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.
