André BRETON.

Breton didn’t change his name at all. He was the father of Surrealism (he was quite a stern father at that). Breton studied psychology and was also active in Tzara’s Dada movement before writing the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 and later, Nadja, a classic Surrealist work about his love affair with a highly neurotic young woman. Breton’s book was very successful and defined the artistic aims of the movement - the girl ended up in a mental asylum. Breton was a man of wide interests, among them anthropology, modern painting, Freudian psychoanalysis, art (of course), literature, and some others too. He was very much leader of a movement which at times included such disparate artists as Giacommetti, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Dalí and Buñuel. He also famously met Trotsky on a trip to Mexico with Wilfredo Lam in 1938 (for the literary product of this meeting, see below), while staying with Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo (with whom Trotsky had a brief, and - by Kahlo’s account disappointing - affair). Breton is a very important figure in Surrealism as well as French intellectual life generally, but he can also be at times tremendously arrogant and a little full of himself. The breadth of his interest and his sense of humour should, perhaps, help us mitigate that a little.