André Breton

To the Dadaists, a successful provocation had little meaning in itself. Content was less important than audience reaction. And what really consummated a Dada event was indignant commentary in the press--so much so that some legendary works occurred exclusively in newspapers, which trustingly printed the Dadaists' invented stories. Andrª Breton's recently discovered, unpublished album, Dossier Dada tracks his own publicity and press coverage, an intrinsic part of his work, from 1916 to 1924. Breton, a central figure in the Dada movement and later the driving force behind the Surrealists, included not only newspaper and magazine articles in which he was mentioned but all of his own original documentation for the events covered--invitations, posters and letters. At 12 by 15 inches across and about 8 inches thick, the album is, among its other distinctions, the largest known Dada collage. The more manageable 80 pages reprinted here have been chosen to present an almost complete chronicle of the public pieces and publications of the Dadaists in Paris.

Originally published in 1928 and augmented throughout the author's life, Surrealism and Painting is the single most important statement ever written on Surrealist art. While many pages have been devoted to visual Surrealism, this is the only book on the subject by the movement's founder and prime theorist. It contains André Breton's seminal treatise on the origins and foundations of artistic Surrealism, with his trenchant assessments of its precursors and practitioners, and his call for the plastic arts to "refer to a purely internal model," to excavate the "dark continent" of consciousness. Also included are essays--many of them classics in their own right--on Picasso, Duchamp, Kahlo, Dali, Ernst, Masson, Gorky, Picabia, Miro, Magritte, Kandinsky, Hantai and others, as well as pieces on Gallic art, outsider art and the folk arts of Haiti and Oceania. But above and beyond the subject matter, what makes this book so enduringly compelling is Breton's signature mixture of rigorous erudition and visceral passion, his sense of art as adventure, and his discoveries of many of Modernism's most prominent figures early in their careers. Long unavailable in English, Surrealism and Painting is not only a supremely exciting work of art criticism, but also one of the three or four indispensable references for any serious discussion of modern art.