André Breton in Exile


Book Description

Following the journey of André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, into exile during the Second World War, the author of this book traces the trajectory of his thought and poetic output from 1941–1948. Through a close examination of the major – and as yet little studied – works written during these years, she demonstrates how Breton’s quest for "a new myth" for the postwar world led him to widen his enquiry into hermeticism, myth, and the occult. This ground-breaking study establishes Breton’s profound intellectual debt to 19th-century Romanticism, its literature and thought, revealing how it defined his understanding of hermeticism and the occult, and examining the differences between the two. It shows how, having abandoned political action on leaving the Communist Party in 1935, Breton nonetheless held firmly to political thought, moving in his quest for a better world via Hermes Trismegistus across the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier and the "magical" practices of the Hopi Indians. The author finally reveals Breton’s misreading of the situation in postwar Paris on his return in 1946, and his failure to communicate the span of his ideas for creating a better society while at the same time maintaining a close connection between art and life.




André Breton in Exile


Book Description

Following the journey of André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, into exile during the Second World War, the author of this book traces the trajectory of his thought and poetic output from 1941-1948. Through a close examination of the major - and as yet little studied - works written during these years, she demonstrates how Breton's quest for "a new myth" for the postwar world led him to widen his enquiry into hermeticism, myth, and the occult. This ground-breaking study establishes Breton's profound intellectual debt to 19th-century Romanticism, its literature and thought, revealing how it defined his understanding of hermeticism and the occult, and examining the differences between the two. It shows how, having abandoned political action on leaving the Communist Party in 1935, Breton nonetheless held firmly to political thought, moving in his quest for a better world via Hermes Trismegistus across the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier and the "magical" practices of the Hopi Indians. The author finally reveals Breton's misreading of the situation in postwar Paris on his return in 1946, and his failure to communicate the span of his ideas for creating a better society while at the same time maintaining a close connection between art and life.




Revolution of the Mind


Book Description

Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought, Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and literary movement of the 20th century. Poet and theorist, artistic impresario and political agitator, Breton was a man of paradoxical character: inspiring one moment, crushingly tyrannical the next; embracing friends like Brunuel, Dali, Duchamp, Miro, Man Ray, Aragon and Eluard, only to exile them as enemies later. From its emergence from Dada after World War I through its culmination in the 1960s, here is the Surrealist world in detail. --Black Widow Press.




Arcanum 17


Book Description

Considered radical at the time, Breton's ideas today seem almost prescient, yet breathtaking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit. Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers issues of love, loss, aggression, war, pacifism and feminism.







Refusal of the Shadow


Book Description

Refusal of the Shadow explores the nature of the relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes, and presents a series of texts which reveal its complexity.




Escape from Vichy


Book Description

Early in World War II, thousands of refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique, en route to safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer, the exiles formed influential ties--with one another and with local black dissidents. As Eric T. Jennings shows, what began as expulsion became a kind of rescue.




Communicating Vessels


Book Description

What Freud did for dreams, André Breton (1896–1966) does for despair: in its distortions he finds the marvelous, and through the marvelous the redemptive force of imagination. Originally published in 1932 in France, Les Vases communicants is an effort to show how the discoveries and techniques of surrealism could lead to recovery from despondency. This English translation makes available "the theories upon which the whole edifice of surrealism, as Breton conceived it, is based." In Communicating Vessels Breton lays out the problems of everyday experience and of intellect. His involvement with political thought and action led him to write about the relations between nations and individuals in a mode that moves from the quotidian to the lyrical. His dreams triggered a curious correspondence with Freud, available only in this book. As Caws writes, "The whole history of surrealism is here, in these pages."




Manifestoes of Surrealism


Book Description

A collection of both of the Manifestoes of Surrealism written by Andre Breton in 1924 and 1929. The pocket book size to make the two manifestoes more accessible in print without being part of some collected works.




A House of Her Own


Book Description

Born in 1989 to wealthy American parents in upstate New York, American Surrealist painter Kay Sage became a member of the Surrealist art movement in Paris in 1937. Along with an eloquent chronicle of Sage's life, Judith Suther shows how not only Sage's art but also the iconoclastic themes of her poetic works were related to Sage's lifelong revolt against social and artistic convention. 78 illustrations. 10 color plates.