French poet and writer, leader and theorist of Surrealism, born on 19 February 1896 in Tinchebray (Orne), died in 1966 in Paris.
Life
André Breton came to Pantin at the age of four, where his family lived until 1918. In October 1914 he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. Called up in 1915 as a military nurse, he was posted to Nantes, where in 1916 he met Jacques Vaché, a “decisive encounter”. From July to November 1916 he served at the neuropsychiatric centre in Saint-Dizier, then in 1917 in Dr Babinski’s department at La Pitié. He gave up medicine for good in 1920.
In March 1919 the first issue of Littérature appeared, which he edited with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault; with Soupault he wrote Les Champs magnétiques, published in 1920. The Manifeste du surréalisme appeared on 15 October 1924, followed by Nadja (1928), the Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1930) and L’Amour fou (1937).
In 1938 he travelled to Mexico, where he met Trotsky. During the war he went into exile in the United States, by way of Martinique, and published Arcane 17 (1944) in New York. Back in Paris on 26 May 1946, he edited, among others, the review La Brèche. Action surréaliste (1961-1967).
The work
Beyond his writings, Breton was a discoverer and a collector: as early as 1921 he bought a Tête by Picasso at the first Kahnweiler sale. From 1947 he took a close interest in Art Brut and, with Jean Dubuffet, helped found the Compagnie de l’art brut. He organised or inspired the major international Surrealist exhibitions, from Paris in 1938 to EROS (1959) and L’Écart absolu (1965).
He himself played the collective game of the exquisite corpse. The gallery lent a Cadavre exquis made in 1929 with Paul and Nusch Éluard (coloured pencils on black paper, 32 x 25 cm, provenance Galleria Schwarz, Milan) to the Surréalisme exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2024, where it is reproduced in the catalogue, then to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2025.
Exhibitions and collections
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou: several exquisite corpses (with Jacqueline Lamba and Yves Tanguy, Nusch Éluard, Valentine Hugo, Greta Knutson), Souvenir du paradis terrestre (1953), La Galvanisation (1959); André Breton archive at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky
- Surréalisme, Centre Pompidou, 4 September 2024 to 13 January 2025 (loan from the gallery)
- Rendez-vous des rêves. Surréalisme et romantisme allemand, Hamburger Kunsthalle, June to October 2025 (loan from the gallery)
- At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty. André Breton the Influencer, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, autumn 2024
- The Gallery’s 25th Anniversary, Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 22 May to 19 June 2026