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Books Like Le Surréalisme et la peinture by André Breton
Breton's definitive account of Surrealist visual art — de Chirico to Gorky
A series of critical essays (1928–1965) in which Breton writes about the painters and sculptors he identified as Surrealist — from de Chirico's metaphysical piazzas through Ernst, Miró, Dalí, and Matta; critical prose as evocative as automatic poetry.
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Buy on AmazonManifeste du surréalisme
by André Breton
The theoretical foundation — reading the Manifesto alongside the painting essays shows how Breton's theory of the unconscious image applies differently in verbal and visual art; the concept of 'pure psychic automatism' takes on new meaning when applied to Ernst's collages and Miró's biomorphic forms.
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Nadja
by André Breton
The creative parallel (1928) published the same year — the photographs in Nadja are the literary equivalent of the visual art Breton is theorizing; comparing the two works gives the clearest picture of what Breton meant by the Surrealist image as a documentary hallucination of the real.
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Buy on AmazonL'Amour fou
by André Breton
The most developed account of convulsive beauty and objective chance (1937) — the flea market chapter, in which found objects reveal unconscious desires, is the verbal equivalent of what Ernst and Dalí were doing visually; reading L'Amour fou alongside the painting essays gives the full range of the theory.
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Minotaure (magazine 1933–1939)
by André Breton and Paul Éluard
The Surrealist magazine (1933–1939) in which many of the painting essays first appeared is the most complete visual record of Surrealism in practice — photographs, collages, drawings, and poems together; reading the magazine alongside the book gives the essays their original context.
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Buy on AmazonThe Visible and the Invisible
by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of vision (1968, posthumous) is the most important philosophical parallel to Breton's visual theory — the argument that vision is not passive reception but active constitution of the world; the comparison gives the philosophical context for Breton's concept of the 'interior model.'
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La Révolution surréaliste (magazine, 1924–1929)
by André Breton
The original Surrealist review in which the first painting essays appeared is the essential primary document — images by de Chirico, Ernst, and Man Ray alongside Breton's texts, automatic writing, dream reports, and political declarations; the magazine gives the essays their original avant-garde context.
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Buy on AmazonThe Painter of Modern Life
by Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire's essay (1863) on Constantin Guys is the founding text of modern art criticism — the identification of the painter who captures the ephemeral beauty of modern urban life; reading it alongside Breton's painting essays gives the nineteenth-century ancestor of the Surrealist theory of the image.
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Buy on AmazonWays of Seeing
by John Berger
Berger's 1972 analysis of how we look at images — the social and ideological determinants of vision — is the most important twentieth-century counter-argument to Breton's Surrealist theory of the image; comparing the two gives the range of twentieth-century thinking about how visual art works and what it is for.
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