French writer and poet, co-founder of Surrealism (1896–1966)
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He wrote the rulebook for surrealism — literally. Breton's 1924 manifesto defined the movement as "pure psychic automatism" and for decades afterward he enforced the doctrine, excommunicating artists who strayed and holding the line between dream logic and everything else.
Born in February 1896, Breton trained as a psychiatrist before the First World War pulled him toward poetry and the problem of the unconscious. In 1924 he published the first Surrealist Manifesto, staking out surrealism as a method of tapping pure psychic automatism — no conscious control, no rational filters. He became the movement's theorist and enforcer, writing criticism that shaped how surrealism was understood in both literature and visual art. His books Nadja and L'Amour fou blurred autobiography and fever dream, tracking obsessive encounters with women and chance in the streets of Pari…
Sourced, dated quotes from André Breton
[T]his cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are' while others, which well might be, 'are not'.
Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express, be it verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, (is) the real working of the mind.
Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.
Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand; the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life — real life, I mean — that in the end this belief is lost.
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