Breton, André

Breton, André (1896–1966). French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, the founder of the Surrealist movement and its chief theorist and promoter. He was born at Tinchebray, Orne, and studied medicine in Nantes, intending to specialize in mental disorders; his work with the insane was one of the sources of his interest in irrational imagery. During the First World War he served as an orderly in a military hospital; the suffering he saw appalled him and encouraged him to turn to writing, for he believed that emotional and imaginative forces could be used to offset the bankruptcy of science and rationalism. After his military service, Breton settled in Paris, where he became one of the editors of the review Littérature (1919–24), which encouraged new talent and in particular supported the Dada movement ( Marcel Duchamp became one of his heroes at this time). In 1920 he published Les Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields), containing texts he had produced with a writer friend, Philippe Soupault, by the method of free association—the first published examples of the techniques of automatism that were to become so important to Surrealism. This was followed in 1924 by Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme (dedicated to the memory of his friend Apollinaire), which marked the official launch of the movement. The manifesto was concerned mainly with the literary aspects of Surrealism, but Breton was deeply interested in painting; in 1925 he helped organize the first Surrealist exhibition (‘La Peinture surréaliste', Galerie Pierre, Paris) and when he took over as editor of La Révolution surréaliste in the same year he greatly increased its visual material. The first issue edited by Breton (no. 4) contained the first instalment of his most important statement on painting, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, which appeared in slightly expanded form as a book in 1928 (partly translated in What is Surrealism?, 1936, and fully translated as Surrealism and Painting, 1972). There had previously been some disagreement as to whether painting had a valid place in Surrealism, for automatism—so central to the movement—depended on a rapid flow of ideas, whereas painting is inherently static. Breton, however, argued that ‘vision is the most powerful of the senses, and so the ability to fix visual images means that Surrealism does have an interest in painting … overall, as in other areas of Surrealist work, the aim was to produce a crisis in bourgeois consciousness, to use painting, in Breton's words, as an “expedient” in the service of revolution’ ( Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–1990, 1992). He always thought of painting (as well as poetry) as a way of understanding and releasing our true natures, rather than as an aesthetic end in itself, and it dismayed him that the success of some Surrealist painters (especially Dalí) led the public to think of Surrealism as primarily a matter of style ( Dalí was one of several leading figures whom he expelled from the movement at various times for doctrinal reasons).

In the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste (no. 12, 1929) Breton published his Second Manifeste du surréalisme, and the following year he launched another magazine, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–3). He was interested in revolutionary ideas in politics as well as art and in 1927 he had joined the French Communist Party. Communism had attracted him as a bold endeavour to change humanity, but he became disenchanted with Stalin and transferred his Marxist political sympathies to Trotsky, whom he met when he made a lecture tour of Mexico in 1938. They jointly wrote a manifesto entitled Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant, which appeared under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera ( Trotsky thought it expedient to substitute the Mexican painter's name for his own); it appeared in translation as ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ in the left-wing American journal Partisan Review (autumn 1938) and soon afterwards in the London Bulletin (see MESENS). In 1939 Breton was drafted into the medical corps of the French army, but he was released the following year and in 1941 he emigrated to the USA, where he spent the remainder of the Second World War. In New York he formed part of a group of expatriate Surrealists who had an important influence on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism, and he helped David Hare to produce the magazine VVV; its first issue (June 1942) contained (in French and English) Breton's ‘Prolégomène à un troisième manifeste du Surréalisme ou non’ (‘Prolegomena to a third manifesto of Surrealism or else').

In 1946 Breton returned to Paris, where he continued to be regarded as the ‘Pope of Surrealism'. By this time, however, the movement was no longer a central force in intellectual life, and his death in 1966 was regarded by many as marking its end. Sarane Alexandrian (Surrealist Art, 1970) writes that ‘The number of tributes from his oldest companions which appeared in Parisian daily papers showed the degree to which he had been able to be not so much the leader of a school as a director of conscience … Even those who had long been divided from him by differences of every kind … made public statements of the sad nostalgia they felt.’ Among these people was Max Ernst, one of the major painters whose reputation Breton had helped to establish. Breton himself did not paint, but he made objects and collaborated in cadavre exquis drawings. He was interested in many aspects of art that lay outside the Western mainstream, including naive painting (notably the work of Hector Hyppolite) and psychotic art, owned a good collection of Polynesian artefacts, and had numerous enthusiasms ranging from Gothic novels to butterflies. These interests are suggestive of his complex and sometimes contradictory personality. John Golding writes that although he was ‘intellectually fearless and a genuine radical', he was also ‘oddly enough, a man who disliked excess … Like a lot of imaginative people … he was attracted to recklessness in others … but understandably enough he often felt more comfortable in their company if they happened to be dead or distant’ (‘The Blind Mirror: André Breton and Painting’ in Visions of the Modern, 1994).