The Surrealist’s Library – A Record

Surrealist artist Andre Breton’s collection of art – to be sold next year – provides “the most complete history of the evolution of an iconoclastic group which opposed all forms of moral and social convention and replaced them by the ‘values of dreams, instinct, desire and revolt’.” The 400 paintings, 1,500 photographs and 3,500 documents are an invaluable record. The Surrealists “1924 manifesto laid the ground for some of Europe’s most devastating artistic quarrels, often turning on a love-hate relationship with Marxism, including Breton’s falling out with the communist poet Louis Aragon.”