André Breton (1896–1966)
Author of Nadja
About the Author
Andre Breton was born in Normandy, France on 19, 1896 and died on September 28, 1966. Breton was a poet, novelist, philosophical essayist, and art critic. He is considered to be the father of surrealism. From World War I to the 1940s, Breton was at the forefront of the numerous avant-garde show more activities that centered in Paris. Breton's influence on the art and literature of the twentieth century has been enormous. Picasso, Derain, Magritte, Giacometti, Cocteau, Eluard, and Gracq are among the many whose work was affected by his thinking. From 1927 to 1933, Breton was a member of the Communist party, but thereafter he opposed communism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism". He also wrote Nadja in 1928. Breton died in 1966 at 70 and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: André Breton par Man Ray en 1930
Series
Works by André Breton
The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) (1997) 88 copies, 1 review
Primo manifesto del surrealismo 4 copies
Segundo manifiesto 3 copies
André Breton y el surrealismo: 1 de octubre-2 de diciembre de 1991 (Spanish Edition) (1991) 3 copies
Point du jour 3 copies
Le cadavre exquis, son exaltation 3 copies
La unión libre 3 copies
Toyen 2 copies
El aire del agua 2 copies
Anthologie de l’humour noir 1 copy
Magic Art 1 copy
Conversaciones (1913-1952) 1 copy
Recuerdo de México 1 copy
Clair de terre 1 copy
Entretiens par Andre Breton 1 copy
Ανθολογία του μαύρου χιούμορ 1 copy
André Breton par lui-même 1 copy
等角投像 1 copy
性に関する探究 1 copy
シュルレアリスムと抒情による蜂起―アンドレ・ブルトン没後50年記念イベント全記録 — Author — 1 copy
太陽王アンドレ・ブルトン — Author — 1 copy
What is surrealism? 1 copy
ブルトン詩集 1 copy
至高の愛: アンドレ・ブルトン美文集 1 copy
時計のなかのランプ 1 copy
Mont de Piété 1 copy
Légitime défense 1 copy
Le Surrealisme et la Peinture Suivi de Genese et Perspective Artistiques du Surrealisme et de Fragments Inedits. (1945) 1 copy
Nadja 1 copy
Clair de Terre 1 copy
Les pas perdus 1 copy
Le voleur 1 copy
Le surrealisme 1 copy
Man Ray 1 copy
Hundred Headless Woman (the) 1 copy
Surrealism, Dadaism, Musique Concrète: Three Manifestos: With a Special Appendix by Marsden Hartley (2023) 1 copy
Antología (1916-1966) 1 copy
Μανιφέστα του σουρρεαλισμού 1 copy
Svart Musik och Surrealism 1 copy
Los pasos perdidos 1 copy
PREMIER MANIFESTE, SECOND MANIFESTE, PROLEGOMENES A UN TROISIEME MANIFESTE DU SURREALISME OU NON, POSITION POLITIQUE DU… (1962) 1 copy
Joan Miró. Constellations: Introduction et vingt-deux proses parallèles par André Breton (1959) 1 copy
Le Surréalisme, même 2 1 copy
Associated Works
Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (1968) — Contributor — 786 copies, 5 reviews
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998) — Contributor — 473 copies, 1 review
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) — Contributor — 348 copies, 2 reviews
The Council of Love: A Celestial Tragedy in Five Acts (1895) — Introduction, some editions — 56 copies
Manifestos d'avantguarda.: Antologia (MOLU s.XX - Les Millors Obres de la Literatura Universal Segle XX) (1995) — Contributor — 13 copies
Kunst aus Haiti : Ausstellung der Berliner Festspiele GmbH — Contributor — 1 copy
ダダ・シュルレアリスム新訳詩集 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Breton, André
- Legal name
- Breton, André
- Other names
- Dobrant, René (Pseudonyme)
- Birthdate
- 1896-02-19
- Date of death
- 1966-09-28
- Burial location
- Cimetière des Batignolles, Paris, France
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- France
- Country (for map)
- France
- Birthplace
- Tinchebray, Orne, Normandy, France
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Places of residence
- Paris, France
New York, New York, USA
Canada - Education
- Hôpital du Val-de-Grâce (Auditeur, Médecine Auxilliaire, 1917 | 1921)
Lycée Chaptal, Paris - Occupations
- poet
writer
Surrealist
essayist
art critic
journal editor - Relationships
- Kahn, Simone (ex-wife)
Claro, Elisa (wife)
Lamba, Jacqueline (ex-wife)
Tzara, Tristan (colleague)
Prassinos, Gisèle (protege)
Elleouet, Aube (daughter) (show all 7)
Vaché, Jacques (author) - Organizations
- Mouvement surréaliste (Fondateur, 19 19)
Littérature, Revue littéraire (Co-fondateur, 19 19)
Maison de couture Jacques Doucet (Conseiller, 19 21)
Contre-attaque, Revue littéraire (Co-fondateur, 19 35 | 19 36)
Armée française, WW1 (Artilleur, puis personnel de santé, 19 15 | 19 19)
Parti communiste français (1913 | 1935) (show all 7)
La Révolution surréaliste (1924) - Short biography
- André Breton was born in Tinchebray, Normandy, France. His parents were Marguerite-Marie-Eugénie and Louis-Justin Breton, a policeman. Breton attended medical school, where he developed a particular interest in mental illness. His education was interrupted when he was drafted into the French army in World War I; he served as a nurse in the medical corps. In 1919, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, he founded the review Littérature. He became one of the original members of the Dada group. He published his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of the journal La Révolution surréaliste from that year on. Influenced by his reading of Sigmund Freud and by Symbolist poetry, Breton is credited with pioneering automatism, the spontaneous act of writing, drawing, or painting as a means to elucidate unconscious thought. The Surrealist movement eventually became involved in the political ferment of the 1930s. During this time, Breton and several colleagues joined the Communist Party. His second Surrealist manifesto, published in 1930, was highly controversial among his fellow artists and writers. Breton broke with the Communist Party in 1935, but remained committed to Marxist ideals. In 1938, he accepted a commission from the French government to travel to Mexico. This provided him with the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. Together with Trotsky, Breton wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. He served again in the medical corps of the French Army at the start of World War II. His writings were banned by the Vichy government and Breton escaped from France in 1941 with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee volunteers led by Varian Fry. After a detour in the Caribbean, Breton emigrated to the USA and lived in New York City for a few years. In 1942, he organized a groundbreaking Surrealist exhibition at Yale University. He traveled to the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec, Canada, where he wrote Arcane 17 (1944), one of the key works of Surrealism, which expressed his fears of war. In 1946, after the end of WWII, Breton returned to France, where he produced another Surrealist exhibition the following year. He was a prolific author who published some 60 volumes of poetry, literary criticism, and anthologies.
Members
Reviews
At first this didn't strike me as especially memorable, a fairly straightforward story about an older novelist becoming smitten with a younger muse only to later become bored the more he learns about and thus demystifies her. But I ended up thinking about it over the proceeding days, and started reading more about it, particularly some reviews here, and began to find it more interesting. A lot of reviews peg Nadja as a prototypical "manic pixie dream girl" and yet the novel essentially show more deconstructs that very idea 80 years before the term would even be coined (much less become such a staple of pop culture). The titular Nadja doesn't merely exist to break the fictionalized Andre out of his funk and teach him a zany new world view, but to then teach him a different lesson, that she is an actual person with a history and problems of her own.
I also read some reviews calling the novel sexist for Andre (the character's) later neglect and dismissiveness toward Nadja when he learns about her madness, and while this is a logical conclusion and I may be reading too much of my modern sensibilities into the work, I don't necessarily think Andre the author is necessarily completely forgiving of his namesake's behavior. He could have easily written a more noble end to the relationship, been more elusive about "Andre's" shifting feelings toward her, made up better excuses for his behavior. Maybe he thought that's what he was doing, and the different morals of the day firmly sided with his condescending and limited "love" giving him nothing to be ashamed of, but in any case laying bare these thoughts and feelings for us allows us to judge all these years later. show less
I also read some reviews calling the novel sexist for Andre (the character's) later neglect and dismissiveness toward Nadja when he learns about her madness, and while this is a logical conclusion and I may be reading too much of my modern sensibilities into the work, I don't necessarily think Andre the author is necessarily completely forgiving of his namesake's behavior. He could have easily written a more noble end to the relationship, been more elusive about "Andre's" shifting feelings toward her, made up better excuses for his behavior. Maybe he thought that's what he was doing, and the different morals of the day firmly sided with his condescending and limited "love" giving him nothing to be ashamed of, but in any case laying bare these thoughts and feelings for us allows us to judge all these years later. show less
Having read the blurb, and then done a little internet checking, I was determined NOT to like this book. It seems that this is a merge of truth and fiction and that Breton did not treat the lady involved in this love story well: not to mention his wife, whom he kept updated upon the affair!
My ire dissipated, however, when faced with such beautiful prose. I reasoned that all parties are now safe from the pain of the story and that Breton himself will get no kudos from a good review (notice show more the supreme egotism there? Even were Breton to still be alive, the prospect of him eagerly awaiting Ken Petersen's opinion of his opus is too absurd for contemplation).
The book is 160 pages long but, when blank pages and a host of, disappointingly dark, photographs are removed, the text is little more than an hour's reading - even at my pedestrian pace. I would suggest that, if you have a full understanding of this tale, then Surrealism will be a piece of cake but, of course, if you think that you understand surrealism, you are, almost certainly, wrong!
I am sorry to all the ladies who, probably correctly, feel that I should be harder upon this book: I simply suggest that you read it and see if the literary style does not mitigate the social faux pas. show less
My ire dissipated, however, when faced with such beautiful prose. I reasoned that all parties are now safe from the pain of the story and that Breton himself will get no kudos from a good review (notice show more the supreme egotism there? Even were Breton to still be alive, the prospect of him eagerly awaiting Ken Petersen's opinion of his opus is too absurd for contemplation).
The book is 160 pages long but, when blank pages and a host of, disappointingly dark, photographs are removed, the text is little more than an hour's reading - even at my pedestrian pace. I would suggest that, if you have a full understanding of this tale, then Surrealism will be a piece of cake but, of course, if you think that you understand surrealism, you are, almost certainly, wrong!
I am sorry to all the ladies who, probably correctly, feel that I should be harder upon this book: I simply suggest that you read it and see if the literary style does not mitigate the social faux pas. show less
André Breton was one of the first Surrealists and wrote many of the manifestos, declarations and exegetical essays for that literary and artistic movement. Reading Breton the theoretician, one comes to see that Surrealism as it was originally conceived bears only the slightest resemblance to the way most people today use the term. Surrealism is more a way of experiencing the world, and—as with psilocybin, or quantum field theory—once it’s absorbed by your cognitive apparatus, it’s show more part of your intuition forever.
Mad Love is somewhere between an extended essay and a prose poem that both illustrates and explains Breton’s preoccupations—“the dominion of the senses,” celebration of the spontaneous and the unforeseeable, the paradoxical cultivation of “chance.” The Surrealist—in art, love, and nature—favors spontaneous creativity over willed perfection, excavation of the accidental over the “imperious concern for equilibrium.” A fundamental tenet of Surrealism is that one can transform the world by transforming one’s perception of the world. Enlightenment converges on a shadowy point, blurring the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The Surrealist prefers the staging of the ritual to the ritual itself, not the rare bird but the small red feather in the headdress of a Hawaiian chieftain.
How can one ever after conjure that initial state of mind aroused by the odd poetic moment of convulsive beauty? If that question makes sense to you, then reading Mad Love will be its own reward. show less
Mad Love is somewhere between an extended essay and a prose poem that both illustrates and explains Breton’s preoccupations—“the dominion of the senses,” celebration of the spontaneous and the unforeseeable, the paradoxical cultivation of “chance.” The Surrealist—in art, love, and nature—favors spontaneous creativity over willed perfection, excavation of the accidental over the “imperious concern for equilibrium.” A fundamental tenet of Surrealism is that one can transform the world by transforming one’s perception of the world. Enlightenment converges on a shadowy point, blurring the distinction between the natural and the artificial. The Surrealist prefers the staging of the ritual to the ritual itself, not the rare bird but the small red feather in the headdress of a Hawaiian chieftain.
How can one ever after conjure that initial state of mind aroused by the odd poetic moment of convulsive beauty? If that question makes sense to you, then reading Mad Love will be its own reward. show less
While I admire the aesthetic of the French prose poem, I am not sure that it really works all that well in this instance. The point of comparison that Breton clearly wants to make, stylistically, is with Lautréamont's magnificent Les Chants de Maldoror, but his purpose is so completely at odds with that book that the attempt, for me, was ultimately unsuccessful.
You see, Breton wants to make an aesthetic statement, a kind of poetic manifesto as to what beauty and love would be in the context show more of surrealism. Being a surrealist, he can't just write some essay or manifesto (although he does do that in [b:Manifestoes of Surrealism|115164|Manifestoes of Surrealism|André Breton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472344999s/115164.jpg|110898]), he has to self-reflexively put into practice the artistic principles that underlie his philosophy.
I'm rather sympathetic to the surrealist cause, but I'm yet to be convinced entirely by Breton. He seems a little bit too much like a politician to me, someone who comes across as leveraging his position for fame and power and reputation. That doesn't make what he has to say in Mad Love wrong, exactly, but it does make me suspicious of its ulterior motives.
What it comes down to is this: Breton is at his best when he speaks directly and simply. The book's most memorable lines - its concluding sentence, for instance, which everyone quotes, or some of his more lucid statements in the beginning about the nature of compulsive beauty - are how he should have written the whole book. The rambling parts about strolling through Paris with Giacometti or wandering through Tenerife are indeed poetic and, if you are in the right mood, lovely and lyrical, but my current mood is that I want meat, content, substance into which I can sink my teeth. From that perspective, Mad Love was a bone that simply did not contain enough meat to satisfy me. show less
You see, Breton wants to make an aesthetic statement, a kind of poetic manifesto as to what beauty and love would be in the context show more of surrealism. Being a surrealist, he can't just write some essay or manifesto (although he does do that in [b:Manifestoes of Surrealism|115164|Manifestoes of Surrealism|André Breton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472344999s/115164.jpg|110898]), he has to self-reflexively put into practice the artistic principles that underlie his philosophy.
I'm rather sympathetic to the surrealist cause, but I'm yet to be convinced entirely by Breton. He seems a little bit too much like a politician to me, someone who comes across as leveraging his position for fame and power and reputation. That doesn't make what he has to say in Mad Love wrong, exactly, but it does make me suspicious of its ulterior motives.
What it comes down to is this: Breton is at his best when he speaks directly and simply. The book's most memorable lines - its concluding sentence, for instance, which everyone quotes, or some of his more lucid statements in the beginning about the nature of compulsive beauty - are how he should have written the whole book. The rambling parts about strolling through Paris with Giacometti or wandering through Tenerife are indeed poetic and, if you are in the right mood, lovely and lyrical, but my current mood is that I want meat, content, substance into which I can sink my teeth. From that perspective, Mad Love was a bone that simply did not contain enough meat to satisfy me. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 180
- Also by
- 29
- Members
- 5,913
- Popularity
- #4,174
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 42
- ISBNs
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- Favorited
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