André Breton
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André Breton (February 18, 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 Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24 and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), to which Breton wrote four introductory essays.In 1919 Breton founded the review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with Dadaist Tristan Tzara.
In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques), 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 Révolution surréaliste from 1924. A group coalesced around him — Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.
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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. 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. Together, they wrote a manifesto Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendent (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.
Dissatisfied with the Vichy government, Breton sought refuge in the United States and the Caribbean in 1941. Breton made the acquaintance of Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, and later penned the introduction to the 1947 edition of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Breton returned to Paris in 1946, where he intervened against French colonialialism (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, 1961-1965). 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 Dalí, Joan Miró, Enrique Tábara and Eugenio Granell.
His works include the novels Nadja (1928) and L'Amour Fou (1937).
He married three times
- His first wife was the former Simone Kahn.
- His second wife was the former Jacqueline Lamba.
- His third wife was the former Elisa Claro.
References
- André Breton: Surrealism and Painting - edited and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti.
- Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. ISBN 0472061828
External links
- [André Breton's workshop]
- [The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)]
- [Das "Anrennen gegen die Grenzen der Sprache" Diskussion mit Roland Barthes, André Breton, Gilles Deleuze & Raymond Federman by Ralph Lichtensteiger]
- [André Breton's Nadja]
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