This is the first comprehensive study in English of surrealist leader André Breton's lifelong commitment to the visual arts. As an essayist, art critic, collector, gallery director, and artist, he actively promoted many painters, from turn-of-the-century Moreau and outsider artists to fellow surrealists like Ernst and Masson.

The book tracks both the development of Breton's surrealist aesthetics within the Parisian avant-garde art scene and the centrality of art to his political agenda. It also highlights Breton the collector and collagist--the works he displayed in his Paris apartment, ranging from Oceanic masks to African sculptures, paintings to pebbles, are themselves seen as an ever-changing assemblage.