Free Rein (La Clé des champs)

Description

Free Rein is a gathering of seminal essays by André Breton, the foremost figure among the French surrealists. Written between 1936 and 1952, they include addresses, manifestoes, prefaces, exhibition pamphlets, and theoretical, polemical, and lyrical essays. Together they display the full span of Breton’s preoccupations, his abiding faith in the early principles of surrealism, and the changing orientations, in light of crucial events of those years, of the surrealist movement within which he remained the leading force. Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, Breton repeatedly addresses the horrors of the Stalinist regime (which denounced him during the Moscow trials of 1936). He argues for the autonomy of art and poetry and condemns the subservience to “revolutionary” aims exemplified by socialist realism. Other articles reflect on aesthetic issues, cinema, music, and education and provide detailed meditations on the literary, artistic, and philosophical topics for which he is best known. Free Rein will prove indispensable for students of Breton, surrealism, and modern French and European culture. Introduction by Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d'Amboise Marvelous versus Mystery Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism Gradiva Memory of Mexico Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art Visit with Leon Trotsky The Marseilles Deck Situation of Surrealism between the Two Wars Declaration VVV Golden Silence Profanation A Tribute to Antonin Artaud Before the Curtain Surrealist Comet Second Ark Magloire-Saint-Aude Ascendant Sign The Lamp in the Clock Thirty Years Later Caught in the Act Oceania Fronton-Virage The Night of the Rose-Hotel Predescription The Engineer The Art of the Insane, the Door to Freedom Pont-Neuf Open Letter to Paul Eluard The Donator As in a Wood Foreword to the Germain Nouveau Exhibition Yellow Sugar Alfred Jarry as Precursor and Initiator Why Is Contemporary Russian Painting Kept Hidden from Us? Tower of Light Letter to a Young Girl Living in America Of "Socialist Realism" as a Means of Mental Extermination