André Breton

Le Déclin de la société bourgeoisie

About this artwork

Best known as a writer and leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton was, by his own admission, not a gifted artist. However he did experiment with techniques which required a minimum of skill, such as collages and boxed constructions including poems. In this collage he has combined printed material in a humorous and anarchic manner. The Surrealists were committed to the overthrow of bourgeois values and systems, so the phrase pasted onto the picture turns this rare collage into a Bretonian prophecy. It is similar in spirit to the collages of Max Ernst, suggesting a date of the mid to late 1930s for the piece.

Updated before 2020

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André Breton

André Breton