At sixteen he is excellent school results

The inventory included a giant clam and a set of moulds to communion wafers, painted of artistes famous paintings or unknown and still art South Pacific, Indian American, photographs, manuscripts and even the trivial objects collected in the street... Portraits of André Breton abound, but the image the most accurate that could give this complex being held in 80 square metres. Indeed, for almost forty years, he lived at 42, rue Fontaine, in the District of Pigalle.

Here, in this modest workshop artist in relative comfort, was created an aesthetic universe out of the ordinary. The magic of the place was the fact that each object in the huge collection disposed on the walls, in closets or bathrooms had a story. The collection, apparently diverse, was a mental construction at its spirit.

In his stories, it justifies the birth of his taste for art by her desire to escape the family trouble. In the Breton family, there is André, the only son of Marguerite Le Gouguès, mother cold, authoritarian and bigote, forbidding him to play in the street, and Louis Breton, ex-gendarme converted in accounting. Every Sunday, papa, Mama and the son will listen to the mass in Paris. They go down on foot from the train station of the East to the Church of the Madeleine. The sake of the young person is to linger before the vitrines of a gallery of art, young Bernheim, rue Richepanse, and look at the exposed tables. Bonnard, Vuillard and especially Matisse. "The joy of living I think that I have taken it there", he wrote. The outrage of his father is that fan's delight.

At sixteen, he is excellent school results. His parents give him a little money. What is He buys a statue of fertility designed to Easter Island and reported by a sailor of Lorient. At the same time, André Breton attended the Gustave-Moreau Museum, located not far from the Chaptal high school where he studied. "The discovery of the Gustave-Moreau Museum, when I was sixteen, has conditioned for always my way to love." Beauty, love, this is that I have had the revelation through a few faces, a few bodies of women. "As to ensure his sleep, the poet had posted, rue Fontaine, beside his bed, a small painting"Jupiter and Semele", copy of age of a Gustave Moreau.

Decisive meetings

In Paris, the meetings will multiply with minds open and bright. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, income trépané trench, is one of the headlights of his new friendly circle figures. The visit in may 1916 of his apartment in the boulevard Saint-Germain is certainly the source of the future workshop, his "ideal Palace" as it is called Agnès de La Baumelle, former curator at the Centre Pompidou. Breton says: "Apollinaire kept within his reach a small number of objects taking taste to wrong way." I remember the terrible Inkwell gilded bronze, effigy and remembrance of the Basilica of the sacred heart, to which I have often seen come his penholders and go in the form of train, that on 11 November 1918, Madam Apollinaire gave me.

In 1921, it is a collection of art on behalf of the couturier Jacques Doucet. Its visionary choices are confounding. This is André Breton who buys for example, on behalf of the couturier one of the most emblematic works of the 20th century, today the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", birth of cubism by Picasso. He already speaks as of a "thing of absolutely undeniable historic importance."

André Breton has kept very carefully all the memories of his creative journey. Enriched original editions of manuscripts for the famous magazine "The Minotaur", photographs of carefully annotated surrealist meetings, Photomatons grimacing dating from the 1930s, discovered mad artists such as Aloïse or friends artists and major designers such as Marcel Duchamp but still Hopi ceremonial dolls brought the Indian reserves of America or painting gift to his friend Diego Rivera.

The mausoleum of surrealism

In a radio recording of the 1950s, he declared with a sentencieux tone, about the objects in his collection: ", I have never been deprived of human warmth."A terrible confession of solitude. Before even the historic sale of 2003, Breton had surrendered as his family situation and its reverses of fortune - he has always lived in a certain physical insecurity - a part of the works which were its collection.

But, today, still, visible to the public, in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, a pan of whole wall from all Breton and concentrated the spirit of the poet. He left imagine exceptional artistique accumulation of rue Fontaine (1). This group of works, at the time located behind the desk where worked André Breton, in the second part of the workshop where he served from 1922 to his death in 1966, is not less of 200 pieces. The list of contents (2) shows all first place that the poet was no hierarchy between the arts: primitives or contemporary, signed or anonymous, carved wood and master paintings. A small carved box adjacent to iroquois mask in North America, a pre-Columbian tissue of the Peru witch mirror everything there more Western and even 5 cut and polished stones, a window box with cicadas, a ball of blue glass and paintings and drawings. Two works by Miró, including a large head in the 1927 simplified contours, three works of Picasso, including a Cubist in 1914 for "Women's shirt", two paintings by Magritte, a photo of 1931 to Edward Weston representing a shell, and again and again...

Until his death, and even after - the fountain Street apartment was retained as what 2003-, visitors intending to visit what had become a sort of mausoleum of surrealist flavour. Breton wrote a day the visitors were too frequent: "Always want to take in the kitchen first came broom and fuck all that out."The disadvantage of having become a living legend.