Wrote the Surrealist manifestos and decided who belonged to the movement. Dalí joined in 1929 and was expelled ten years later, by which time Breton had renamed him Avida Dollars.
André Breton wrote the manifestos of Surrealism and directed the movement from its founding in 1924 until his death in 1966. A French poet and critic trained in medicine, he took the word surréalisme from Guillaume Apollinaire, who had coined it in 1917, and took it up when he organized the movement seven years later. He gave Surrealism a doctrine, a bureau, journals, and a membership he controlled personally — and from a studio on the rue Fontaine, a headquarters that outlasted every quarrel.
Breton was born on 19 February 1896 in Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, the only child of a policeman and a former seamstress. He was studying medicine in Paris when the First World War interrupted, and the army put the training to use: in 1915 he was assigned to a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met Jacques Vaché, a wounded admirer of Alfred Jarry whose contempt for established art marked him deeply. In 1916 he moved to the psychiatric center at Saint-Dizier, treating shell-shocked soldiers with the new psychoanalytic methods and reading the psychiatric literature, Sigmund Freud included.
What he heard there — men speaking without editing themselves — became the basis of everything he did afterwards.
In 1919 Breton founded the magazine Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. That spring he and Soupault wrote Les Champs magnétiques, published in 1920 — the first sustained experiment in automatic writing, composed at speed to outrun the censoring mind. When Tristan Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920, Breton joined forces with Dada; the alliance ended in personal quarrels between the two men, and Breton came out of Dada with a movement of his own to build.
The Manifesto of Surrealism appeared on 15 October 1924, published by Éditions du Sagittaire. It defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" and gave the movement its method: automatic writing, dream transcription, and the belief that the marvelous is available to anyone who stops supervising their own mind. The movement's enthusiasms reached back before its founding. The Surrealists took Musidora — above all the black-clad Irma Vep of Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires — as their tenth muse, and Breton and Aragon paid homage to her in their play Le Trésor des Jésuites in 1929.[1]
He also gave it an administration. The Bureau of Surrealist Research kept public hours, the journals came out on schedule, and membership was granted and revoked by Breton personally, with trials. Robert Desnos was crowned the movement's prophet in the first Manifesto and expelled in the second, published in December 1929. The joke that Breton was the pope of Surrealism described the arrangement accurately.[2]
Salvador Dalí is the fullest case. Gala Dalí, whom Breton knew through Paul Éluard's circle, used the painter's notes on his paranoiac-critical method to persuade Breton of his importance in 1929. Dalí was tried before the group in 1934 over his politics and expelled in 1939, and Breton coined the anagram Avida Dollars for him; the two attacked each other in print for decades afterward.[3]
Not every long relationship ended in a tribunal. Marcel Duchamp remained a friend for life, and the two designed Surrealist exhibitions together — Duchamp hung twelve hundred coal sacks over the 1938 international exhibition in Paris, and strung a mile of string through the 1942 show in New York.[4]
On 1 January 1922 Breton moved into a studio at 42 rue Fontaine, near Pigalle, and it remained his address for the rest of his life. The collection he assembled there grew past five thousand items — modern paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, books, manuscripts, and Oceanic and popular art. Money troubles forced him and Paul Éluard to auction their holdings in 1931; he rebuilt. A wall of the studio is preserved at the Centre Pompidou.
The book most tied to his Paris is Nadja, published in 1928, Breton's account of his encounter with a woman he met on the street who was later confined to a psychiatric institution. It is written from life, and it carried the Surrealist conviction that the city itself, walked attentively, produces the marvelous.
Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927 and was expelled in 1933; he remained on the revolutionary left while rejecting Moscow's control of art. In 1938 he traveled to Mexico, met Leon Trotsky, and drafted with him the manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, published under the names of Breton and the painter Diego Rivera.
When the Second World War came he served in the medical corps, and the Vichy government banned his writings. He escaped to the United States in 1941 with the help of Varian Fry's rescue network. In New York he worked as a radio announcer for the Voice of America's French broadcasts, edited the Surrealist magazine VVV with Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, and organized the 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism with Duchamp. In exile he met Elisa Bindhoff, the Chilean woman who became his third wife in 1945.[5]
He returned to Paris in 1946 and gathered a second Surrealist group around new reviews and exhibitions. He ran Surrealism until he died, by which time its images had long since escaped him. Breton died in Paris on 28 September 1966, at seventy, and is buried in the Batignolles cemetery under a five-word epitaph.
I seek the gold of time
Je cherche l'or du temps
Breton published a second Surrealist manifesto in December 1929, five years after the first, and used a large part of it to settle accounts.
Where the 1924 text had defined a method, the 1929 text drew a boundary. It attacked former members by name — among them Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault and Antonin Artaud — accused them of dilettantism or careerism, and set out the political commitment Breton now expected. Several of those named replied in January 1930 in a pamphlet titled Un cadavre, reusing the title the Surrealists had themselves put on their attack on Anatole France six years before.[1]
The pattern held for the rest of his life. Membership of Surrealism was something Breton conferred and withdrew, and the movement's history is punctuated by expulsions carried out in writing.
Nadja, published in 1928, is illustrated with forty-four images. Among them are the empty Paris street views Breton commissioned from Jacques-André Boiffard, portraits by Man Ray and Henri Manuel, drawings by Nadja herself, and reproductions of paintings.[2]
The street views are deliberately flat: the hotel, the statue, the shop sign, shot straight on with nobody in them. Breton's stated reason was that he wanted to eliminate description from the book altogether. Rather than write a paragraph about a square, he printed a photograph of it and moved on.
Printing a photograph where a description would go has been borrowed steadily since, by W. G. Sebald above all, and Nadja is now cited as often in arguments about how photographs work inside prose as it is in accounts of Surrealism.
Breton filled the studio at 42 rue Fontaine over forty-four years: paintings, Oceanic and Native American objects, insects, minerals, manuscripts, masks, found things from the flea markets, about five thousand items in all, arranged so that they answered one another.
His widow Elisa and his daughter Aube kept it intact after his death in 1966. It stayed that way for thirty-seven years, effectively a private museum nobody could visit.
In 2003 the contents were sold at auction over nine days, after an attempt to have the studio classified and preserved failed. One wall was withdrawn from the sale: about two hundred and fifty-five objects were accepted by the state in lieu of inheritance duties, entered the Musée national d'art moderne, and were rebuilt exactly as Breton had hung them. The wall was shown at the Centre Pompidou until the building closed for renovation in September 2025.
André Breton died in Paris on 28 September 1966, aged seventy, of heart failure. He had run Surrealism for forty-two years, and the movement did not survive him by long; the remaining group dissolved itself in 1969.
He is buried in the Batignolles cemetery in the seventeenth arrondissement. The headstone carries a line of his own: I seek the gold of time.
Born on 19 February in Tinchebray, Normandy, the only child of a policeman and a former seamstress.
Serving as a medical auxiliary, he treats shell-shocked soldiers at the psychiatric center of Saint-Dizier, after a neurological ward in Nantes where he met Jacques Vaché.
Founds the magazine Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, and writes Les Champs magnétiques with Soupault, the first book of automatic writing, published the next year.
Moves into the studio at 42 rue Fontaine on 1 January; it remains his address for life.
The Manifesto of Surrealism is published on 15 October, and the Bureau of Surrealist Research opens its doors.
Joins the French Communist Party; he is expelled in 1933.
Nadja, his book about a woman met on the street who was later institutionalized, is published.
Publishes the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in December, attacking former members by name.
Those he named reply in January in a pamphlet called Un cadavre, reusing the title the Surrealists had used against Anatole France in 1924.
Marries the painter Jacqueline Lamba, mother of his daughter Aube, and puts Salvador Dalí on trial before the group; Dalí is expelled in 1939.
Meets Leon Trotsky in Mexico and drafts Towards a Free Revolutionary Art with him; in Paris, Marcel Duchamp hangs twelve hundred coal sacks over the international Surrealist exhibition.
Escapes occupied France for New York with the help of Varian Fry's network; there he edits VVV and works for the Voice of America's French broadcasts.
Returns to Paris and rebuilds a Surrealist group around new reviews and exhibitions.
Dies in Paris on 28 September, at seventy. He is buried in the Batignolles cemetery under the epitaph 'Je cherche l'or du temps' — I seek the gold of time.
The remaining Surrealist group dissolves itself, three years after his death.
The contents of 42 rue Fontaine are sold at auction over nine days, after an attempt to have the studio preserved fails.
One wall, about 255 objects, is accepted by the state in lieu of inheritance duties and rebuilt exactly as Breton hung it.
How André appears in its pages: The book's 'I' — Breton at thirty, in the fourth year of the Surrealist movement he had founded with the 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme. He was married to Simone Kahn Breton throughout the ten days he spent with Nadja in October 1926.
Met · 1925
Breton met Miró during a visit to the studio at 45 rue Blomet in 1925, the year of the first Surrealist group exhibition. Miró showed with the group from that exhibition on while declining to submit to its discipline.
Clashed with · 1934–1939
Breton put Dalí on trial before the group in 1934 over his politics, expelled him in 1939, and coined the anagram Avida Dollars for him. The two went on attacking each other in print for decades.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Breton were lifelong friends who designed Surrealist exhibitions together, Duchamp providing the installations — the twelve hundred coal sacks hung over the 1938 Paris show and the mile of string strung through the 1942 New York exhibition.
Met
Gala knew Breton through Éluard's Surrealist circle. The Dalí Museum credits her with using Dalí's notes on the paranoiac-critical method to persuade Breton of the painter's importance in 1929.
Met · 1938–1939
Breton met Kahlo in Mexico in 1938, wrote the text for her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York that year calling her a Surrealist, and organised the Mexique exhibition at the galerie Renou et Colle in March 1939 that brought her to Paris. She rejected the label, and her February 1939 letters from Paris record her anger at how little he had arranged.
Met · 1929
The Centre Pompidou's artist record states that Cartier-Bresson met Andre Breton, who directed the Surrealist movement from Paris, at the home of the American poet and publisher Harry Crosby in 1929. Cartier-Bresson was twenty-one and had not yet chosen photography over painting; he never joined the movement.
Met · 1937
Varo reached Paris with Benjamin Peret, a founding member of Surrealism and Breton's closest ally in it, and worked inside the Paris group in the late 1930s, exhibiting in the international Surrealist exhibitions Breton's circle organised. A personal acquaintance follows almost inescapably from that position, but the sources consulted describe her membership of the circle rather than a documented meeting, so the edge is recorded as probable and inferred.
Met · 1925
Tanguy met Breton in Paris in 1925 and joined the Surrealist group led by him.
Met · 1940
Dubuffet and Breton were co-founders of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1948 before disagreements separated their positions.
Met
Giacometti belonged to the Surrealist group around Breton from about 1930, and Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m. date from those years. Breton expelled him in 1935 after he went back to working from a live model, which the group regarded as a return to academic art.
Supported by · 1921–1924
Doucet hired André Breton in mid-1921 as librarian and artistic adviser, four years before the Surrealist movement Breton led was fully underway, and the salary supported him through that period. Breton in turn steered Doucet's buying toward the avant-garde, most consequentially to Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1924.
The Surrealists took Musidora — above all the black-clad Irma Vep of Feuillade's Les Vampires — as their 'tenth muse'; Breton and Aragon paid homage to her in Le Trésor des Jésuites (1929). Connects silent serial cinema to the Surrealist circle without routing through the Cinémathèque.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Breton wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 and ran the movement until his death in 1966, admissions and expulsions included. The joke that he was its pope described the administration accurately.
Art movement · c. 1916–1924
Hosted Tristan Tzara's arrival in Paris in 1920 with the Littérature group and led Paris Dada until his break with Tzara opened the road to Surrealism.
A chance encounter becomes a map of 1920s Paris, Surrealist wonder and the danger of turning another person into a symbol.
Dedicatee · Painting
The back of the canvas carries Max Ernst's prose poem and the dedication "à André Breton / très amicalement / max ernst". Tate's catalogue records that Ernst gave the painting to André Breton, who reproduced it in his book Nadja in 1928.
— Max Ernst, Men Shall Know Nothing of This, 1923 (T00336), T00336; catalogue entry (Ronald Alley, 1981)
A French poet and critic, born in Normandy in 1896, who founded Surrealism and led it for four decades. He wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, the book Nadja in 1928, and controlled the movement's membership personally until his death in Paris in 1966.
The founding document of Surrealism, written by André Breton and published in Paris on 15 October 1924. It defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism — thought expressed without control by reason — and proposed automatic writing and dreams as its instruments. Breton took the word itself from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had coined it in 1917. A second manifesto followed in 1929.
Because he ran the movement like an institution with himself at its head. Membership was granted and revoked by Breton personally, sometimes after formal trials before the group: Robert Desnos was praised in the first Manifesto and expelled after the second, and Salvador Dalí was tried in 1934 and expelled in 1939. The nickname was a joke about that authority, and it stuck.
Dalí joined the Surrealists in 1929, after Gala Dalí used his notes on the paranoiac-critical method to persuade Breton of his importance, and Breton put him on trial before the group in 1934 over his politics. The expulsion came in 1939, and Breton coined the anagram Avida Dollars for him. The two attacked each other in print for decades.
At 42 rue Fontaine, near Pigalle, from 1 January 1922 until his death in 1966. The studio held his collection of more than five thousand paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, and Oceanic and popular art. One wall of it is preserved at the Centre Pompidou.
He died in Paris on 28 September 1966, at the age of seventy. He is buried in the Batignolles cemetery in the 17th arrondissement, and his gravestone carries the epitaph he chose from his own writing: 'Je cherche l'or du temps' — I seek the gold of time.
A text Breton published in December 1929, five years after the first. Where the 1924 manifesto defined a method, this one drew a boundary: it attacked former members by name, including Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault and Antonin Artaud, and set out the political commitment he now expected. Several of them replied in a pamphlet called Un cadavre.
Because Breton wanted to eliminate description. The book carries forty-four photographs, most taken by Jacques-André Boiffard on his instructions, deliberately flat and empty — the hotel, the street, the shop sign. Rather than write a paragraph about a place, he printed a picture of it. W. G. Sebald and others have used the device since.
It stayed intact for thirty-seven years after his death, kept by his widow Elisa and his daughter Aube. In 2003, after an attempt to have the studio preserved failed, the roughly five thousand items were sold at auction over nine days. The French state bought a large part, and one wall was rebuilt as Breton had hung it and is on permanent display at the Centre Pompidou.
In the Batignolles cemetery in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris. He died on 28 September 1966, aged seventy, of heart failure. The headstone carries a line of his own: I seek the gold of time.
Associated with · 1924–1966
Breton wrote the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 and ran the movement until his death in 1966, admissions and expulsions included. The joke that he was its pope described the administration accurately.
Met · 1925
Breton met Miró during a visit to the studio at 45 rue Blomet in 1925, the year of the first Surrealist group exhibition. Miró showed with the group from that exhibition on while declining to submit to its discipline.
Associated with
Hosted Tristan Tzara's arrival in Paris in 1920 with the Littérature group and led Paris Dada until his break with Tzara opened the road to Surrealism.
Clashed with · 1934–1939
Breton put Dalí on trial before the group in 1934 over his politics, expelled him in 1939, and coined the anagram Avida Dollars for him. The two went on attacking each other in print for decades.
Collaborated with
Duchamp and Breton were lifelong friends who designed Surrealist exhibitions together, Duchamp providing the installations — the twelve hundred coal sacks hung over the 1938 Paris show and the mile of string strung through the 1942 New York exhibition.
Influenced by
The Surrealists took Musidora — above all the black-clad Irma Vep of Feuillade's Les Vampires — as their 'tenth muse'; Breton and Aragon paid homage to her in Le Trésor des Jésuites (1929). Connects silent serial cinema to the Surrealist circle without routing through the Cinémathèque.
Met
Gala knew Breton through Éluard's Surrealist circle. The Dalí Museum credits her with using Dalí's notes on the paranoiac-critical method to persuade Breton of the painter's importance in 1929.
Met · 1938–1939
Breton met Kahlo in Mexico in 1938, wrote the text for her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York that year calling her a Surrealist, and organised the Mexique exhibition at the galerie Renou et Colle in March 1939 that brought her to Paris. She rejected the label, and her February 1939 letters from Paris record her anger at how little he had arranged.
Met · 1929
The Centre Pompidou's artist record states that Cartier-Bresson met Andre Breton, who directed the Surrealist movement from Paris, at the home of the American poet and publisher Harry Crosby in 1929. Cartier-Bresson was twenty-one and had not yet chosen photography over painting; he never joined the movement.
Met · 1937
Varo reached Paris with Benjamin Peret, a founding member of Surrealism and Breton's closest ally in it, and worked inside the Paris group in the late 1930s, exhibiting in the international Surrealist exhibitions Breton's circle organised. A personal acquaintance follows almost inescapably from that position, but the sources consulted describe her membership of the circle rather than a documented meeting, so the edge is recorded as probable and inferred.
Met · 1940
Dubuffet and Breton were co-founders of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1948 before disagreements separated their positions.
Met
Giacometti belonged to the Surrealist group around Breton from about 1930, and Suspended Ball and The Palace at 4 a.m. date from those years. Breton expelled him in 1935 after he went back to working from a live model, which the group regarded as a return to academic art.
Supported by · 1921–1924
Doucet hired André Breton in mid-1921 as librarian and artistic adviser, four years before the Surrealist movement Breton led was fully underway, and the salary supported him through that period. Breton in turn steered Doucet's buying toward the avant-garde, most consequentially to Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1924.
Dedicatee · 1923
The back of the canvas carries Max Ernst's prose poem and the dedication "à André Breton / très amicalement / max ernst". Tate's catalogue records that Ernst gave the painting to André Breton, who reproduced it in his book Nadja in 1928.
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