Breton celebrated the concept of Mad Love, and many women joined the surrealist group over the years. Toyen was a good friend. During this time, he survived mostly by the sale of paintings from his art gallery.

However, visiting Mexico provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists travelled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Erongarícuaro. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera, calling for complete freedom of art, which was becoming increasingly difficult with the world situation of the time.

Breton was again in the medical corps of the French Army at the start of World War II. The Vichy government banned his writings as the very negation of the national revolution and Breton escaped, with the help of the American Varian Fry and Hiram Harry Bingham IV, to the United States and the Caribbean during 1941. He emigrated to New York City and lived there for a few years. In 1942, Breton organized a groundbreaking surrealist exhibition at Yale University.

Breton returned to Paris in 1946, where he opposed French colonialism (for example as a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War) and continued, until his death, to foster a second group of surrealists in the form of expositions or reviews (La Brèche, 1961–65). In 1959, he organized an exhibit in Paris.

By the end of World War II, André Breton decided to embrace anarchism explicitly.

In 1952, Breton wrote It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself. Breton consistently supported the francophone Anarchist Federation, and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists around founder and Secretary General Georges Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération communiste libertaire.

André Breton died at the age of 70 in 1966, and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris.

More information: Surrealist Art

 Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

André Breton