Breton, Andre

The most notorious example of post-Symbolist alchemical imagery in Erench artistic theory was that employed by Andre Breton (1896-1966), the Pope of Surrealism. Breton s many affinities with mainstream Symbolist art theory need not detain us here, with the exception of one familiar and ongoing leitmotif, le Rive. Besides being a recognized core idea in Symbolist poetics, the Dream was also much discussed by another spiritual step-child of Symbolismus, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. As seems conveniently overlooked, the Rives-Traume... 

In short, Duchamp s uniquely amorous artistic scenario for the Large Glass— the cause of so much spilled ink as the only object of the attentions of so many learned art critics, beginning with Andre Breton in 1935 —really concerns nothing more or less than the search for the ever elusive and all-powerful Philosophers Stone. So does his infamous Piss Pot. ... 

Nonetheless, chess, art collecting, and the covert creation of a personal legend most certainly did not represent the totality of Duchamp s discretely pursued, post-Large Glass activities. There were even some physical products, the kind you could call art. Early in 1924, at the suggestion of Andre Breton, Marcel received a six-thousand franc commission from the couturier... 

Andre Breton Magus of Surrealism. New York Noonday, 1971. 

Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism. Tuscaloosa Univ. of Ala-... 

Stalinism provoked, too, a falling-out among the Czech avant-gardists, who by now had taken to Freudian-influenced Surrealism and had grown close to Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. Teige, Biebl, and others broke with Nezval. It was the time of Stalin s show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, and the issue was one of loyalty to Moscow. Breton was horrified. It was absolutely impermissible, he insisted, that in a time when at any moment the fate of civilization could be decided, his Czech friends could lose their sense of what united them. 4... 

Andre Breton, Open Letter to Paul Eluard, in Free Rein (La Cle des champs), trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d Amboise (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 229-31. 

Odysseus Elytis, like Seferis, spent time in Paris during the 192,0s. Born eleven years after Seferis, he had been young enough to learn from the Surrealism of Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, although he would always distance himself afterwards from Surrealism as a movement. In 1936, Seferis had written the much-quoted line, Wherever I travel Greece wounds me. Six years later, Elytis would turn this idea on its head - while yet using very similar images of Hellenic continuity ... 

RUDOLF KUENZLi, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published books on Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealist Lihn, Andre Breton, Surrealism and Women, and New York Dada. He is the editor of Dada/Surrealism and the Director of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa. 

Andre Breton, Anthologie de I Humour Noir, (Paris Sagittaire, 1940). 

Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 27. 

Volume 237—The Photosynthetic Bacterial Reaction Center II Structure, Spectroscopy, and Dynamics edited by Jacques Breton and Andre Vermeglio... 

---