The mythical “Manifesto of Surrealism” by the French poet André Breton will be auctioned

The mythical “Manifesto of Surrealism” by the French poet André Breton will be auctioned

A lover of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Destribats kept this manuscript as part of an unprecedented collection that he cultivated for decades.

In the case of this “Manifesto of Surrealism”which keeps the initial title, “Introduction to Surrealism”and was scratched by hand by the poet, had already been put up for sale in July 2019, at a higher price that will go on sale next month, but there was no buyer.

It was at that time, in 2019, when the National Library of France used his right of first refusal to win the manuscript of the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”for 442,000 euros.

These manifestos are a public vindication of the surrealist school, based on automatic writing and the free will of thought, without any type of aesthetic or moral restraint.

Breton was a French poet born in Tinchebray, Orne, in 1896, who studied medicine and worked in psychiatric hospitals during the First World War, putting his knowledge of Freudian theory into practice. He built friendships with important intellectual figures in France becoming the great promoter of surrealism and Dadaism and in 1921 published his first surrealist work, “The Magnetic Fields”, in which he explored the possibilities of hypnosis.

In 1922 he broke with Dadaism, dedicated himself to psychic automatism and published in 1924 and 1929 the already mythical surrealist manifestos. He was a member of the French Communist Party until 1935 and as a result of the Second World War, he settled in the United States, where he founded in the company of Marcel Duchamp, Marx ErnstY David Hare, the magazine “VVV”. In 1941 he published the third surrealist manifesto, then returned to Paris in 1946, dedicating himself until his death in 1966 to keeping the surrealist movement alive.

Source: Ambito

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