André Breton

André Breton (1896–1966) was a French poet, essayist, and art critic born in Tinchebray, Normandy, who founded and led the Surrealist movement for more than four decades. After studying medicine and psychiatry before the First World War, he encountered Dada in Paris and, with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, participated in the earliest experiments with automatic writing. He published the Manifeste du Surréalisme in 1924, defining Surrealism as a practice of pure psychic automatism aimed at liberating thought from reason and aesthetic convention; a second manifesto followed in 1929.

His own writing — Nadja (1928), Les Vases communicants (1932), L'Amour fou (1937), Arcane 17 (1945) — combines autobiography, prose poetry, and theoretical argument in a form that enacts rather than merely describes Surrealist principles. As a critic and collector, Breton was central to the careers of Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Giacometti, Miró, and many others; his apartment on the Rue Fontaine in Paris served as the movement's de facto archive and salon. He was exiled in New York and the Caribbean during the Second World War, where he wrote Arcane 17 and collaborated with artists who had also fled Europe. He supported Trotskyist politics and met Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938. His disputes with former Surrealists — Aragon, Dalí, Bataille — were as significant as his collaborations. His theoretical writings remain the central documents of Surrealism.