Birth
February 19, 1896, Tinchebray, France
Death
September 28, 1966, Paris, France
Country of Origin/Citizenship
France/ French
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
writer, poet
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Surrealism, Dada
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
Paris, 1920’s/1930's, New York, 1941
Andre Breton was born in 1896 in Tinchebray, France. He attended medical school at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris and then served in World War I in the ambulance corps. After the war, Breton became interested in Sigmund Freud’s views on the unconscious; in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, he wrote of his desire to “to reconcile the unconscious with the conscious mind to form a higher synthesis” (Bolovan). He helped edit the journal Littérature, with Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon. He also actively participated in a Paris branch of Dada. However, he quickly found Dada to be not nearly constructive nor progressive enough and defected around 1922.
Breton founded Surrealism in 1924 and led his own group of fellow Surrealists. He remained aligned with this movement for the remainder of his life. Throughout the 1930’s Breton and the Surrealists became involved with Communism, and Breton briefly joined the French Communist Party. The relationship between the two movements was rocky, however, and Breton broke away from Communism in 1935. His political ideologies and World War II drove him into exile in New York in 1941. He lived in poverty during this time. Breton was an accomplished poet; his first collection of poetry was 1923’s Clair de terre. During his exile, he wrote three longer form poems: Fata Morgana (1942), Les Etats genereux (1943) and Ode a Charles Fourier (1947). His last major poetic work was Constellations, which was published in 1959 (Balakian and Lorenz).
As a writer, Breton’s best-known work is the 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja, which describes the interaction between the author and an enigmatic woman in the streets of Paris. Describing Brenton as having “the expression of an outrageous ram,” the two travelled in similar circles in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and in New York in the early 1940s (Burke 380). Loy was the Paris representative for her son-in-law Julien Levy’s art gallery, which exhibited the work of the Surrealists, and thus Loy closely followed Surrealism and negotiated with a number of surrealist artists. Loy’s novel Insel chronicles interactions between fictionalized versions of Surrealist painter Richard Oelze and herself and was influenced by Loy’s work as Levy’s agent and the structure of Breton’s Nadja.
Moreover, Breton idolized Loy’s late second husband, Arthur Cravan, who in the 1910s staged a number of proto-Dada performances, wrote and edited the journal Maintenant, and boxed professionally. In 1918 Cravan disappeared at sea off the coast of Mexico, a mysterious end that added to his legend. Breton asked for Loy’s permission to publish Cravan’s unpublished work, but she refused until 1941, when she finally agreed under the condition that they collaborate on the publication. Cravan’s notes were published in the Surrealist journal VVV (Kinnahan).
After his exile, he never truly embraced the American life, refusing to learn English and keeping his social circle restricted to other displaced Surrealists. After World War II, Breton returned to France, where he remained until he suffered a heart attack and died in 1966.
Related
Works Cited
Balakian, Anna, and Isabelle Lorenz. “Andre Breton.” French Novelists, 1900-1930. Ed. Catharine Savage Brosman. Detroit: Gale, 1988. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 65.
Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Sept. 2017.
Balakian, Anna. “Reminiscences and Reflections on André Breton.” LEsprit Créateur, vol. 36, no. 4, 1996, pp. 21–31., doi:10.1353/esp.0.0071.
Bolovan, Margaret M. “Andre Breton.” Modern French Poets. Ed. Jean-Francois Leroux. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 258. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 Sept. 2017.
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Kindle ed., Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
Kinnahan, Linda A. Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century photography, and contemporary women poets. Basingstoke, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2017. Schaffner, Ingrid, and Lisa Jacobs. Julien Levy: portrait of an art gallery. MIT Press, 1998.
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