André Breton

(French, 1896–1966)

André Breton was an influential French writer and artist who helped form Surrealism. He is credited with pioneering automatism, the spontaneous act of writing, drawing, or painting as a means to elucidate unconscious thought. “Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought,” he once declared. Born on February 19, 1896 in Tinchebray, France, Breton pursued a brief medical career before moving to Paris in the early 1920s, where he quickly joined the city's avant-garde milieu. Inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud, in 1924 he wrote the Manifeste du surréalisme, in which he championed free expression outside the constraints of reason and morality. The manifesto had an immediate impact on peers such as Wifredo Lam and Max Ernst, and would later influence the works of Jackson Pollock. In the late 1920s, Breton joined the French Communist Party and became a lifelong Marxist committed to fighting the rise of fascism. Fleeing from World War II, Breton left France in the early 1940s, living in the United States for several years, where he organized a groundbreaking exhibition of Surrealist Art at Yale University. After the war, Breton returned to Paris, where he continued to publish poetry and essays. He died at the age of 70 on September 28, 1966 in Paris, France. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.