Simone Breton (née Kahn, also Simone Collinet)

Simone Breton played an important but long unrecognized role beside her husband, André Breton, in his endeavors as a collector and dealer. Simone and André met in June 1920, and from that time on she played an active part in the Surrealist movement, managing the Surrealist office (La centrale surréaliste) and even publishing a text in the first issue of the La révolution surréaliste (December 1, 1924). Around the time of their marriage in September 1921, the collector and fashion designer Jacques Doucet hired André as his adviser and personal librarian. With his income and a dowry provided by Simone’s parents, the couple began an important art collection.

They made their first purchases at the Kahnweiler sequestration sales that took place at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris between 1921 and 1923. While André bought Cubist artworks on behalf of Doucet, he also bid for himself in the four auctions, buying a dozen works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger, including the small Head by Picasso (1913; Centre Pompidou, Paris).

The couple developed a passion for Cubist art, and Simone began dealing Cubist works out of their studio apartment at 42 rue Fontaine as a source of income. At the time of the third Kahnweiler sale on July 4, 1922, the Bretons and another Surrealist, Philippe Soupault, made a financial agreement to buy artworks jointly. Correspondence between Simone and her cousins Denise and Georges Lévy reveals that Simone bought specific Cubist works for the Lévys both at the Kahnweiler sales and through negotiations with dealers Paul Eluard, Kahnweiler, and Léonce Rosenberg. Among these purchases were several works by Braque, Léger, and Picasso, most notably Braque’s Violin: “Mozart Kubelick” (1912; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection). Simone bought this painting at the last Kahnweiler sale for the Lévys, which Kahnweiler then resold as an intermediary in 1925 to banker and collector Raoul La Roche.

Simone and André separated in 1928 and divorced in 1931 after Simone had an affair with the Surrealist artist and writer Max Morise and André fell in love with the photographer Suzanne Muzard. They divided their joint collection but, unlike André, Simone kept most of her share intact. After World War II, Simone opened a gallery, Artistes et Artisans, on the rue de Seine in Paris, and from 1954 to 1965 also ran the Galerie Furstenberg, exhibiting only Surrealist artists and continuing to publish essays on art.