Portrait of André Breton, 1924
André Breton (1896 – 1966) was a French writer, and a poet. Breton was a major member of the Dada group and the co-founder of Surrealism with Paul Éluard, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. He was dedicated to avant-garde art-making. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, declaring surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”, deeply affecting the methodology and origins of future movements, such as Abstract Expressionism.
(Surrealism was a cultural movement during the 1920s that evolved around visual art and other literature in Paris. It uses techniques, such as word games, to challenge the mind. Surrealist art focuses on the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions. The leader of the movement, Andre’ Breton, believed that surrealism was a revolutionary movement above all.)
André Breton worked in various creative media, focusing on collage and printmaking as well as authoring several books. “Breton innovated ways in which text and image could be united through chance association to create new, poetic word-image combinations. His ideas about accessing the unconscious and using symbols for self-expression served as a fundamental conceptual building block for New York artists in the 1940s.” (The Art Story)
Along with his role as leader of the surrealist movement he is the author of celebrated books such as “Nadja” and “L’Amour fou”. Those activities, combined with his critical and theoretical work on writing and the plastic arts, made André Breton a major figure in twentieth-century French art and literature.
Breton launched the review Littérature in 1919, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also associated with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924, he was instrumental in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, also known as the Centrale Surréaliste or “Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries”. It was a Paris-based office in which a loosely affiliated group of Surrealist writers and artists gathered to meet, hold discussions, and conduct interviews in order to “gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind.
In Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and was editor of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste from that year on. A group of writers became associated with him: Soupault, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.
Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx. He was expelled in 1933.
In 1938, he met Leon Trotsky. Together, Breton and Trotsky wrote the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art (published under the names of Breton and Diego Rivera) calling for “complete freedom of art”, which was becoming increasingly difficult with the world situation of the time.
“One of Breton’s fundamental beliefs was in art as an anti-war protest, which he postulated during the First World War. This notion re-gained potency during and after World War II, when the early Abstract Expressionist artists were creating works to demonstrate their outrage at the atrocities happening in Europe.” (The Art Story)
Breton was an avid collector of art, ethnographic material, and unusual ornaments. He was particularly interested in materials from the northwest coast of North America. He subsequently rebuilt the collection in his studio and home at 42 rue Fontaine. The collection grew to over 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art.
Always for the First Time – André Breton, 1934
Always for the first time
I barely know you by sight
You return at some hour of night to a house diagonal from my window
An imaginary house
Where from one second to the next
In perfect darkness
I wait for the magic splitting to happen
A single tear
In the wall and in my heart
The closer I get to you
In real life
The more the key sings in the door of an unknown room
Where you appear to me alone
Where you first melt into brilliant light
Into the stray angle of a curtain
Into the field of jasmine, I saw at dawn on a road in the province of
Grasse
With the diagonal arc of the harvesting girls
Behind them the dark falling wing of plants stripped bare
Before them a square bracket of dazzling light
The curtain raised invisibly
The flowers all returning in fury
It is you face to face with an hour too long never dark enough for sleep
You as if you could be
The same except that I might never meet you
You pretend not to know I see you
Miraculously I’m no longer sure you do
Your lazy lingering fills my eyes with tears
A swarm of meanings surrounds each of your gestures
This is a hunt for honey
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that will scratch you in the forest
There’s a shop window on Notre-Dame-de-Lorette Street
Two lovely crossed legs caught in stockings
Spreading out from the center of a great white clover
There’s a silk ladder rolled out across the ivy
There’s
A way that by gazing into the void and into your absence
I’ve found the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time.
(Translated from French by P. Weinfield)
Toujours pour la Première Fois, André Breton, 1934
Toujours pour la première fois
C’est à peine si je te connais de vue
Tu rentres à telle heure de la nuit
dans une maison oblique à ma fenêtre
Maison tout imaginaire
C’est là que d’une seconde à l’autre
Dans le noir intact
Je m’attends à ce que se produise
une fois de plus la déchirure fascinante
La déchirure unique
De la façade et de mon cœur
Plus je m’approche de toi
En réalité
Plus la clé chante à la porte de la chambre inconnue
Où tu m’apparais seule
Tu es d’abord tout entière fondue dans le brillant
L’angle fugitif d’un rideau
C’est un champ de jasmin que j’ai contemplé à l’aube
sur une route des environs de Grasse
Avec ses cueilleuses en diagonale
Derrière elles l’aile sombre tombante des plants dégarnis
Devant elles l’équerre de l’éblouissant
Le rideau invisiblement soulevé
Rentrent en tumulte toutes les fleurs
C’est toi aux prises avec
cette heure trop longue jamais
assez trouble jusqu’au sommeil
Toi comme si tu pouvais être
La même à cela près que
je ne te rencontrerai peut-être jamais
Tu fais semblant de ne pas savoir que je t’observe
Merveilleusement je ne suis plus sûr que tu le sais
Ton désœuvrement m’emplit les yeux de larmes
Une nuée d’interprétations entoure
chacun de tes gestes
C’est une chasse à la miellée
Il y a des rocking-chairs
sur un pont il y a des branchages
qui risquent de t’égratigner dans la forêt
Il y a dans une vitrine
rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Deux belles jambes croisées prises dans de hauts bas
Qui s’évasent au centre d’un grand trèfle blanc
Il y a une échelle de soie déroulée sur le lierre
Il y a
Qu’à me pencher sur le précipice
et de ton absence
J’ai trouvé le secret
De t’aimer
Toujours pour la première fois.