Andre Breton

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Prussian philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most... notable being The Communist Manifesto and Capital ; some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels. Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books.
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Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal , expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's... highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience. Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary 'Parnassians'.
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Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem Commedia, later named La divina commedia , considered the greatest literary work composed in the... Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. In Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language". Dante was born in Florence, Italy. The exact date of Dante's birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" is 70 years; and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300, Dante must have been born around 1265.
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Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 20. As part of the... decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, travelling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his 37th birthday. Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville in the Ardennes département in northeastern France. He was the second child of a career soldier, Frédéric Rimbaud, and his wife Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. His father, a Burgundian of Provençal extraction, rose from a simple recruit to the rank of captain, and spent the greater part of his army years in foreign service. Captain Rimbaud fought in the conquest of Algeria and was awarded the Légion d'honneur.
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Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso , was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. One of the greatest and most influential artists of the... 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , and Guernica , a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence.
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