Donna Seaman
The French writer and leader of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton (1896-1966), avoided interviews. He disliked their volatility and open-endedness, but in 1952 he agreed to participate in a series of radio conversations with Andre Parinaud, a respectful admirer and journalist for French National Radio. Breton accepted Parinaud's offer for several reasons, the most mundane of which was the need for money. He was also struggling against creative inertia and depression and had become concerned about the future of surrealism. His fear was that it would be forgotten in the eager regrouping of the postwar era. Although Breton doesn't discuss the intimacies of his childhood, marriages, or love affairs, he is generous with personal anecdotes about his fellow surrealists, including Apollinaire, Duchamp, Tzara, Picabia, Dali, Eluard, Artaud, and Ernst. This evocative set of conversations is the closest thing we have to a Breton autobiography, and it vividly conveys his prickly personality, perceptive political and social observations, and seminal aesthetic and philosophical viewpoints.
Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism
by AndrT BretonView All Available Formats & Editions
The closest Andre Breton has ever come to writing an autobiography, Conversations--based on a series of radio interviews conducted with the founder of Surrealism in 1952--chronicles the entire Surrealist movement as lived from within, tracing the origins and development of Surrealism from the discovery of automatic writing in 1919 to the Surrealists' ideological… See more details below
Overview
The closest Andre Breton has ever come to writing an autobiography, Conversations--based on a series of radio interviews conducted with the founder of Surrealism in 1952--chronicles the entire Surrealist movement as lived from within, tracing the origins and development of Surrealism from the discovery of automatic writing in 1919 to the Surrealists' ideological debate with communism and their opposition to Stalin.
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Product Details
- ISBN-13:
- 9781569249703
- Publisher:
- Shooting Star Press
- Publication date:
- 04/01/1993
- Pages:
- 264
- Product dimensions:
- 5.91(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)
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