" In the world we live in everything militates in favour of things
that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again"
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere"
"No
one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than
life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that
this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily."
"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all" - Quotes by Andre Breton
Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as "one of the four or five
great reformers of modern thought", Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the
founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and
literary movement of the 20th century. Poet and theorist, artistic
impresario anti-fascist and political agitator, Breton was a man of paradoxical
character: inspiring one moment, crushingly tyrannical the next;
embracing friends like Brunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Miro, Man Ray, Aragon and
Eluard, only to exile them as enemies later. From its emergence from
Dada after World War I through its culmination in the 1960s, here is his
Surrealist world..
André Breton was born into a working-class family on February 19, 1896, in Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, France, although his family relocated
to a Parisian suburb soon after. He excelled in school and developed
literary interests quite early. Breton read the French Decadents, such
as Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, Stephane Mallarme, and the German
Romantic writers, all of whom informed his early thoughts on
Avant-Gardism. By 1912, Breton had a cultivated knowledge of
Contemporary art and begun to study Anarchism as a political movement.
While he loved the French Decadent artists, such as Gustave Moreau, he
began to separate himself from their belief in "art for art's sake," in
favor of art that appealed to the masses.In 1916, Breton joined the group of artists associated with the
subversive Dada movement in Paris, including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
But he moved away from
Dadaism, which itself began during World War One as an irrational,
nonsensical expression of anti-war rhetoric and along with Louis Aragon and
Phillippe Soupault, Breton in 1919 co-founded a journal called Littérature to
showcase the first surrealist writing. His definition of
surrealism was summed up as:" psychic automation in its pure state, by
which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word,
or in any other manner - The actual functioning of thought." In 1924, he published
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (
The Manifesto of Surrealism),
a document announcing the new movement's embrace of all forms of
liberated expression and its rejection of social and moral conventions.
Breton studied
medicine and psychiatry and showed a particular interest in mental
illnesses.His early interest was in
being a psychoanalyst and met Freud in Vienna in 1921. During the first
world war Breton served in the neurological ward in Nantes,as a nurse but never
qualified as a psychoanalyst. But no
doubt this experience laid the foundations for his theories on the
concept of the unconsciousness. His first poems, Decembre and Age, were written while he worked there.He developed a passion for psychiatric art, which informed his
interest in Dada, and later surrealism. Here he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/alfed-jarry-891877-11107-life-as-riot.html Jacques Vache whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at the age 24 in 1919. Somewhat later Breton conducted his first experiments with the insane at a psychiatric center in aint-Dezier. He drew pictures of their dreams and committed their free associations to paper in order to nalyse the patients by Freudian methods. In 1919 he published a slim volume
Les Chants magnifique, consisting of texts developed together with Phillipe Soupalt by the free association method that is automatically.
He married Simone Kahn in 1921 and while
they lived in Paris he amassed a massive collection of artwork,
photographs and books. He went on to marry a further two times.
His
Surrealist Manifesto, the first of three, was produced in 1924. This
explained his definition of surrealism and sought to highlight the
importance of dreams and the merging of realities in an absurdist way,which outlines surrealist preoccupations and is considered to be the
beginning of the Surrealist Movement. It also established Breton as the
spearhead of Surrealism, a role he would maintain for the entire
duration of the movement.
Breton credited several contemporaries in the work including Louis
Aragon, Paul Eluard and others.And he became associated with a number of writers including Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud,
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/antonin-artaud-18961948-revolt-against.html
Robert Desnos
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/robert-desnos-47-00-paris-8645-some.html Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/paul-eluard-14121895-261152-poetic.html.and also associated with the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/tristan-tzara-441896-251263-radical.html
Breton third on left pictured will fellow Surrealists
His second Manifesto came in 1930 but
the third was never published. After writing his Manifestos he published
poems and novels throughout the 1920s and 30s. His most acclaimed
novel, from 1928, is
Nadia, believed to be a semi-autobiographical story
of his relationship with a mad woman who was a patient of Pierre Janet.
It begins with the question “Who Am I” and ends with “beauty will be
CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
L'Amour Fou (
Mad Love), published in 1937, is a poetic meditation on obsessive love.
Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927.The revolutionary aspiration is at the very source of Surrealism,it is
not by accident that one of the movement’s first collective texts,
written in 1925, is called “Revolution First and Always.” That same
year, the desire to break with Western civilization led Breton to
investigate the ideas of the October Revolution, for example, Trotsky’s
essay
Lenin. .In 1933 however Breton and Eluard were expelled from the party due to nonconformist behaviour. In 1935, there was a conflict between Breton and the Soviet writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg
during the first "International Congress of Writers for the Defense of
Culture" which opened in Paris in June. Breton had been insulted by
Ehrenburg—along with fellow surrealists—in a pamphlet which said,
among other things, that surrealists were "pederasts".
Breton slapped Ehrenburg several times on the street, which resulted in the
surrealists being expelled from the Congress.He also criticised Stalins repression of public opinion, and quoted from Lenin (1905) ; " Everyone is free to say and write whatever he pleases; freedom of the press must remain unimpeded."
Breton considered everything else reactionary, " Whether we move in the realm of politics or of art, there are always these two forces; the refusal to accept conditions as they are and the irresistable need to change them, on the one hand, there must be lasting loyalty to the moral precepts that have stood for progress. No one can suppress these forces for years, or fight against them in the name of messianic idea of what the Soviet Union is doing."
Now the break with the Soviet Union was official, Lenin and Trotsky had become the new heroes of the movement, not Stalin. A Militant Federation of Revolutionary Intellectuals , by a group that included Breton, Eluard and Peret. It was called Contre-Attaque and its aim was class struggle and the nationalisation of the means of production.
In April 1938 Breton accepted a cultural commission from the French government to travel to Mexico with his wife the painter Jacquline Lamba. After a conference about surrealism, Breton told a story about getting lost in Mexico City
(as no one was waiting for him at the airport) "I don't know why I came
here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". They
stay with Guadalupe Marin, Diego Rivera's previous wife, and meet the
Kahlo-Riveras. When Breton sees Kahlo's unfinished "What the Water Gave
Me", the metaphorical self-portrait of what life had given her -
floating on the water of her bathtub - he immediately labels her an
innate "surrealist", and offers to show her work in Paris.
Frida Kahlo's - What the Water Gave Me
Immediately he circumscribed her as one part the essence of the
surrealist movement and wrote an essay to her „a strip of silk around a
pump”. This label of surrealism of the work of Frida Kahlo is one of the
“mistakes” that have been continued between the massive public with
respect to their classification and understanding.In her own words she said " They thought I was a surrealist , but I was not, I never painted my dreams, I only painted my own reality."
Visiting Mexico also provided the opportunity to meet Leon Trotsky. Breton and other surrealists traveled via a long boat ride from Patzcuaro to the town of Frongaricuaro. He Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo were among the visitors to the hidden community of intellectuals and artists. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote a manifesto
for an Independent Revolutionary Art
(published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera) calling for
"complete freedom of art", a call to arms, pens and brushes
addressed to radical artists and writers. It denounced fascism and
Stalinism, two dictatorships suffocating artistic expression as they
were drowning workers’ opposition in blood. It was also a comment on the
role of art and culture in class society, it contains this famous passage:
The revolution must, from the very start, establish and assure an
anarchist regime of individual liberty for cultural creation. No
authority, no constraint, not the slightest trace of commandment! On
this issue Marxists can march hand in hand with anarchists….
https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm
The result was a manifesto that would be of great importance for both Trotsky and Breton . Communist and Surrealist met on their common ground of their reaction to Stalinism and their interest in the revolutionary function of art.
Breton, Riviera and Trotsky
At the start of the 1940s Breton had returned briefly to work in the
medical wards in French hospitals but when the Nazis invaded and
occupied France he fled to America along with his friends Marcel Duchamp
and Max Ernst. He lived in New York City at this time, and managed a Surrealist exhibition at Yale
in 1942.In 1945 he married Elisa Bindhorf in Reno, Nevada.
He returned to Paris after the war in 1946, where he opposed French colonialism (for example as a signatory of the
Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian war) and continued, until his death, to foster a second group of surrealists in the form of expositions or reviews (
La Breche, 1961–1965). In 1959, he organized an exhibit in Paris.
Breton’s anarchist sympathies manifested more clearly in the postwar years.By the end of World War11 the surrealist group led by Breton had decided to explicitly embrace anarchism. In the 1947 book
Arcanum 17,
he describes the emotion he felt when, still a child, he discovered in a
cemetery a headstone with the simple inscription, “Neither God Nor
Master.” Commenting
on these words, he raises a
general reflection: “Above art and poetry, whether we wish it or no,
flies a flag alternately red and black”—two colors between which he
refused to choose."
From October 1951 to January 1953, the Surrealist group in Paris regularly contributed articles and leaflets to the journal
Le Libertaire,
the organ of the French Anarchist Federation. Their principal
correspondent in the Federation was, at that time, the libertarian
communist George Fontenis. It was during this time that Breton wrote
the flamboyant 1952 text entitled “La claire tour/The Light Tower,”
which gives the libertarian origins of Surrealism:
Surrealism first came into being in the black mirror of anarchism,
well before it defined itself, when it was nothing more than a free
association among individuals rejecting spontaneously and outright the
social and moral constraints of their time. Breton was consistent in his support for the francophone Anarchist Federation and he continued to offer his solidarity after the Platformists around Fontenis
transformed the FA into the Federation Communiste Libertaire. He was
one of the few intellectuals who continued to offer his support to the
FCL during the Algerian War
(1954-1962) when the FCL suffered severe repression and was forced
underground. He sheltered Fontenis whilst he was in hiding. He refused
to take sides on the splits in the French anarchist movement and both he
and Peret expressed solidarity as well with the new FA set up by the
synthesist anarchists, and worked in the Antifascist Committees of the
1960s alongside the FA. His apartment at la Rue Fontaine #42 became the heart of Paris’s
anarchist writers and artists, and home to his collection of over 5000
artworks, manuscripts, African masks and objects of Oceanic art.
This interest and active sympathy for anarchism did not at all
lead
Breton to renounce his adhesion to the October Revolution and the ideas
of Leon Trotsky. In an intervention on November 17, 1957, André Breton
insisted and signed, " Against winds and tides, I am among those who still find, in the
memory of the October Revolution, a high degree of that unconditional
enthusiasm which I bore toward it in my youth and which implies total
self-sacrifice."
Finally, in 1962, in an homage to Natalia Sedova Trotsky, who had just
died, he hoped that one day history would accord Leon Trotsky “not only
justice…but will be called to accept, in all their vigor and amplitude,
the ideas to which his life was given.”
During his lifetime, Breton produced a tremendous body of work that
contained poetry, novels, criticism, and theory. Of his oeuvre, the
collection of poems
Mad Love (1937), the novel
Nadja (1928) and the critical text
Communicating Vessels (1932) are considered to be his most valuable contributions to the literary world.He published three books of
poetry, in all
Arcane 17 in 1945, and a further Surrealist work in 1953 called
The key to the fields. He also mentored young surrealist writers and
artists.
Andre Breton died in Paris on September 28th 1966 at the age of 70 and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris. He remains one of the most outstanding literary representatives of surrealism, who tried to link art with revolutionary politics. Who with single mindedness clung to his idea of Surrealism and the revolution of the mind.His rich contribution to the idea of surrealism, art, and the meaningful poetry, that he left means his legacy lives on.After coming to New York during World War II, his ideas on Surrealism
were essential to early Abstract Expressionists, like
Arshile Gorky,
Roberto Matta, and
Yves Tanguy, as well as second generation Surrealists, like
Joseph Cornell. He pioneered the concept of fusing art and culture, which became a basic tenet in
Pop Art.
Breton's use of the media as a tool of art practice also helped shape
many contemporary artists who build personas as part of their work. In
this way, he foresaw
Performance Art,
Fluxus,
Conceptualism,
and what has followed on from those movements. Perhaps above all,
Breton's love of absurdist humor continues to inspire artists to the
present day..
Here's a link to a previous post about him :-
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/andre-breton-1896-1966-surreallism-and.html
Freedom of Love
(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
The Spectral Attitudes
I attach no importance to life
I pin not the least of life's butterflies to importance
I do not matter to life
But the branches of salt the white branches
All the shadow bubbles
And the sea-anemones
Come down and breathe within my thoughts
They come from tears that are not mine
From steps I do not take that are steps twice
And of which the sand remembers the flood-tide
The bars are in the cage
And the birds come down from far above to sing before these bars
A subterranean passage unites all perfumes
A woman pledged herself there one day
This woman became so bright that I could no longer see her
With these eyes which have seen my own self burning
I was then already as old as I am now
And I watched over myself and my thoughts like a night watchman in an immense factory Keeping watch alone
The circus always enchants the same tramlines
The plaster figures have lost nothing of their expression
They who bit the smile's fig
I know of a drapery in a forgotten town
If it pleased me to appear to you wrapped in this drapery
You would think that your end was approaching
Like mine
At last the fountains would understand that you must not say Fountain
The wolves are clothed in mirrors of snow
I have a boat detached from all climates
I am dragged along by an ice-pack with teeth of flame
I cut and cleave the wood of this tree that will always be green
A musician is caught up in the strings of his instrument
The skull and crossbones of the time of any childhood story
Goes on board a ship that is as yet its own ghost only
Perhaps there is a hilt to this sword
But already there is a duel in this hilt
During the duel the combatants are unarmed
Death is the least offence
The future never comes
The curtains that have never been raised
Float to the windows of houses that are to be built
The beds made of lilies
Slide beneath the lamps of dew
There will come an evening
The nuggets of light become still underneath the blue moss
The hands that tie and untie the knots of love and of air
Keep all their transparency for those who have eyes to see
They see the palms of hands
The crowns in eyes
But the brazier of crown and palms
Can scarcely be lit in the deepest part of the forest
There where the stags bend their heads to examine the years
Nothing more than a feeble beating is heard
From which sound a thousand louder or softer sounds proceed
And the beating goes on and on
There are dresses that vibrate
And their vibration is in unison with the beating
When I wish to see the faces of those that wear them
A great fog rises from the ground
At the bottom of the steeples behind the most elegant reservoirs of life and of wealth
In the gorges which hide themselves between two mountains
On the sea at the hour when the sun cools down
Those who make signs to me are separated by stars
And yet the carriage overturned at full speed
Carries as far as my last hesitation
That awaits me down there in the town where the statues of bronze
and of stone have changed places with statues of wax Banyans banyans.
Link to Less Time - Andre Breton
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/less-time-andre-breton-1921896-2891966.html
Further reading :-
Breton, “Homage to Natalia Sedova-Trotsky,” in
What is Surrealism,
pp.306-308.
Surrealism- Uwe M. Schneede ; Harry N Abrams, New York,
Surrealism -Patrick Waldberg ; Thames and Hudson
dada; art and anti art - Hans Richter; Thames and Hudson
The Poetry of Surrealism: An Antholog
y, ed. Michael Benedikt (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1974).
