Simone Breton

Simone Breton , (born May 3, 1897 in Iquitos , Peru as Simone Rachel Kahn ; † March 30, 1980 in Paris ), was a French suffragette and gallery owner . Her first marriage was to the surrealist André Breton .

Life

Simone Kahn grew up as the daughter of a wealthy Strasbourg banking family in Paris . After school, she completed a literature course at the Sorbonne . In 1919 she first met André Breton in the bookstore “La maison des amis des livres”, who published the magazine Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault . They came closer at a Dada reading in Breton. Kahn, who enjoyed her student life in the Latin Quarter , the Parisian student and artist district, was fascinated by Breton.

On September 15, 1921, Kahn and Breton were married. Paul Valéry was Breton's best man. The couple moved to rue Fontaine 42 on Montmartre in Paris. Their home became the center of meetings with befriended artists and intellectuals. But the role of "wife of a famous artist" did not last long. She wasn't an artist and didn't really feel part of the circle. However, Simone Breton was very enterprising and worked actively in the surrealist research bureau that had opened in Paris's Rue Grenelle in October 1924. For Breton she became more and more just a work colleague, his whole passion belonged to his artistic work. The encounter with a young woman named Nadja (her real name was Léona Delcourt ) , which he paradigmatically experienced as “surreal”, inspired him to write his novel Nadja , which he wrote in 1928.

Simone Breton began an affair with the young writer Max Morise ; however, she separated from him again. Breton, who himself had another affair with Suzanne Muzard , was becoming increasingly estranged from his wife. In 1929, the couple divorced at Breton's request. The diatribe Un cadavre appeared , with which some members of the surrealist movement expressed their solidarity with the abandoned wife.

In 1932 she met the professor and sociologist Michel Collinet and married him in 1938. When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, Simone Breton was forced to go into hiding because of her Jewish origins and left Paris until the end of the war. In 1948 she acquired the “Artists and Craftsmen” gallery at 31 rue de Seine in Paris. She made contact with former friends from the art scene, including Max Ernst and Salvador Dali , and devoted herself to her exhibitions with their help. From 1954 to 1965 she ran the Fürstenberg gallery in 2 rue Fürstenberg, where she only exhibited surreal artists.

Simone Breton joined the women's movement "Féministes Révolutionnaires" around Simone de Beauvoir . In 1971 she signed the famous pamphlet for the right to abortion ( Le manifeste des 343 salopes ).

When asked about the storm of surrealism in the 1920s, André Breton, who subsequently married twice, did not mention his wife at the time, on whose money he had lived.

literature

• Unda Hörner : The real women of the surrealists. Simone Breton, Gala Éluard, Elsa Triolet. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-39316-2 , pp. 13-91
• Mark Polizzotti : Revolution of the Spirit: The Life of André Breton . From the American. by Jörg Trobitius, Hanser, Munich 1996 (first in English 1995)

Web links

• Simone Breton , short biography at Fondation Beyeler

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unda Hörner: The real women of the surrealists , 1998, p. 91