It seems that, long before Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) said his well-known phrase “Surrealism is me”, André Breton (1896-1966) had already said it. Which of the two was right? Because, Although it is true that Dalí was the great surrealist genius, we must not forget that it was Breton who laid the foundations of the movement and launched, in 1924, the first manifesto of this avant-garde..

Today we will talk about the “father” of surrealism, who received other not so flattering titles such as “the pope of surrealism”, in reference to the obstinacy he had in expelling dissidents from the movement’s orthodoxy from the group. Because Breton was, in addition to being a great intellectual, an intransigent and authoritarian person, if we are to believe those who knew him.

In today’s article we will investigate the life of this character, so extremely important for the development of one of the most important avant-garde movements.

Brief biography of André Breton, the “father” of surrealism

His gaze had a strange magnetism, which made him a great seducer, and not only of women. Everyone fell in love with the character’s overwhelming personality, which was, on the other hand, quite ambiguous. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998), who met him during his stay in Paris, said of him that he had “two faces”: one extremely vitalist and very honest; the other, fanatical and brutal.

Who really was André Breton? It is difficult to sketch someone’s personality; However, in this biography we will try to reconstruct the life and character of this character. Join us.

In contact with “madness”

The “father” of surrealism had very early contact with dementia. He was born in 1896 in Tinchebray, France, into a modest family that wanted him to dedicate himself to engineering. However, young Breton decided on medicine. While still a university student, the First World War broke out, and in 1916 a twenty-year-old Breton was mobilized and sent to a military sanatorium, the Second Army Psychiatric Center, in Saint-Dizier..

There, the young man would learn about “madness” first-hand, through the sick people who paraded through the hospital. This is a very important experience in the life of our character and in the history of art in general, since, from the apparently incoherent speeches that Breton hears the inmates say, he will later extract the bases for automatism, that is, the spontaneous flow of the psyche, without obstacles of any kind.

The theories of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), together with those of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) finished outlining the “psychic automatism” that the surrealists would later announce. Breton firmly believed that freedom should be granted to thought, which he considered locked in a moralistic dictatorship resulting from the hypocritical bourgeois society. This morality was to blame for all the inhibitions that ate the human being from the inside, and that caused, therefore, the whole series of traumas and mental problems that that same society later rejected.. The testimony of the mentally ill in the sanatorium was, in this sense, deeply revealing for Breton.

Psychic automatism and the liberation of the mind

It is ironic that the person who wanted to free people from the “yoke” of the bourgeois dictatorship was such an extremely radical and intransigent character. In the beginning, however, it was like this: fascinated by automatism, which linked directly to the depths of the psyche, Breton wrote in 1919, together with the writer Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), what would be the first work of automatic writing. : Les champs magétiques (Magnetic fields).

The two young people challenged themselves to write a text on which they would not exercise any type of correction and which would have no aesthetic objectives. In other words; It was about facing the sheet of paper and “vomiting” everything that came up spontaneously, without censoring or altering a single comma.. The chapters of the book also made no sense; When the mental stream stopped flowing, they stopped writing and went to rest.

The result was a success and exceeded all the expectations that Breton and Soupault had set for themselves. Automatic writing had just been born, a way of creating without filters that circumvented all the obstacles that morality and logic imposed on the artist.

Flirts with Dada and appearance of the First manifesto

In 1916, the Dadaist group was created in Zurich, led by such charismatic personalities as the Romanian Tristan Tzara (1896-1963). Breton’s anti-bourgeois mentality cannot be left out of such a great event, and for a few years he adheres to the movement with genuine enthusiasm..

As we know, Dadaism takes the avant-garde maxim épater le bourgeois (something like “impress the bourgeois”) to its maximum expression. Impressing him negatively, that is understandable. Thus, Dada encourages absurdity and brings traditional values ​​to their final bankruptcy. Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal (ironically baptized, in true Dada style, as The Fountain), presented to the Annual Association of Independent Artists, is a clear example of the absurdity of the movement, of which even its name, Dada, does not mean nothing.

Dadaism will have a lot to do with the later surrealism developed by André Breton. However, at the beginning of the 1920s, he definitively broke with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists and embarked alone on the formation of his new postulates. In 1924 he launched the First Surrealist Manifesto, in which he laid the foundations of the avant-garde..

What are these bases? Mainly, the introduction into a “higher state of consciousness”, which can only be achieved through the connection between sleep and wakefulness. The world, says Breton, is too accustomed to moving by reason, that is, by the conscious self; It is necessary, therefore, to add the component of the unknown to reach the sublime and desired state. And that unknown component is found in the unconscious, which is what drives dreams.

The reviled politicization

In the mid-1920s, just after the appearance of the First Manifesto, surrealism experienced a golden stage. Other notable surrealists adhered to Breton’s postulates, such as Louis Aragon (1897-1982), with whom he founded the magazine Littérature, Paul Éluard (1895-1952), best known for being Gala’s first husband, and Benjamin Péret (1899- 1959).

However, at the end of the decade the movement began to become politicized. Specifically, Breton, clearly a supporter of communism, defends the adherence of surrealism to this political current.. In 1929 the Second Surrealist Manifesto appeared in the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste, and it was very clear in stating that the movement must approach Marxism.

Breton’s perspective, as always authoritarian and radical, will cause many conflicts among the members of the group, as well as several splits. Salvador Dalí will be one of the “heretics” condemned by Breton, who is already beginning to be famous for his sectarian nature. His vision of surrealism is one and only one, and he does not accept, under any circumstances, deviations from the “orthodoxy” of the movement. In a word, surrealism belongs to him.

Adhering to the Communist Party since 1927, in 1935 he definitively broke with communism and opted for Trotskyism. That same year he traveled to Mexico, where his admired León Trotsky lived in exile, by the way, in the home of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.. Through Rivera he was finally able to meet the leader and write with him and Frida’s husband the Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art, which was published in 1938.

With “soul of a leader”

The translator and art critic Mark Polizzotti (b. 1957) has an interesting study on André Breton that, due to its quality, is worth reviewing. It is a very extensive investigation, where the author collects testimonies and anecdotes that serve to illustrate the character of our character.

As Octavio Paz stated at the time, according to Polizzotti Breton was an ambiguous being. His mood changed easily and, apparently, he had tremendous fits of anger.. However, he was a very charismatic person, possessed of enormous magnetism that extended to everyone who approached him.

There were several women in his life. In addition to his wives (Simone Kahn, Jacqueline Lamba, Elisa Breton), many other female names are related to his biography, among them the enigmatic Nadja, the protagonist of one of his most famous novels and which is supposedly based on a real character.

There are few personalities in the history of art similar to that of André Breton. Admired by some, detested by others, his name is inextricably linked to surrealism, the movement he created with his companions and which had so much influence on the artistic panorama of the 20th century.. Not in vain, and as Polizzotti also states in his book, Breton had an authentic “soul of a leader.” With Dalí’s permission, of course.