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).

BRETON, ANDRÉ (1896-1966)

A French poet, the founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, André Breton was born February 19, 1896, in Tinchebray, France, and died in Paris on September 28, 1966. Until he was four years old, Breton was raised in Brittany by his maternal grandfather. Nostalgia for those early years of astonishment, fear, and surprise never left Breton. In 1907 he entered the Lycée Chaptal in Paris. In 1913 he began studying medicine, published his first verses, and established literary friendships, first with Paul Valéry, followed by Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy.

Mobilized in 1915, in July 1916 he asked to be assigned to the army's neuropsychiatric center in Saint-Dizier. This period had a "decisive influence" (Conversations, 1952) on Breton. As a student of medicine, he observed his patients with close attention. He developed a strong interest in psychiatry and in Freud, whose ideas he encountered for the first time in Emmanuel Régis's Précis de psychiatrie. As a poet he began to ask questions about literary creation. The discourse of madness contained striking images, how did these come into being? How did madmen and poets develop their language? What was the relationship between subject and object embodied in language?

Freud provided a response to these fundamental questions but Breton had access to them only in the form of Régis's introduction. As a result his concept of Freudian analysis was distorted. Although Breton understood the role of the libido, the conflict between desire and censure, and the dream work that provides insight into the artistic process, he believed with Régis that the analytic method was a mechanized collection of the subject's verbal outpourings, which he repeated as they popped into his mind, like a "recording device" (Régis). This was a formula Breton was to use in his Surrealist Manifesto : "We . . . who have turned ourselves into . . . modest recording devices in our art . . ." (1924). Transference, the analyst's suspended attention in the face of the representations supplied by the subject or their interpretation, dream associations, all of this disappeared. Although Breton continued his medical training until 1920, he was not interested in therapy. His meeting with Freud in 1921 had no affect on him (1924). The problems he wanted to resolve were different: "There is the entire question of language." (1919)

With psychoanalysis, Freud provided Breton with a theory of language. "Those verbal representations that Freud claims are 'memory traces arising principally from acoustic perceptions' are precisely what constitute the raw material of poetry" (1935). The poet as dreamer is the "receiver of Indirect Contributions" supplied by the figurative activity of the preconscious mind, where representations of words and things make contact with one another. He "yields to the collage" of associations (1919). This leads to the creative experiments Breton conducted from 1919 to 1924 (automatic writing, hallucinosis, half-sleep, automatic writing, and others), which found a large number of applications in literature.

In the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton condensed the theoretical conclusions he drew from his experiments. This was the founding text of the surrealist movement that did so much to introduce Freudian ideas to France and elsewhere. Although Breton used Hegelian dialectics to criticize Freud (Communicating Vessels, 1932; the republication of 1955 contains three letters from Freud to Breton), he continued to study him (Carnet, 1921, Cahier de la girafe sur la Science des rêves, 1931, Position politique du surréalisme, 1935, Anthology of Black Humor, 1940) and emphasize the importance of his thought. "Surrealism . . . considers the Freudian critique of ideas . . . to be the first and only one with a basis in fact" (1930).

Nicole Geblesco

See also: Claude, Henri Charles Jules; Literature and psychoanalysis; Surrealism and psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Alexandrian, Sarane. (1974). Le surréalisme et le rêve. Paris: Gallimard.

Bonnet, Marguerite. (1975). La violence du voir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Breton, Andre. (1988, 1992). Œuvres complètes (M. Bonnet, Ed.). Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade.

Carrouges, Michel. (1950). André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard.

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. (1978). Les vases non communicants. N.R.F, 302, 26-45.

André Breton

The French writer André Breton (1896-1966) was the leader of the surrealist movement, which was the most important force in French poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.

André Breton was born in Tinchebray and was studying to be a doctor when he was drafted in 1915. The period of World War I was extremely important for Breton in orienting his career. Already interested in poetry, he met the writers Louis Aragon and Philip Soupault while in the army. Also influenced by meetings with the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Valéry and the nihilist Jacques Vaché, Breton became interested in the importance of reform and revolt in literature and in society. While in the army Breton was assigned to work in the psychiatric wards. The patients he observed and the study he made of neurology and psychology were, like his personal encounters, of great importance in forming his literary and social theories.

In 1918, together with Aragon and Soupault, Breton brought out the first issue of the review Littérature. And in 1919 Breton's first book of poems, Mont-de-piété (Pawn Shop), appeared. Breton grew progressively more interested in dreams and psychic automatism. By 1924 he had organized a group dedicated to surrealism and had issued his Manifeste du surréalisme. In 1930 and 1934 he wrote two additional manifestos, which explained the principles of surrealism. From the beginning, surrealism was conceived of as a movement transcending the purely literary or esthetic concerns, and it turned increasingly in the direction of social participation. In 1926 Breton joined the Communist party but withdrew in 1935 because of the incompatibility between the total personal freedom that surrealism advocated and the individual submission that Marxism required.

Meanwhile Breton published some of his most important works, notably Nadja, an account of his relationship with a woman and their explorations of the "daily magic" of Paris, and L'Immaculée Conception (The Immaculate Conception), in which Breton and the poet Paul Éluard simulate various forms of mental derangement. During the rest of the 1930s Breton's chief publication was L'Amour fou (Mad Love), a work illustrating the importance of love, one of the basic articles of surrealist faith. By 1939 it had become apparent that the heyday of surrealism was over. Breton had been its life and soul, but the history of the movement had been marked by noisy repudiations and denunciations. After breaking with his former companions and the Communist party, Breton visited Mexico. He made New York City his headquarters during World War II. When he returned to Paris, existentialism had replaced surrealism, but Breton tried to keep surrealism alive. He organized exhibitions, promoted reviews, and published articles and texts until his death in 1966. Breton's theoretical work continues to have a great impact, and his creative work, although yet not fully appreciated, demonstrates rare poetic gifts.

Further Reading

A recent and thorough biography of Breton is Anna Balakian, André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (1971). J. H. Matthews, André Breton (1967), in the series "Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, " is an introduction by an authority on surrealism. Although older and not as comprehensive, other excellent studies in English are Georges E. Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature (1941; rev. ed. 1947), and Anna Balakian, The Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947; rev. ed. 1965) and Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1959). Other works are Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (1966), and Herbert S. Gershman, The Surrealist Revolution in France (1969). □

Breton, André (b Tinchebray, Orne, 19 Feb. 1896; d Paris, 28 Sept. 1966). French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, the founder of the Surrealist movement and its chief theorist and promoter. In 1924 he marked the official launch of the movement by publishing his Manifeste du surréalisme (dedicated to the memory of his friend Apollinaire), and in 1925 he helped organize the first Surrealist exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre, Paris. He wrote numerous other books and articles on Surrealism and was also the driving force behind two of the major periodicals of the movement—La Révolution surrealiste (1924–9) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–3). In 1941–6 he lived in New York, where he was one of a group of expatriate Surrealists who had an important influence on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism. After his return to Paris he continued to be regarded as the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, even though the movement was now long past its prime, and his death in 1966 was regarded by many as marking its end.

Breton, André (1896–1966). French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, the founder of the Surrealist movement and its chief theorist and promoter. In 1924 he marked the official launch of the movement by publishing his Manifeste du surréalisme (dedicated to the memory of his friend Apollinaire), and in 1925 he helped organize the first Surrealist exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre, Paris. He wrote numerous other books and articles on Surrealism and was also the driving force behind two of the major periodicals of the movement—La Révolution surrealiste (1924–9) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–3). In 1941–6 he lived in New York, where he was one of a group of expatriate Surrealists who had an important influence on the genesis of Abstract Expressionism. After his return to Paris he continued to be regarded as the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, even though the movement was now long past its prime, and his death in 1966 was regarded by many as marking its end.

André Breton , 1896-1966, French writer, founder and theorist of the surrealist movement. He studied neuropsychology and was one of the first in France to publicize the work of Freud. At first a Dadaist, he collaborated with Philippe Soupault in automatic writing in Les Champs magnétiques (1921). He then turned to surrealism , writing three manifestos (1924, 1930, 1934) and opening a studio for "surrealist research." Breton helped to found several reviews: Littérature (1919), Minotaure (1933), and VVV (1944). His other works include Nadja (1928, tr. 1960), a semiautobiographical novel; What is Surrealism? (1934, tr. 1936); Ode à Charles Fourier (1946); and L' Art Magique (1957).

Bibliography: See biography by M. Polizzotti (1995); study by A. E. Balakian (1971); A. E. Balakian and R. E. Kuenzli, ed., André Breton Today (1989).

Breton, André (1896–1966) French poet and theorist. A founder and poet of the surrealism movement, he wrote Manifeste du surréalisme (1924) and Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1928). His fictional works, an autobiographical novel Nadja (1928), Les Vases Communicants (1932), L'Amour Fou (1937) and Poèmes (1948), reflect surrealist theories. See also Dada