André Breton

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 Paris. By the time he died in September 1966, he'd spent four decades as the movement's gravitational center, the man who defined what surrealism was and who belonged inside it.