André Breton (1896-1966)

French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, chief promoter and one of the founders of Surrealist movement with Paul Eluard, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali among others. Breton's manifestoes of Surrealism are the most important theoretical statements of the movement.

André Breton was born in Tinchebray (Orne) as the son of a shopkeeper. Breton studied medicine and later psychiatry, and met in 1921 Freud in Vienna. He never qualified but during World War I he served in the neurological ward and made some attepts to use Freudian methods to prychoanalyze his patients.

In 1916, Breton joined the Dadaist group, but after quarrels continued his march forward: "Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the road." He turned then to Surrealism and co-founded with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault the review Littérature. Very important for his literary work was his wartime meetings with Apollinaire. His MANIESTE DU SURRÉALISME was published in 1924. Influenced by psychological theories Breton defined Surrealism as a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to everyday world. In the Second Manifesto Breton stated that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the reral and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."

Breton and his colleagues believed that the springs of personal freedom and social an political liberty lay in the unconscious mind. They found examples of exploration of the mind from the works of such painters as Hieronymus Bosch and James Ensor and from the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry - and also from the revolutionary thinking of Karl Marx.

"Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assults on each other during a human life out of which the first one suffers the worse beating." (from Nadja, 1928)

From 1927 to 1935 Breton was a member of the French Communist Party. Although he broke with the party in disgust with Stalinism and Moskow show trials, he remained committed to Marxism. In 1938 he founded with Leon Trotsky, whom he met in Mexico, the Fédération de l'Art Revolutionnaire Independant. When the Nazis occupied France, Breton fled to the United States with Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. He held there a broadcasting job and arranged a surrealist exposition at Yale in 1942.

After WW II Breton travelled in the Southwest and the West Indies and returned to France in 1946. He soon became a important guru of a group of young Surrealists. In the 1940s and 1950s Breton wrote essays and collections of poems, among them ARCANE 17 (1945), a statement of love. He died in Paris on September 28, 1966.