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Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton
In the first full-length biography in English of Andre Breton, the founder and prime theorist of the French Surrealist movement, Mark Polizzotti reveals the intellectual, artistic and personal life of one of our century's most influential and charismatic cultural figures, a man whom Eugene Ionesco dubbed "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought." This definitive work traces Breton's artistic career, from his participation in the Paris Dada group in the 1920s, through his seminal experiments with automatic writings and "induced slumbers," to the development of Surrealism proper and the literary, aesthetic, social, and political successes and scandals of that most influential modernist movement. Polizzotti reconstructs Breton's intense and formative friendships with Man Ray, Duchamp, Dali, and Miro, among others; his legendary encounters with Trotsky, Freud, and Sartre; and his several marriages and love affairs.
754 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1995
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341 people want to read
About the author
Mark Polizzotti
76 books40 followersMark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books, including works by Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Roussel, Marguerite Duras, and Paul Virilio. Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is also the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton and other books. He currently directs the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 2, 2007
A really great introduction to one of the great forces in the 20th Century aesthetics - Andre Breton. The head Surrealist was a royal pain in the ass with his Stalin like control of the Surrrealist movement, but then again he gave the avant-garde a certain amount of class, style, and adventure. His "Nadja" is a masterpiece in my opinion, but also a good if not great poet.
But what makes this bio so interesting are the side charcters in this man's life. Great poets and painters all! It is also a good history of avant-garde Europe and New York. And gossipy as well
But what makes this bio so interesting are the side charcters in this man's life. Great poets and painters all! It is also a good history of avant-garde Europe and New York. And gossipy as well
June 30, 2024
2024 review:
Re-read this ten years plus. Still think of it as a 3 because Breton is a unlikable character. He excommunicates almost everyone of his friends from his group, he's sexist (doesn't care if a woman feels pleasure; idealizes women as some sort of mythic symbol till he finds the next (at least till his last wife, though he grew bored of her by the end), he disapproves of homosexuality (while paradoxically loving Rimbaud (at least at first)), and he's always getting in black moods.
This was the new edition that cut and expanded portions of the text. The author discovered the real-life Nadja who ended up in an insane asylum after Breton turned her into a symbol and inspiration for his best-selling work. A bad book at that in my opinion.
2011 review:
Breton is not necessarily someone likable. His modus operandi is to be of moody austerity, trying to put a self-control and authority over the uncontrolled: the unconscious (a disappointing meeting with Freud shows up), madness (Antonin Artaud runs the surrealist camp for a time before losing his wits and describing the authoritarian Breton as a shining god), class (he aligns with Trotsky in Mexico), and the avant-garde (where he idolizes the old guard and follows their models of poetry only later to overthrow their relations (Dada) and make new ones (his many magazines), a continuing cycle of recycling who interests him as new and playing a double agent between the different literary camps of Paris).
Breton was defiantly the driving force in Surrealism, others like Dali jumped aboard and used it as they needed. Breton liked the evil twisted jester like side of Parisian literature: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont. He was compared to a mummy, a vulture, a dictator, a Machiavelli. He indulged in the mind certainly more then the flesh or the drug, he wanted to tap some revelation into the mystic.
The book which I got through except the last few sections is exciting until we move out of the 20s and past Trotsky.
Re-read this ten years plus. Still think of it as a 3 because Breton is a unlikable character. He excommunicates almost everyone of his friends from his group, he's sexist (doesn't care if a woman feels pleasure; idealizes women as some sort of mythic symbol till he finds the next (at least till his last wife, though he grew bored of her by the end), he disapproves of homosexuality (while paradoxically loving Rimbaud (at least at first)), and he's always getting in black moods.
This was the new edition that cut and expanded portions of the text. The author discovered the real-life Nadja who ended up in an insane asylum after Breton turned her into a symbol and inspiration for his best-selling work. A bad book at that in my opinion.
2011 review:
Breton is not necessarily someone likable. His modus operandi is to be of moody austerity, trying to put a self-control and authority over the uncontrolled: the unconscious (a disappointing meeting with Freud shows up), madness (Antonin Artaud runs the surrealist camp for a time before losing his wits and describing the authoritarian Breton as a shining god), class (he aligns with Trotsky in Mexico), and the avant-garde (where he idolizes the old guard and follows their models of poetry only later to overthrow their relations (Dada) and make new ones (his many magazines), a continuing cycle of recycling who interests him as new and playing a double agent between the different literary camps of Paris).
Breton was defiantly the driving force in Surrealism, others like Dali jumped aboard and used it as they needed. Breton liked the evil twisted jester like side of Parisian literature: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont. He was compared to a mummy, a vulture, a dictator, a Machiavelli. He indulged in the mind certainly more then the flesh or the drug, he wanted to tap some revelation into the mystic.
The book which I got through except the last few sections is exciting until we move out of the 20s and past Trotsky.
August 5, 2013
I usually hate reading academic fonch triple-speak. Rubbish. Like a brain damaged inmate, who thinks he's intellectual because he discovered marx while getting his GED, and is bound and determined to tell you all about it, because it applies to tv and society, and he's had 40 years to think about it, and its really really deep on american culture or whatever, no wamsayin?
but. breton was into stone deep occultism. mysteries in plain view
but. breton was into stone deep occultism. mysteries in plain view
March 17, 2023
Artistic groups form and fall apart according to their own physical laws. Artists are typically individualists until the time comes that they would like to get anything substantial done on a plane beyond the immediately creative. Gallery shows are put together, magazines are founded, manifestos drawn up, all in the service of a group mind. With the group comes group dynamics, and with group dynamics come power struggles and clashes of personality.
This was never more truer than it was for the “Surrealists” as they morphed over something like five or six decades during the tumultuous 20th century, when modernism as an artistic concept began to have real effects, the rubber hitting the road. Mark Polizzotti’s Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton gave a full-scale biographical cross sectioning of the life of perhaps the greatest personality playing the personality game in the French Surrealist movement. Over 624 pages (plus notes) we get the life of this charismatic, charming poet and theoretician who could be found mostly in Parisian coffeehouses leading meetings of his group like a corporate CEO doing trust exercises with his staff — and often, if they had displeased Breton or diverged from the group’s principles, letting them plummet to the ground unsupported. (Breton fled Europe during World War Two and set up shop in New York City, an absconding that would at times work against him when he returned to war-torn France after the Nazis were beaten. Other artists were not as well-connected and swift with getting papers to leave and had to stay in France and contend with life under the Nazis; some of them joined the Resistance.)
Anyone spending time thinking about the fissiparity of artistic movements, how they clump together and fracture along the fault lines drawn between fields of personal individual charm, would be interested in the story of how Breton behaved with his friends, colleagues, and enemies. It seemed that the Surrealists were forever drawing up statements of intent and excommunicating those who went off the script. Breton would do things like conduct mock trials for other writers and artists in and out of the group and declare them persona non grata at surrealist functions. I would need to reread the book to gain a greater mastery of the whole cast of characters swirling around Breton and their movements, their tendentious friendships with Breton. A recurrent motif had individuals meeting Breton on the streets of Paris by chance, extending their hands for a handshake, and Breton snubs them for some offense, saying “We are not friends and we’ll never speak again.” Snubs and social cutting happened all the time in this milieu.
The combat between Breton and Spanish painter Salvador Dali provides some of the funniest reading. Surrealism was always welcoming in new members — like an army needing more bodies — and then getting into internecine squabbles with its own people. Dali’s ego and desire for publicity and outrage made him a natural foe of Breton who seemed to want more of the limelight for himself. I can only imagine the theatrical, destructive, rude scenes in the coffeehouses or brasseries where Breton and Dali would publicly go at it, in the name of art.
It was always about the art. And the impulse for constant activity. After World War One and the nihilistic virulence of the Dada movement from Zurich and Berlin which caused its own waves of conflict, the number of publications, books, magazines that sprung up to publish the works of the surrealists and their adjacent numbers was positively swarming. Paintings and drawings by visual artists exchanged hands and became the subject of formidable gallery shows, catalogs and retrospectives. Again, I can’t recall the names of individual artists involved beyond Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, who as self-sufficient artists were never really in the inner circles of Surrealism but were definitely moving in the broth.
Surrealism can be defined as an aesthetic movement that took cues from the “automatism of the subconscious mind.” Parlor games, borderline seances and “trance parties,” automatic writing sessions pushed the boundaries of group creativity in what was a relatively new environment of Freudian psychoanalytic thought. Breton tried to draw the Viennese doctor into the Surrealist orbit on a few occasions and the blank expression on Freud’s face when Breton finally got an audience with him is priceless. Freud had a distaste for the surrealist’s wacky shenanigans and thought they were all weirdos.
Significantly, Dali cracked the shell around Freud where Breton and others failed, causing further rifts: to watch how these artistic personalities pursued celebrated authority figures for their own somewhat propagandistic ends brings up curious and uneasy questions. Politically, Europe was under the sway of the cults of personality surrounding leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and Surrealists in an pursued leaders, charismatic nodes of concentration in individual people, in an oddly similar fashion that seems counter to the notions of “personal freedom” that they valued. Breton goes to great lengths to try to get on the same wavelength as Leon Trotsky hiding out in Mexico before his assassination. No movement seems exempt from this inevitable worship of a leader, a decision maker, someone to rally followers — or to serve as a focus for rebellious hate. One aspect of the book I found rather tiresome, although I understood its major significance, was the seemingly irresistible suction of Communism upon the Surrealists. It was a strong orbit that Breton and the group at first succumbed to, but then as years went by and the horrors of Stalinist maneuvering became more evident, they tried to pull out of, often unsuccessfully. Creative freedom, the revolution of the human unconscious, does not easily go hand in hand with the struggle of the proletariat. There is a split between the force of historical materialism and the offbeat ideas of the artist chasing dream-imagery, and they don’t serve each other as neatly as the Communists wanted. The Communists were as confused as Freud was at the Surrealists, but wanted to bully them into shape, and some like Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon were with it, but many weren’t.
Repeatedly in the biography we see how violent it could get, even leaving aside the struggle of Communism. Interwar Paris was a place where you might have a poetry reading, a performance of a play, and opening of a film (a new medium), and a rival gang of artists or just thugs would show up and start shit. It was common for Breton or others to jump on stage and physically confront other people in the middle of a reading or a play. They seemed to have inherited some of this anarchic energy from Dadaists like Tristan Tzara. It was a fight over aesthetic and ideological turf. If you criticized a beloved writer, you might have three dudes show up at your apartment and stomp you. Where are such combatants today? On Twitter perhaps. The subtweet is the beatdown. Reputations get tarnished in a flurry of digital feuilletons. Clusters of writers engage in psychological warfare in social media spaces.
I can’t let this review go by without mentioning the women. It’s understood now from history’s perspective that women do not get treated well even by progressive groups trying to promulgate cultural change. Tales of hippies from the 1960s are rife with women being put in subservient roles and unfortunately some of the behavior around Breton was no different. Women were often relegated to being muses and targets of love poetry, which is apparently very nice but not, intrinsically, a condition of freedom or equality. Breton was married several times but carried on affairs with other women, sometimes with the patient understanding of his wives, but always seemingly with a kind of artistic motive: love is the fuel for creativity, and when the creative juices aren’t flowing anymore, out goes the woman. Movies could be made about the “tourism of lovers” around Europe as men and women in the Surrealist fold followed each other from French vacation spot to vacation spot, tug of wars over lovers that were never fully decisive. A perennial theme of such stories is the older man being rejuvenated by a relationship with a woman in her twenties. Breton’s famous novel Nadja, the “first Surrealist romance,” is a semi-autobiographical narrative about Breton’s meetings with a strange, somewhat mentally unwell woman on the streets of Paris, a series of romantically tinged encounters that seemed to crystallize in inexplicable ways, the ideas about the unconscious and randomness that Breton was trying to formulate in the 1920s. The actual woman who was the source for this character Nadja (Nadezhda is Russian for “hope,” so Nadja is a name that is a truncation of hope) was apparently too volatile for Breton to stay in touch with and the case could be made that he discarded her in some way.
Polizzotti’s book was evidently his first book, which is as Edmund White puts it, “astonishing.” As a historical document it is quite impressive and drew on a mass of letters, magazine articles, books, and radio interviews (Breton became in the post-war years a kind of eminence grise who strenuously tried to keep himself and surrealism in the center of the public discourse, even as his group was shedding older members and drawing in newer devotees). Readers who want to dig into a more thorough treasure trove of historical sources about surrealism and their cultural vicinity in France and beyond, or just the history of art in the first half of the 20th century, should look to this book. The case has been made, with some persuasiveness, that Surrealism has been one of the most influential trends in 20th century art and culture, giving breath and momentum to subsequent developments in painting, literature, music, cinema, pop art, punk aesthetics, and beyond. With Breton’s input, as intransigent and difficult as it may have been, Surrealist France continued to prove itself as an epochal, history-diverting, monolithic source of ideas and energy that have infused culture so deeply we can hardly sort out the ectoplasm of the unconscious from among the fibrous grains of reality.
This was never more truer than it was for the “Surrealists” as they morphed over something like five or six decades during the tumultuous 20th century, when modernism as an artistic concept began to have real effects, the rubber hitting the road. Mark Polizzotti’s Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton gave a full-scale biographical cross sectioning of the life of perhaps the greatest personality playing the personality game in the French Surrealist movement. Over 624 pages (plus notes) we get the life of this charismatic, charming poet and theoretician who could be found mostly in Parisian coffeehouses leading meetings of his group like a corporate CEO doing trust exercises with his staff — and often, if they had displeased Breton or diverged from the group’s principles, letting them plummet to the ground unsupported. (Breton fled Europe during World War Two and set up shop in New York City, an absconding that would at times work against him when he returned to war-torn France after the Nazis were beaten. Other artists were not as well-connected and swift with getting papers to leave and had to stay in France and contend with life under the Nazis; some of them joined the Resistance.)
Anyone spending time thinking about the fissiparity of artistic movements, how they clump together and fracture along the fault lines drawn between fields of personal individual charm, would be interested in the story of how Breton behaved with his friends, colleagues, and enemies. It seemed that the Surrealists were forever drawing up statements of intent and excommunicating those who went off the script. Breton would do things like conduct mock trials for other writers and artists in and out of the group and declare them persona non grata at surrealist functions. I would need to reread the book to gain a greater mastery of the whole cast of characters swirling around Breton and their movements, their tendentious friendships with Breton. A recurrent motif had individuals meeting Breton on the streets of Paris by chance, extending their hands for a handshake, and Breton snubs them for some offense, saying “We are not friends and we’ll never speak again.” Snubs and social cutting happened all the time in this milieu.
The combat between Breton and Spanish painter Salvador Dali provides some of the funniest reading. Surrealism was always welcoming in new members — like an army needing more bodies — and then getting into internecine squabbles with its own people. Dali’s ego and desire for publicity and outrage made him a natural foe of Breton who seemed to want more of the limelight for himself. I can only imagine the theatrical, destructive, rude scenes in the coffeehouses or brasseries where Breton and Dali would publicly go at it, in the name of art.
It was always about the art. And the impulse for constant activity. After World War One and the nihilistic virulence of the Dada movement from Zurich and Berlin which caused its own waves of conflict, the number of publications, books, magazines that sprung up to publish the works of the surrealists and their adjacent numbers was positively swarming. Paintings and drawings by visual artists exchanged hands and became the subject of formidable gallery shows, catalogs and retrospectives. Again, I can’t recall the names of individual artists involved beyond Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, who as self-sufficient artists were never really in the inner circles of Surrealism but were definitely moving in the broth.
Surrealism can be defined as an aesthetic movement that took cues from the “automatism of the subconscious mind.” Parlor games, borderline seances and “trance parties,” automatic writing sessions pushed the boundaries of group creativity in what was a relatively new environment of Freudian psychoanalytic thought. Breton tried to draw the Viennese doctor into the Surrealist orbit on a few occasions and the blank expression on Freud’s face when Breton finally got an audience with him is priceless. Freud had a distaste for the surrealist’s wacky shenanigans and thought they were all weirdos.
Significantly, Dali cracked the shell around Freud where Breton and others failed, causing further rifts: to watch how these artistic personalities pursued celebrated authority figures for their own somewhat propagandistic ends brings up curious and uneasy questions. Politically, Europe was under the sway of the cults of personality surrounding leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and Surrealists in an pursued leaders, charismatic nodes of concentration in individual people, in an oddly similar fashion that seems counter to the notions of “personal freedom” that they valued. Breton goes to great lengths to try to get on the same wavelength as Leon Trotsky hiding out in Mexico before his assassination. No movement seems exempt from this inevitable worship of a leader, a decision maker, someone to rally followers — or to serve as a focus for rebellious hate. One aspect of the book I found rather tiresome, although I understood its major significance, was the seemingly irresistible suction of Communism upon the Surrealists. It was a strong orbit that Breton and the group at first succumbed to, but then as years went by and the horrors of Stalinist maneuvering became more evident, they tried to pull out of, often unsuccessfully. Creative freedom, the revolution of the human unconscious, does not easily go hand in hand with the struggle of the proletariat. There is a split between the force of historical materialism and the offbeat ideas of the artist chasing dream-imagery, and they don’t serve each other as neatly as the Communists wanted. The Communists were as confused as Freud was at the Surrealists, but wanted to bully them into shape, and some like Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon were with it, but many weren’t.
Repeatedly in the biography we see how violent it could get, even leaving aside the struggle of Communism. Interwar Paris was a place where you might have a poetry reading, a performance of a play, and opening of a film (a new medium), and a rival gang of artists or just thugs would show up and start shit. It was common for Breton or others to jump on stage and physically confront other people in the middle of a reading or a play. They seemed to have inherited some of this anarchic energy from Dadaists like Tristan Tzara. It was a fight over aesthetic and ideological turf. If you criticized a beloved writer, you might have three dudes show up at your apartment and stomp you. Where are such combatants today? On Twitter perhaps. The subtweet is the beatdown. Reputations get tarnished in a flurry of digital feuilletons. Clusters of writers engage in psychological warfare in social media spaces.
I can’t let this review go by without mentioning the women. It’s understood now from history’s perspective that women do not get treated well even by progressive groups trying to promulgate cultural change. Tales of hippies from the 1960s are rife with women being put in subservient roles and unfortunately some of the behavior around Breton was no different. Women were often relegated to being muses and targets of love poetry, which is apparently very nice but not, intrinsically, a condition of freedom or equality. Breton was married several times but carried on affairs with other women, sometimes with the patient understanding of his wives, but always seemingly with a kind of artistic motive: love is the fuel for creativity, and when the creative juices aren’t flowing anymore, out goes the woman. Movies could be made about the “tourism of lovers” around Europe as men and women in the Surrealist fold followed each other from French vacation spot to vacation spot, tug of wars over lovers that were never fully decisive. A perennial theme of such stories is the older man being rejuvenated by a relationship with a woman in her twenties. Breton’s famous novel Nadja, the “first Surrealist romance,” is a semi-autobiographical narrative about Breton’s meetings with a strange, somewhat mentally unwell woman on the streets of Paris, a series of romantically tinged encounters that seemed to crystallize in inexplicable ways, the ideas about the unconscious and randomness that Breton was trying to formulate in the 1920s. The actual woman who was the source for this character Nadja (Nadezhda is Russian for “hope,” so Nadja is a name that is a truncation of hope) was apparently too volatile for Breton to stay in touch with and the case could be made that he discarded her in some way.
Polizzotti’s book was evidently his first book, which is as Edmund White puts it, “astonishing.” As a historical document it is quite impressive and drew on a mass of letters, magazine articles, books, and radio interviews (Breton became in the post-war years a kind of eminence grise who strenuously tried to keep himself and surrealism in the center of the public discourse, even as his group was shedding older members and drawing in newer devotees). Readers who want to dig into a more thorough treasure trove of historical sources about surrealism and their cultural vicinity in France and beyond, or just the history of art in the first half of the 20th century, should look to this book. The case has been made, with some persuasiveness, that Surrealism has been one of the most influential trends in 20th century art and culture, giving breath and momentum to subsequent developments in painting, literature, music, cinema, pop art, punk aesthetics, and beyond. With Breton’s input, as intransigent and difficult as it may have been, Surrealist France continued to prove itself as an epochal, history-diverting, monolithic source of ideas and energy that have infused culture so deeply we can hardly sort out the ectoplasm of the unconscious from among the fibrous grains of reality.
December 27, 2021
As a work of biography - masterful. It's subject - altogether revolting. Andre Breton - the Joseph Stalin, or perhaps more accurately the Pol Pot or Idi Amin, of surrealism.
My greatest pleasure in reading this book - the story of Breton's creeping irrelevance in post-WWII France (as elsewhere) leaving him stewing in his own juice - while no one much cared whether he did or didn't.
My greatest pleasure in reading this book - the story of Breton's creeping irrelevance in post-WWII France (as elsewhere) leaving him stewing in his own juice - while no one much cared whether he did or didn't.
March 26, 2012
Breton lived in a culture where art was taken seriously and Breton took art, literature and poetry more serious than anyone. An all-encompassing book about the leader of Dadaism and then Surrealism.
May 23, 2017
This is the best biography of an author I have ever read, surpassing even Graham Robb's works on French authors. Mark Polizzotti has unturned every stone in the life of Breton, while writing in a very approachable style that engages and enthralls. I am a Breton scholar myself, having written a thesis on him while studying at the Sorbonne. Polizzotti's information is so valuable in understanding this complex Surrealist and the movement he initiated, for which he served as "Pope" for so many years. Many lacunae in my own knowledge have now been filled and I can finish my article on Breton's Nadja. I plan to use the new information in a book on the minds of mediums and mystics, with the addition of Hester Albach's more recent findings in Léona héroine du surréalisme. It's a long trip I've been on and seems to be coming to a finale I can be proud of, as I add the new biographical information to my own neuroscientific studies on poetic minds.
May 25, 2011
Thoroughly exhaustive biography of Andre Breton, and probably the most comprehensive English-language retrospect on the French Surrealist movement. Rather less than admiring, but interesting enough to hold interest.
April 7, 2015
Dream is over.
November 10, 2014
Very interesting bio. Certainly made Breton sound like a jerk and a total control freak. But a lot of insight in the Surrealist movement,
October 23, 2023
This is a disappointing and curiously empty book. Despite this I've given it 3 because - well, how could the life of André Breton, the central figure in the development of Surrealism, be anything but compelling and fascinating?
For that one does not need to identify with Surrealism (as I do). Polizzotti, however, seems aware of Surrealism as a significant force, hence writing on the towering and magnetic figure of Breton, without ever really getting inside it, without ever really getting to the compulsions within it. A narrow focus on the personal hides how that is played out intellectually and publicly at times: having dealt carefully and with great attention to the disputes and tussles of the formative years of the movement, we find that Surrealism has become a pole of attraction without Polizzotti ever really discussing how or why.
A great part of the problem is Polizzotti's weakness on political questions. This is flagged up early (p.87), with a reference to Karl Liebknecht as 'a German anarchist'. To describe the great Marxist, co-founder of the Spartacus League with Rosa Luxemburg, this way points to a vagueness on the fundamental political and theoretical issues that both informed and exerted enormous pressures on Surrealism through the '20s and '30s. Polizzotti's discussions of Stalinism are inadequate to the task in hand, and his discussions of Trotsky and Trotskyism even thinner. Despite my own political sympathies, I am far from thinking Breton was 'a Trotskyist', just as I reject the counter-suggestion that he was 'always an anarchist', but picking out those positions requires a much greater socio-political understanding than Polizzotti has.
At the same time, it is difficult to be confident that Polizzotti even has a firm enough grip on the cultural context of his subject. Finding the great anarchist chansonnier Léo Ferré described as 'a folksinger' (with an inadequate and misleading comment about the split between him and Breton) hardly instils confidence.
It is perhaps the throwaway remarks, like that about Ferré, that create the greatest anxiety. I am used to the familiar misspelling of Wifredo Lam's name as 'Wilfredo': I despise it as lazy ignorance, but accept that as part of a general lack of informed awareness of Surrealism. To find it used repeatedly and consistently in a book about Breton is alarming. Similarly, this is not the place I would expect to find the Swedish painter Max Walter Svanberg's name misspelled (as Swanberg), and while French-born J-B Brunius lived and worked in Britain it is neither clear nor accurate enough simply to describe him as 'an English Surrealist'. I am pretty well clued up on this stuff: this makes me wonder what else I might have missed, and how much those not so clued up are being misled.
The whole finds its enraging summation in Polizzotti's acceptance in good coin of the winding up of the Paris Surrealist group in 1968 by Jean Schuster. Polizzotti treats this as the winding up of the Surrealist movement, without mentioning either that Schuster's termination was highly controversial and not accepted by all of the Paris group, or that other groups (some very recent, some of long standing) still existed elsewhere around the world. The Czech group had similarly resisted Nezval's attempt to wind it up in the late '30s: this was not known in Paris for a long time, although a historian has a responsibility to recognise it, but a joint statement between Paris and Czech Surrealists in 1968 should surely have alerted Polizzotti to the misrepresentation. He offers a lazy falsehood for cheap narrative effect. It is unworthy.
There is fascinating and invaluable stuff here, but it is very far from being the last - or even the best - word.
For that one does not need to identify with Surrealism (as I do). Polizzotti, however, seems aware of Surrealism as a significant force, hence writing on the towering and magnetic figure of Breton, without ever really getting inside it, without ever really getting to the compulsions within it. A narrow focus on the personal hides how that is played out intellectually and publicly at times: having dealt carefully and with great attention to the disputes and tussles of the formative years of the movement, we find that Surrealism has become a pole of attraction without Polizzotti ever really discussing how or why.
A great part of the problem is Polizzotti's weakness on political questions. This is flagged up early (p.87), with a reference to Karl Liebknecht as 'a German anarchist'. To describe the great Marxist, co-founder of the Spartacus League with Rosa Luxemburg, this way points to a vagueness on the fundamental political and theoretical issues that both informed and exerted enormous pressures on Surrealism through the '20s and '30s. Polizzotti's discussions of Stalinism are inadequate to the task in hand, and his discussions of Trotsky and Trotskyism even thinner. Despite my own political sympathies, I am far from thinking Breton was 'a Trotskyist', just as I reject the counter-suggestion that he was 'always an anarchist', but picking out those positions requires a much greater socio-political understanding than Polizzotti has.
At the same time, it is difficult to be confident that Polizzotti even has a firm enough grip on the cultural context of his subject. Finding the great anarchist chansonnier Léo Ferré described as 'a folksinger' (with an inadequate and misleading comment about the split between him and Breton) hardly instils confidence.
It is perhaps the throwaway remarks, like that about Ferré, that create the greatest anxiety. I am used to the familiar misspelling of Wifredo Lam's name as 'Wilfredo': I despise it as lazy ignorance, but accept that as part of a general lack of informed awareness of Surrealism. To find it used repeatedly and consistently in a book about Breton is alarming. Similarly, this is not the place I would expect to find the Swedish painter Max Walter Svanberg's name misspelled (as Swanberg), and while French-born J-B Brunius lived and worked in Britain it is neither clear nor accurate enough simply to describe him as 'an English Surrealist'. I am pretty well clued up on this stuff: this makes me wonder what else I might have missed, and how much those not so clued up are being misled.
The whole finds its enraging summation in Polizzotti's acceptance in good coin of the winding up of the Paris Surrealist group in 1968 by Jean Schuster. Polizzotti treats this as the winding up of the Surrealist movement, without mentioning either that Schuster's termination was highly controversial and not accepted by all of the Paris group, or that other groups (some very recent, some of long standing) still existed elsewhere around the world. The Czech group had similarly resisted Nezval's attempt to wind it up in the late '30s: this was not known in Paris for a long time, although a historian has a responsibility to recognise it, but a joint statement between Paris and Czech Surrealists in 1968 should surely have alerted Polizzotti to the misrepresentation. He offers a lazy falsehood for cheap narrative effect. It is unworthy.
There is fascinating and invaluable stuff here, but it is very far from being the last - or even the best - word.
October 2, 2022
Well, that took a while! Partly because I haven't had as much time to read recently and partly because I decided to read/reread Breton's writings as they came along in the text, most of which I haven't read for probably 30 years or more. Still a couple to finish and one or two to buy before I'm done. Might write a bit more here when I get through those.
September 9, 2020
An fascinating and deeply comprehensive biography of the man who started Surrealism and stood at the center of many things for 50 years.
January 4, 2026
I can’t believe how much I enjoyed this book. For someone who preached the total transformation of humanity, Breton failed in many ways: he was egotistical, petty, sexist, homophobic, and occasionally violent (or at least willing to have others commit violence on his behalf). Yet he also had startlingly original ideas, and he galvanized an impressive circle of talented writers, poets, and artists to produce actual masterpieces of the modern period. He was capable of doing very funny things, too, despite taking himself far too seriously. Polizzotti deserves considerable credit for writing a biography that is consistently engaging and enjoyable. I can't recommend it enough.
June 20, 2021
Clear lucid and immensely readable
A faithful charting of a pivotal character whose sometimes autocratic and fractious deeds in the service of his vision for surrealism sometimes obscured a loving nature of great friendships and intelligent conversations.
A faithful charting of a pivotal character whose sometimes autocratic and fractious deeds in the service of his vision for surrealism sometimes obscured a loving nature of great friendships and intelligent conversations.
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