André Breton

• 1. Introduction

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  André Breton defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" - a phrase that landed in print in 1924 and reoriented the entire direction of modern art. He was a French poet and writer from Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, and by the time he died in 1966 he had written manifestos, novels, and theoretical texts that drew writers, painters, and political radicals into his orbit across five decades. How does a policeman's son from the Norman countryside become the self-appointed pope of an international avant-garde? And what happens when that pope starts shooting - at least on paper - into the crowd?

• 2. A Mind Shaped by War

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  Breton was conscripted into World War I before finishing medical school, and the war deposited him in a neurological ward in Nantes. There he met Jacques Vaché, a devotee of the playwright Alfred Jarry, whose anti-social posture and contempt for established artistic tradition made a lasting mark on Breton. Vaché died by suicide at age 23, and his wartime letters were collected in a volume called Lettres de guerre, published in 1919, for which Breton wrote four introductory essays. The loss carried weight. Vaché had shown Breton that art could be a weapon pointed at convention rather than a decoration hung on its walls. That lesson informed everything Breton would write afterward.

  The medical ward also gave Breton a framework. His particular interest in mental illness, developed during his studies, now had a clinical context. He watched closely how minds broke down and how language escaped rational control. That observation would become the theoretical core of surrealism: if you let the unconscious speak without interference, what comes out is truer than anything the reasoning mind can produce.

• 3. The Manifesto and Its Enemies

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  In 1919, Breton co-founded the literary review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He had also begun associating with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and with Soupault he co-wrote Les Champs Magnétiques, putting the principle of automatic writing into practice. The 1924 Surrealist Manifesto gave the movement a name and a credo, and it brought a group of writers directly into Breton's circle: Soupault, Aragon, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.

  By December 1929, Breton published a second manifesto, and one sentence in it became notorious. He wrote that the simplest surrealist act consists of going into the street with a revolver and firing blindly into the crowd. Albert Camus was among those who found it reproachable. Georges Limbour called it buffoonery and shamelessness. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes called Breton a hypocrite, a cop, and a priest.

  The reaction was fierce enough to produce Un Cadavre, a collective pamphlet published in 1930 by writers and artists who had been insulted by Breton or objected to his domination of the movement. Breton added a note to the second edition of the manifesto: he said the sentence was not a practical recommendation, and that demanding he explain himself was like a bourgeois demanding a non-conformist explain why he had not committed suicide. The clarification did not entirely quiet his critics.

• 4. Politics and Ruptures

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  Breton was drawn to the idea of combining Arthur Rimbaud's vision of personal transformation with Karl Marx's politics of social revolution. He joined the French Communist Party in 1927 along with others in the surrealist circle. The party expelled him in 1933. The friction between surrealism and institutional communism never fully resolved.

  In June 1935, at the first International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in Paris, it spilled into physical confrontation. The Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg had published a pamphlet insulting Breton and his fellow surrealists, calling them parasites who endorsed a list of behaviors that included, in the pamphlet's language, onanism, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism, and sodomy. Breton found Ehrenburg on the street and slapped him several times. The surrealists were expelled from the Congress.

  René Crevel, whom Salvador Dalí described as the only serious communist among the surrealists, found himself isolated from Breton's group at this point. Both Breton's displeasure with Crevel's bisexuality and a broader frustration with communists had created the distance. In 1938, Breton traveled to Mexico on a cultural commission from the French government. After a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he said, after getting lost in Mexico City because no one had met him at the airport: "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world." The trip gave him access to Leon Trotsky, and together they co-wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, calling for complete freedom of art. The manifesto was published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera.

• 5. Exile and Haiti

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  When France fell in 1940, the Vichy government banned Breton's writings as "the very negation of the national revolution." He escaped with the help of the American Varian Fry and Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV. By 1941 he was in New York City. In 1942, he organized a surrealist exhibition at Yale University and collaborated with the artist Wifredo Lam on a publication of his poem "Fata Morgana," illustrated by Lam. In New York he met Elisa Bindhoff, the Chilean woman who became his third wife. In 1944, the two traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec, where Breton wrote Arcane 17, a book wrestling with his fears about World War II while also describing the Percé Rock and celebrating his new relationship.

  In 1945 and into 1946, Breton visited Haiti. He sought to connect surrealist ideas with the legacies of the Haitian Revolution and the ritual practices of Vodou possession. He was particularly taken by the painter and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, whom Breton identified as the first artist to depict Vodou scenes and the lwa, the Vodou deities, directly rather than disguising them in Catholic imagery or tracing them in vevé, the powder-drawn ritual forms that are not permanent. In the visitors' book at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, Breton wrote: "Haitian painting will drink the blood of the phoenix. And, with the epaulets of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, it will ventilate the world."

  Breton acknowledged openly that his understanding of Hyppolite's work was limited by the fact that the two men shared no common language. He returned to France with multiple paintings by Hyppolite, weaving them into surrealism's growing focus on the occult and myth. His time in Haiti overlapped with the overthrow of president Élie Lescot. A youth journal called La Ruche published one of Breton's talks alongside a commentary described by Breton himself as having an insurrectional tone. The government suppressed the issue, a student strike followed, then a general strike, and Lescot fell. Breton later insisted in interviews that the misery of the Haitian people had brought them to a breaking point long before he arrived, and that it would be absurd to claim he alone caused the government's fall.

• 6. The Collector's Apartment

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  On the 1st of January 1922, Breton and his first wife, Simone Kahn, moved into an apartment at 42 rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district of Paris. Over the following decades, the apartment became a container for more than 5,300 objects: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art. Breton was especially drawn to materials from the northwest coast of North America.

  Financial crisis forced him to auction most of the collection in 1931, along with the collection of his friend Paul Éluard. He rebuilt it afterward. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who spent time with Breton in 1940s New York, endorsed Breton's skill at authentication. After Breton died on the 28th of September 1966, his third wife Elisa and his daughter Aube opened the archive and collection to students and researchers. After thirty-six years, when efforts to establish a surrealist foundation to protect the collection were blocked, the auction house Calmels Cohen sold the collection at Drouot-Richelieu. A wall of the rue Fontaine apartment survives today at the Centre Georges Pompidou. In May 2008, Sotheby's separately auctioned nine manuscripts, including a previously partly unpublished version of the Surrealist Manifesto.

• 7. Later Work and Lasting Influence

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  Breton returned to Paris in 1946 and remained an active political voice until his death. He signed the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War and continued to support the francophone Anarchist Federation, offering solidarity even after its founder Georges Fontenis transformed the FA into the Fédération communiste libertaire. He organized a Paris exhibition in 1959 and edited the surrealist journal La Brèche from 1961 to 1965.

  His major books include Nadja, a novel about an imaginative encounter with a woman who later becomes mentally ill, published in 1928, and L'Amour fou, published in 1937. His critical and theoretical writings on the visual arts ran alongside his poetry and fiction across more than four decades. Breton died at the age of 70 and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris. His later writings on Hector Hyppolite, written after returning from Haiti with multiple Hyppolite paintings, were undeniably central to the artist's international standing from the late 1940s onward.