Manifestoes of Surrealism

Breton was born in 1896 to a middle-class family in Normandy, France. He enrolled in medical school as a young man, but his education was paused when he was drafted into World War I. He spent the war working in a neurological hospital, which furthered his interest in mental illness and psychiatry. A patient at the hospital, Jacques Vaché, was a devotee of Absurdism and helped inspire Breton to found the Surrealist movement. In 1919, Breton and several members of the Dada Movement launched the magazine Littérature, which collected art and writing from Dadaists and early Surrealists, including Man Ray and Francis Picabia. In 1924, he created the Bureau of Surrealist Research, a loose collective that met to discuss the burgeoning movement. He wrote the first Surrealist manifesto the same year. Breton is often considered the founder of the Surrealists, and he was the movement’s de facto leader for many years. In the 1930s, his work became controversial among some Surrealists, and he was shunned by a faction of the movement. He continued to be an important ambassador for Surrealism, though, and helped take the style to a wider