BRETON, André. Pour un art révolutionnaire indépendant.

Mexico: July 1938.

4to, (273 x 210 mm.). A single bifolium comprising four pages printed in black ink on red paper stock. Central fold, a few creases or very minor chips at extremities, otherwise fine.

First edition of Breton’s scarce pamphlet calling for revolution in art, the product of his meeting with Leon Trotsky in 1938. Trotsky had settled in Mexico following his expulsion from the Soviet Union, and through Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo (with whom Trotsky had a brief and - and by Kahlo’s account undistinguished - affair), a meeting was arranged during Breton’s trip to Mexico in 1938. The text published here, although signed by Breton and Rivera, is really the work of Breton and Trotsky; a slightly different version appears in the Trotsky archives in Harvard1.
The text reflects its time of writing; it is concerned with the political situation in the world, and engages with Communism (in its Trotskyite form), which was for so many the bulwark against the rising fascisms in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and in the build-up to World War Two: “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society”. It stresses the common fate of the revolutionary artist and the political revolutionary. It reinforces the independent position of art at a time when it art was systematically being subjugated to the ideals purposes of the State in the European dictatorships (think, for example, of the Nazi exhibition of ‘Entartete Kunst’ - Degenerate Art in 1937). The organisation created by this pamphlet, FIARI (Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant) was not a success and indeed disappeared in 1939 after issuing only two issues of its magazine, Clé. Its manifesto was, however, issued in New York by William Phillips’ ‘Partisan Review’.
There are four different issues of this tract, on red, blue, green, and purple paper; this one is printed on red. The tract also appeared in Spanish in Barcelona in the same year.

Bel exemplaire de ce celébre et important pamphlet, une collaboration de Breton et Trotsky en Mexique, 1938. Cet exemplaire est sur papier rouge pale. Pli centrale, un ou deux petits plis au coins.

1 cf. Marlene Kadar, Cultural Politics in the 1930s. Partisan Review, the Surrealists and Leon Trotsky (PhD, Edmonton, Alberta, 1983, 284 p.)