Andre Breton

From Philosopedia

Andre Breton

Andre Breton 'Le Déclin de la société bourgeoisie' 1930's paper collage. Breton was by his own admition not a talented artist. Here he has combined printed materials in a humerous and archaic manner. The Surrealists were committed to the overthrow of bourgeois values and systems, so the phrase pasted onto the picture is extremely relevant. (It means the decline of the Bourgeois System)

Breton, Andre (19 February 1896 - 28 September 1966)

Breton was born in Tinchebray (Orne), Normandy, and studied medicine and psychiatry.

During World War I, he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché had committed suicide at age 24 and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

In 1927, he joined the French Communist Party, which expelled him in 1933.

A principal theorist of the surrealist movement, Breton has written, “Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, infamous, sullying, and grotesque is contained for me in this single word: God.”

Breton married three times: from 1921 to 1931 to Simone Kahn Collinet (1897-1980); to the former Jacqueline Lamba, with whom he had a daughter named Aube; and to the former Elisa Claro.

At the age of 70, he died and was buried in the Cimetiére des Batingnolies in Paris.

{CE; PA}