I don't have any cash. Do you take mackerel?
Fights, fury and fish... the auction of Breton's collection in Paris has got the surrealists up in arms. Fiachra Gibbons puts in a bid

'Monsieur, you are a traitor, a traitor to France, and a philistine!" The last word was spat out in a venomous ball of phlegm. Then, without so much as an "en garde", I felt the stab of a cigarette holder in my stomach.

Never, ever pick a fight with a surrealist. Not unless you are packing a kipper yourself, and are prepared to use it. That much I now know. But at lunchtime on Monday, when I tried to slip through the surrealist blockade of the André Breton auction at the Hôtel Drouot, I assumed a black polo neck was protection enough against accusations that I was a bourgeois lackey bent on picking the bones of the great man.

I had gone to Paris to witness the "death of surrealism", to watch what was being called "a great national humiliation", the Passion of André Breton. That is how French intellectuals see the sale and dismemberment of the astonishing collection of surrealist masterpieces, letters, books and bric-a-brac the leader of the 20th-century's most important art movement crammed into his small apartment above the clip joints of the Rue Fontaine.

Dali, Miro, Duchamp and Max Ernst all climbed the stairs to Breton's studio, hard by the Moulin Rouge, to take part in surrealistic experiments and pay homage to the man who wrote the Manifeste du Surréalisme in 1924. All left work behind on the walls next to the Picassos, the Magrittes, and the photographs and collages by Man Ray and the rest of the gang.
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  thanks to consumptive.org

I do like Jame's take on it:

a funnily appropriate article about the auction of andre breton's apartment. it would seem to mark the official end of surrealism and, as an artist, as someone influenced by all that aleatoric politico-mystico mumbo jumbo, it feels a little bit liberating to know that the goods will be scattered to the four corners, falling back into dreams and lost under the couch cushions, waiting to be found again.

Breton's goods are being dispersed but their ghosts still reside on the web — for a moment.

André Breton
42, rue Fontaine

Portrait d'André Breton à Saint Cirq-Lapopie
entre 1953 et 1962