Andre Breton
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Andre Breton
Andre Breton (February 19, 1896 - September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism.
Biography
Born into modest origins in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry.During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the spiritual son of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vache, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably.
Vache committed suicide at age 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.
Beauty will be convulsive
or will not be at all.
~Andre Breton
From Dada to Surrealism
1919 Breton founded the review Litterature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924 he was instrumental to the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnetiques), a collaboration with Soupault, he put the principle of automatic writing into practice. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of La Revolution surrealiste from 1924. A group coalesced around him - Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Rene Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.
Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933. During this time, he survived mostly off the sale of paintings from his art gallery.
Under Breton's direction, surrealism became a European movement that influenced all domains of art, and called into question the origin of human understanding and human perceptions of things and events.
In 1938 Breton accepted a cultural commission from the French government to travel to Mexico. This provided the opportunity to meet Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists sought refuge via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the surreal town of Erongaricuaro. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote a manifesto Pour un art revolutionnaire independent (published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera) which called for "complete freedom of art", which was becoming increasingly difficult in the world situation of the time.
It is livingand ceasing to
live that are
imaginary solutions.
Existence is elsewhere.
~Andre Breton
1940s
Breton was again in the medical corp 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 sought refuge in the United States and the in 1941. Breton made the acquaintance of writer Aime Cesaire, and later penned the introduction to the 1947 edition of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. During his exile in New York City, he met Elisa, the Chilean woman who would become his third wife.
In 1944, he and Elisa traveled to Gaspesie in Quebec, Canada, where he wrote Arcane 17, a book which expresses his fears of World War II, describes the marvels of the Rocher Perce and the northeastern end of North America, and celebrates his newly found love with Elisa.
In 1944, he and Elisa traveled to Gaspesie in Quebec, Canada, where he wrote Arcane 17, a book which expresses his fears of World War II, describes the marvels of the Rocher Perce and the northeastern end of North America, and celebrates his newly found love with Elisa.
Later life
Breton returned to Paris in 1946, where he intervened against 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 Breche, 1961-1965). In 1959, Andre Breton organized an exhibit in Spain to celebrate the Fortieth Anniversary of Surrealism called the Homage to Surrealism which exhibited works by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Enrique Tabara and Eugenio Granell.
Andre Breton died in 1966 at 70 and was buried in the Cimetiere des Batignolles in Paris.
Andre Breton died in 1966 at 70 and was buried in the Cimetiere des Batignolles in Paris.
Breton As A Collector
Breton's collection
Selected modern painters or sculptors:
Pierre Alechinsky, Aloïse Corbaz, Braulio Arenas, Arman, Jean Arp, Enrico Baj, Ben, A Benquet, Alexandre Boileau, Bona Pieyre de Mandiargue, Micheline Bounoure, André Bourdil, Francis Bouvet, Victor Brauner, Elisa Breton, Jorge Caceres, Jacques Callot, Jorge Camacho, Paul Colinet, Pierre Courthion, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Salvador Dalí, André Demonchy, Ferdinand Desnos, Deyema, Oscar Dominguez, Enrico Donati, Mirabelle Dors, Marcel Duchamp, Baudet Dulary, René Duvilliers, Yves Elléouët, Nusch Eluard, Paul Eluard, Colette Enard, Jimmy Ernst, Max Ernst, Henri Espinoza, Fahr el Nissa Zeid, Jean Fautrier, Luis Fernandez, Charles Filiger, Alexandre Evariste, Johann Henrich Füssli, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Gironella, Arshile Gorky, Eugenio Granell, Henri de Groux, Jacques Hérold, René Iché, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Diego Rivera, Yves Tanguy, Adolf Wölfli, etc.
Selected photographers:
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Pierre Argillet, Bach Fritz, Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassaï, Elisa Breton, Claude Cahun, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Léo Dohmen, Paul Dacceti, Izis, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Raoul Ubac, Emile van Moerkerken, etc.
kachina dolls
Marriages
Breton married three times:
- His first wife, from 1921 to 1931, was Simone Collinet, née Simone Kahn (1897-1980).
- His second wife was Jacqueline Lamba, with whom he had his only child, a daughter named Aube.
- His third wife was Elisa Claro.
References
- Andre Breton: Surrealism and Painting - edited and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti.
- Manifestoes of Surrealism by Andre Breton, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane.
Further Reading
Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton
Amazon Price: $14.99 (as of 02/15/2012)
List Price: $20.95
Words make love
with one another.
~Andre Breton
André Breton: Dossier Dada
Amazon Price: $20.00 (as of 02/15/2012)
List Price: $35.00
To the Dadaists, a successful provocation had little meaning in itself. Content was less important than audience reaction. And what really consummated a Dada event was indignant commentary in the press--so much so that some legendary works occurred exclusively in newspapers, which trustingly printed the Dadaists' invented stories. Andra Breton's recently discovered, unpublished album, Dossier Dada tracks his own publicity and press coverage, an intrinsic part of his work, from 1916 to 1924. Breton, a central figure in the Dada movement and later the driving force behind the Surrealists, included not only newspaper and magazine articles in which he was mentioned but all of his own original documentation for the events covered--invitations, posters and letters. At 12 by 15 inches across and about 8 inches thick, the album is, among its other distinctions, the largest known Dada collage. The more manageable 80 pages reprinted here have been chosen to present an almost complete chronicle of the public pieces and publications of the Dadaists in Paris.
All my life,my heart has
yearned for
a thing I
cannot name.
~Andre Breton
Love is when youmeet someone who
tells you something
new about yourself.
~Andre Breton
Spotlight: Nadja
Nadja
Amazon Price: $7.60 (as of 02/15/2012)
Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work--pictures of various 'surreal' people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.~Andre Breton
~Andre Breton
Poems
Always For The First Time by Andre Breton
Always for the first timeHardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It's a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It's a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the
forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time
~Andre Breton
Freedom of Love
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
Sunflower
The traveler who crossed Les Halles at summer's end
Walked on tiptoe
Despair rolled its great handsome lilies across the sky
And in her handbag was my dream that flask of salts
That only God's godmother had breathed
Torpors unfurled like mist
At the Chien qui Fume
Where pro and con had just entered
They could hardly see the young woman and then only at an angle
Was I dealing with the ambassadress of saltpeter
Or with the white curve on black background we call thought
The Innocents' Ball was in full swing
The Chinese lanterns slowly caught fire in chestnut trees
The shadowless lady knelt on the Pont-au-Change
On Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps had changed
The night's promises had been kept at last
The carrier pigeons and emergency kisses
Merged with the beautiful stranger's breasts
Jutting beneath the crepe of perfect meanings
A farm prospered in the heart of Paris
And its windows looked out on the Milky Way
But no one lived there yet because of the guests
Guests who are known to be more faithful than ghosts
Some like that woman appear to be swimming
And a bit of their substance becomes part of love
She internalizes them
I am the plaything of no sensory power
And yet the cricket who sang in hair of ash
One evening near the statue of Etienne Marcel
Threw me a knowing glance
Andre Breton it said pass
(Translated by Mark Polizzotti)
Walked on tiptoe
Despair rolled its great handsome lilies across the sky
And in her handbag was my dream that flask of salts
That only God's godmother had breathed
Torpors unfurled like mist
At the Chien qui Fume
Where pro and con had just entered
They could hardly see the young woman and then only at an angle
Was I dealing with the ambassadress of saltpeter
Or with the white curve on black background we call thought
The Innocents' Ball was in full swing
The Chinese lanterns slowly caught fire in chestnut trees
The shadowless lady knelt on the Pont-au-Change
On Rue Gît-le-Coeur the stamps had changed
The night's promises had been kept at last
The carrier pigeons and emergency kisses
Merged with the beautiful stranger's breasts
Jutting beneath the crepe of perfect meanings
A farm prospered in the heart of Paris
And its windows looked out on the Milky Way
But no one lived there yet because of the guests
Guests who are known to be more faithful than ghosts
Some like that woman appear to be swimming
And a bit of their substance becomes part of love
She internalizes them
I am the plaything of no sensory power
And yet the cricket who sang in hair of ash
One evening near the statue of Etienne Marcel
Threw me a knowing glance
Andre Breton it said pass
(Translated by Mark Polizzotti)
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Quotes
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
~Andre Breton
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
~Andre Breton
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
~Andre Breton
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
~Andre Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
~Andre Breton
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
~Andre Breton
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
~Andre Breton
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
~Andre Breton
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
~Andre Breton
~Andre Breton
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
~Andre Breton
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
~Andre Breton
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
~Andre Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
~Andre Breton
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
~Andre Breton
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
~Andre Breton
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
~Andre Breton
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
~Andre Breton
Surrealism Links
- Surrealism - Wikipedia
- Surrealism [1] is a cultural movement that began in the early-1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. ...
- Surrealism
- Surrealism.org is dedicated to Surrealism. ... Surrealism is a cultural movement and artistic style that was founded in 1924 by André Breton. ...
- Welcome to Surrealist.com - Surrealism, Surrealist & Surrealism ...
- Surrealism, surrealist, surreal, art, literature, music, dada, dadaism, and everything else.
- ArtLex on Surrealist Art
- Surrealism defined with images of examples from art history, great quotations, and links to other resources.
- History of Surrealism
- Good introduction to Surrealism maintained by Monica Sanchez.
- SURREALISM
- Surrealism inherited its anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, but was lighter in spirit than that movement. Like Dada, it was shaped by emerging theories ...
- The Surrealism Server
- Extensive collection including a bibliography, image gallery, surrealist games, and the Surrealist Compliment Generator.
- Literary Encyclopedia: Surrealism
- Although first named, with a term borrowed from Apollinaire, in André Breton's manifesto of 1924, the roots of the Surrealist movement are to be found ...
- ravenblack.net : The Random Surrealism Generator
- Random Surrealism Generator. Add it to your page for free. Come here to see what it's all about.
- Breton-What is Surrealism?
- A lecture given in Brussels on 1st June 1934 at a public meeting organised by the Belgian Surrealists, and issued as a pamphlet immediately afterwards.
- Female Surrealist Artists
- Special thanks go to Whitney Chadwick for her wonderful look at female Surrealistes in her book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. ...
- What? This is Surrealism.
- Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, a work that helps define the movement itself; yet this is the first U.S. publication of ...
- Art Web Sites: Surrealist Links
- Other Surrealists: "Alberto Giacometti and the Surrealists" - M. Harden: Picasso: Bienvenue sur le Web de Picasso (sometimes Surrealist): Surrealism ...
- Surrealist Manifesto 1924
- Includes the translated Manifesto of Surrealism, Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art, and A Surrealist Manifesto (written mostly by André Breton).
- A Short Inverted Bibliography of Surrealism
- Extensive collection of books about Surrealism.
- Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in ...
- Page 1 of Irene E. Hofmann's 'Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection'
- Photography and Surrealism | Thematic Essay | Timeline of Art ...
- Surrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not ...
- breton
- The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, ... Surrealism, as I envisage it, proclaims loudly enough our absolute ...
- French surrealist poetry in English translation by David Gascoyne
- French surrealist poetry by Arp, Breton, Dalí, Péret, Picasso, Ribemont-Dessaignes and Unik in English translation by David Gascoyne.
- What is Surrealism by: André Breton - Surrealism, Surrealist ...
- A history of surrealism, surreal art, and the artists involved in the surrealist art movement. A definitive history of the surrealist movement. ...
- The Surrealist Art Movement: definition | surrealist artists ...
- The Surrealist Art Movement: art, artists and authors. This is a portion of The Biography Project.
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