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Breton Andre 1896 - 1966 (70)

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.


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Manifesto of

Surrealism Surrealism is a psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

Andre Breton was an important French novelist, poet and essayist, cofounder and principal theorist of surrealism. He was born on 19 February 1896 in Tinchebray, Normandy, in a bourgeois family. He studied Medicine and Psychiatry in Paris and during first world war he was employed in various psychiatric centers. He came into contact with Freud's work and met at the Nantes hospital with the practitioner and poet Aragon. He began to write poetry and in 1919 he published his first poetry collection. With Aragón and Soupault he started a literary magazine called “Litterature”, while in 1919-1921 he participated in the initial events of the Dadaism movement in Paris, but he publicly denied it in 1922. Two years later, in October 1924 , he published the first Manifesto of Surrealism:

EXPERIENCE, name noun. Genuine psychic automatism, in which one expresses in writing, orally, or in any other way, the true function of thought. Denial of thought without any reasonable control, beyond any aesthetic or moral sense. "

In 1926 he joined the French Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1933. In 1928 he published his book "Surrealism and Painting", one of the most important theoretical texts on surrealist painting. In July 1930, he founded a new Surrealism magazine "Surrealism at the service of the Revolution", with the main goal of linking politics to poetry. In 1931 he got married and in February 1934, he signed with other celebrities a proclamation calling all intellectuals on a joint plan of action against rising fascism. At the same time, he made many trips to Europe and America, spreading surrealism. In one of those travels, he met with Leo Trotsky in Mexico (May 1938) and wrote a text titled "For an Independent Revolutionary Art”. In 1941, he left France due to World War II and emigrated to New York City, In 1942, he organized a groundbreaking Surrealist exhibition at Yale University. He returned to Paris in 1946, where he embraced anarchism explicitly and opposed communism and French colonialism. He died on September 28, 1966.

His most representative works are: The Magnetic Fields (1920), The Communicating Containers (1932), 17 Arcanum (1945), Poems (1948).