Born in Ireland in 1909, Francis Bacon spent his formative years in a nation wracked by the Sinn Fein uprising, an event that haunted him long after his family moved to England. He never trained formally as a painter but began to pursue art in London in the late 1920s, eventually

Andre Breton's hallucinatory approach to poetry emerged as a reaction against the tiresome literary conventions of Paris in the 1920s. Abandoning traditional notions of creativity and promoting the philosophical and political ideals of the Surrealist movement, Breton's highly stylized yet spontane