From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Jacques Baron (1905 - 1986) was a French poet, whose first collection of poems was published in
Aventure in 1921. Although he was initially involved with the
Dada movement, he became a founding member of the
Surrealist movement following his meeting with
André Breton in 1921, and contributed to
La Révolution surréaliste. In 1927, like many of his contemporaries, Baron joined the
Cercle Communiste Démocratique. Although fascinated by dream-like states of the nomadic unconscious and other imaginary worlds of the “marvelous”, a dispute with Breton in 1929 got him expelled from the movement. Baron became associated with
Georges Bataille and
Documents, in which he published a short essay on "Crustaceans for the Critical Dictionary" (1929, issue 6), an article on the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1930, issue 1), and a poem dedicated to Picasso "Flames" (1930, issue 3). He later collaborated on a number of reviews such as
Le Voyage en Grèce,
La Critique Sociale and
Minotaure. Baron also wrote a novel,
Charbon de mer (1935), a mémoire,
L’An 1 du Surréalisme (1969), and a collection of poems,
L’Allure poétique (1973).