translated by Giorgina Arcuri

A few months ago our Magazine had already announced the auctioning of Andrè Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism at Sotheby’s auction house in Paris.
At long last, the sale took place on 21st May achieving great results. Indeed, the auction dedicated to books, manuscripts and photographs, which included some of Andrè Breton’s works, fetched 6,052,780 euros. An extraordinary sale whose absolute protagonists were the French’s poets manuscripts, presented for the first time on the art market and belonging to a collection of the writer’s first wife, Simone Collinet.
The top-price, as expected, was achieved by the 21 pages of the “Manifeste du Surréalisme” written in 1924, which had been estimated by Sotheby’s experts between 300 and 500 thousand euros, but during the auction they sold for 1,913,850 euros.
The manuscript, presented with many corrections and additions, can be considered the summation defining the mainstays of the Surrealist creed. Originally it was meant to be a preface to the publication of Breton’s automatic writing under the title of “Poisson Soluble”, but afterwards the author decided to modify the text to make of it the Manifesto of the historical revolutionary avant-garde.
Surrealism is an evolution of Dadaism, but unlike the latter artistic movement, which aims at dismantling all the artistic restrictions that have been rooted for centuries, Surrealism overthrows the Dadaist destructive idea assigning an edifying role to art, suggested by man’s interiority.
In the “Manifeste du Surréalisme”, Breton defines Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism with which one proposes to express, either orally or in any other manner, the real process of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside any aesthetic or moral concerns.”
Substantial elements of surrealist poetics are the reconsideration of the irrational component in human creativity and the will to express through art the manifestations of the subconscious: a refusal of human logic and of culture restrictions in favour of total freedom of expression, which finds theoretical reference in Freud’s psychoanalytical studies.
Surrealism revalues dream, irrationality, madness, states of hallucination, seizing the intimate essence of reality, beyond reality itself to seize the sense of life with the overwhelming sensitivity of Baudelaire’s decadent thought.
The surrealist thought often appeared as a rebellion against cultural and social conventions, conceived as a total transformation of life, through freedom of customs, poetry and love. Its referent, besides Freud, is Karl Marx: “Transform the world, said Marx, change life, said Rimbaud. These two watchwords for us one only” (Breton).
The manuscript of the “Manifeste du Surrèalisme” was exposed to the public for the first time in 2002, in occasion of the exhibition Rèvolution Surréaliste at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Besides this exceptional document, Sotheby’s auction presented other manuscripts by the French author. “Poisson Soluble”, manuscript of 59 pages composed of 32 texts, result of four years of writings, was auctioned with an estimate included between 200 and 300 thousand euros and sold for 917,050 euros.
Other pieces auctioned that are worth mentioning are: [Poisson Soluble I et Poissin Soluble II] Cahier “Seigneur du Chateau”, which from an estimate of 50-70 thousand euros, achieved 138,250 euros; [Poisson Soluble I et Poissin Soluble II] Cahier “L’Anglaise” (estimate 60-80 thousand euros) sold for 162,250; [Poisson Soluble I et Poissin Soluble II] Cahier “Pour Simone” (estimate 80-120 thousand euros) sold for 216,250 euros; [Poisson Soluble I et Poissin Soluble II] Cahier “Sociètè Moderne” (estimate 50-70 thousand euros), which totalled 138,250 euros.