André Masson

gigatos | June 7, 2022

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Summary

André Masson, born January 4, 1896 in Balagny-sur-Thérain (Oise) and died October 28, 1987 in Paris, is a French painter, engraver, illustrator and decorator of theater.

He participated in the Surrealist movement during the 1920s and kept the spirit of it until 1945. In a more marginal way, he also practiced sculpture.

Famous for his “automatic drawings” and his “sand paintings”, he is marked – on an aesthetic level – by “the spirit of metamorphosis” and “mythical invention” and even more – on an ethical level – by a visceral anti-conformism, including within the surrealist group from which he moves away as soon as he enters and that he denounces as “orthodox”; appearing there as a “rebel” or a “dissident”.

Having narrowly escaped death during the First World War and sensitive to the writings of Sade and his friend Georges Bataille, his work can be interpreted as an uncompromising questioning of human barbarism and perverse behavior. This preoccupation taking precedence over any aesthetic consideration, critics explain the marginal role he plays in modern art by the fact that “he has never been concerned with pleasing”.

His influence was most noticeable in New York during World War II, where he was staying while fleeing Nazi Germany. His paintings broke with the classical scheme of figures standing out against a background (in order to best symbolize the state of mental confusion that – according to him – governed his century), and served as references to the painters Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, founders of abstract expressionism.

On the other hand, the last forty years of his career (from the time of his return from the United States) are generally shunned by the critics.

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The beginnings

André Masson was born on June 4, 1896 in Balagny, a village located about thirty kilometers from Beauvais, in the Oise region, the son of a wallpaper salesman. His family moved to Lille in 1903, then to Brussels two years later, and he trained as a painter from an early age, studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1907 to 1912. He learned mural decoration and received a first prize for decoration. His first artistic emotion came from the discovery of James Ensor”s paintings, of which he said later that he appreciated this painter all the more because he was “considered a lunatic by his time”.

One of his teachers introduced him to the work of the poet Emile Verhaeren and persuaded his parents to have him continue his education in Paris. In 1912, he left Belgium and enrolled in the studio of the fresco artist Paul Baudoüin at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts until April 1914. After a trip to Tuscany on a scholarship, he went to Berne, Switzerland, and joined the infantry a year later. He was seriously wounded in the chest during the Chemin des Dames offensive in April 1917, and for a time was left for dead in a bomb crater. He stayed in various hospitals until the Armistice. From this war, he kept all his life a repulsion for warmongering and translated it in several of his works, including the Massacres, in 1934.

After the war, Masson stayed for a while in an abandoned hut on the shore of the Etang de Berre, near Martigues (not far from Marseille), then went to Collioure, following in the footsteps of Matisse and Derain, and then to Céret, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, near the Spanish border, where he was influenced by both Cézanne and van Gogh (Paysage de Céret, Environs de Céret). He moved there in April 1919 and met the painter Chaïm Soutine. The following year, he married Odette Cabalé (1899-1984), a native of the town. After the birth of their daughter, the family moved to Paris, in the district of Montmartre.

Surrealism

Masson”s career really began in 1922, when he moved to 45 rue Blomet. While his works testify to his interest in cubism, his contact with Miró, with whom he shared the same studio, led him to a quest for the irrational. More still his meeting with the writers Roland Tual, Max Jacob, Antonin Artaud, Georges Limbour, Michel Leiris, Louis Aragon and Robert Desnos. The studio on rue Blomet became “the equivalent for surrealism of the Bateau-Lavoir for cubism”. Years later, Masson describes it as an “anti-cenacle” gathering “fanatics” of “freedom”, animated by the “certainty that there was opening only in the transgression”.

In October of the same year, Masson signed a verbal contract with Kahnweiler”s Simon Gallery and exhibited there in February 1924, selling all his works. Also frequenting Juan Gris, references to Cubism did not disappear completely from his paintings, but his interest in Dadaist productions (notably through Limbour and Aragon) took precedence. One contact was decisive in Masson”s career, that with the poet and writer André Breton, who showed a keen interest in the theories on the unconscious developed by psychoanalysis and who himself had met Sigmund Freud in 1922

Receiving Breton in his studio in 1924, Masson sold him his painting The Four Elements and joined the Surrealist group whose manifesto (written by Breton) was published in October. The text gives this definition of the word “surrealism”: “pure psychic automatism by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of the thought, in the absence of any control exerted by the reason, apart from any aesthetic or moral concern “.

Two months later, in December 1924, the first issue of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, directed by Breton, appeared. Over the next five years, Masson and Breton diverged on the interpretation of the concept of “automatism”, a divergence that eventually led Masson to break with the movement and – temporarily – with Breton himself.

In 1927, inspired by the principle of automatic writing developed by Breton, Masson created his first “automatic drawings”. However, the poet Georges Limbour, a friend of Masson”s, later believed that this influence was only apparent and that in reality everything opposed the two men from the beginning:

“If the automatism was one of the big surrealist processes, it is advisable to notice that the one that was recommended by Breton in his manifestos were a methodical automatism, voluntary, extremely disciplined and whose rules were formulated with a big precision. The automatism which presided over the elucubration of certain drawings of Masson is on the contrary involuntary and all spontaneous, this is why it does not refuse, if it presents itself momentarily, on a hesitation, the intervention of the lucidity. The automatism is not therefore with him a method of creation suitable to replace other failing means, an experimental survey of the unconscious, it is the natural movement of the inspiration, the vivacity of the invention.”

– Georges Limbour, preface to André Masson: Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier, Julliard, 1958, p. 917.

The critic Bernard Noël also believes that Breton and Masson have very different approaches to automatism, but he puts it in these terms:

“When André Breton describes the automatic writing sessions, he speaks of them as a mystical experience, in terms close to those used by Saint John of the Cross. When André Masson talks about automatic drawing, he refers to the disturbing images it raises.”

– André Masson, Meeting with Bernard Noël, Gallimard, 1993

Masson himself later explains his divergence from Breton:

“Basically, I thought, contrary to Breton, that the primordial value would never be the automatism, but the Dionysian spirit; the automatism can very well be integrated with the Dionysian spirit, which corresponds to a kind of ecstatic and explosive state allowing to go out of oneself, to give free course to its instincts and, by there, to lead to the automatism. But, for me, the Dionysian feeling is more permanent than the automatism, because the automatism is absence of the conscious. The misguidance that I practiced was absolutely foreign to him.”

– André Masson, Vagabond du surréalisme éd. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1975, p. 80.

During the summer of 1925, the artist stayed in Antibes where he rubbed shoulders with Picasso. The following year, he moved to Sanary-sur-Mer, where he invented the process of “sand paintings” by spreading glue on the support in a random way and then projecting sand on it.

In 1928, he traveled to Holland and Germany and began to work in engraving and sculpture (Métamorphose) as well as theater and interior design: Pierre David-Weill asked him to decorate his Paris apartment. That same year, under the influence of Bataille, Masson also began illustrating poetic texts: Justine de Sade and Histoire de l”œil, by Bataille himself. The graphics then become nervous and tormented, translating a mixture of eroticism and perversion. For reasons linked to their respective life paths, the two men share the same questioning, tinged with fascination, about human cruelty.

The year 1929 was one of breakups: first with his wife, then with his first dealer, Kahnweiler, and finally with Breton, who was preparing the drafting of the second Surrealist manifesto and whom he considered dogmatic. He developed a solid friendship with Georges Bataille, who never officially joined the Surrealist movement, judging Breton to be “moralist” and even “puritanical.

The link with Bataille

In 1931, Masson illustrated the Dossier de l”œil pinéal. L”anus solaire by Georges Bataille, published clandestinely because of its deliberately scabrous character. He did not leave the official circuits of art: the following year, he responded to a commission from the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, the sets and costumes for the ballet Les Présages, which premiered in April 1933. And that year, his Massacres were exhibited in New York.

In the spring of 1934, after several stays in the South of France, he moved to Tossa de Mar, in Catalonia, a place where European and American intellectuals lived and where the beauty of the coastal landscapes attracted various artists, among them Chagall. On this occasion he discovered bullfighting. In December he remarried Rose Maklès (1902-1986), Bataille”s sister-in-law. In April 1936, he participated with Bataille in the creation of the magazine Acéphale, whose effigy he designed. The same year, the publisher of the magazine also publishes Sacrifices, an album of five etchings by Masson, which accompanies a text by Bataille.

When the Spanish war broke out in July 1936, he supported the anarchists through caricatures. However, as the violence continued to spread, he left the country in 1937 and settled in Lyons-la-Forêt, a village in the Eure region of Normandy, which he remembered fondly. Renewing his relationship with Breton, he participated in the surrealist exhibitions in London (1936) and Paris (1938) but, until 1939, he continued to collaborate with Bataille in the journal Acéphale, of which he was the sole illustrator, without joining the secret society that was linked to it. Masson, in fact, does not adhere at all to Bataille”s project of “founding a new religion. And Bataille himself agrees later on of the “monstrous” character of this project: “It was a monstrous error; but gathered, my writings will return at the same time of the error and the value of this monstrous intention”.

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The flight and the exodus

In June 1940, all of northern France was occupied. Masson, his wife (of Jewish origin) and their sons fled to the Cantal, in the free zone.

In October, when the status of the Jews was published, they decided to go to Marseille with the idea of going to America. With the help of Countess Lily Pastré, they occupied an isolated pavilion on the outskirts of the city, waiting for a visa to the United States, which they obtained in March 1941. In the meantime, Masson attended meetings at the Villa Bel Air, which welcomed writers and artists who were on the verge of exfiltration thanks to the American journalist Varian Fry, creator of the American Committee for Intellectual Relief. With the financial help of a Jewish family of wealthy Baltimore art collectors (the sisters Saidie May and Blanche Adler), they embark for the new continent.

After a three-week stay in Martinique, where he met the poet Aimé Césaire and marveled at the lush vegetation, Masson went to the United States in May 1941. He settled first in New York (where he met other European intellectuals and artists, including André Breton and Marcel Duchamp) and then in New Preston, Connecticut, where his neighbors were Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy and Arshile Gorky. His work, especially his Iroquois Landscape (1942), “stimulated” the painters of Abstract Expressionism and Gestural Abstraction (including Jackson Pollock). In 1959, the American art critic William Rubin insisted on Masson”s “stimulating” role while being careful not to bet on “influence”: “Although Pollock knew Masson”s painting and was stimulated by it, the implacable logic of his own development prevents us from attributing to Masson”s work any critical effect on Pollock”s development.” “Pollock may have been inspired by the surrealist automatism, developed by Masson, who draws freely, letting his hand wander. But Masson observes his tangled lines to see forms and figures emerge that reveal his unconscious. Pollock, on the other hand, keeps only the memory of his gesture, without trying to make an image appear: the material trace of the process counts more than the final result.” Unlike Pollock, who moves toward total abstraction, Masson always resorts to painting for figurative purposes.

However, the American period was an important change of intellectual reference points for him: on the one hand, in 1943, he fell out again with André Breton (this time definitively) and, in so doing, his art ceased to refer to fantasies born of the unconscious; on the other hand, at the beginning of 1945, he received Jean-Paul Sartre at his home, who was then a special envoy for Combat and Figaro and with whom he collaborated on his return to France.

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The serenity of Aix

Returning to France in October 1945, Masson lived for some time in Lusignan, near Poitiers, but kept a close link with Paris, designing in 1946 the sets for Hamlet (at the Théâtre Marigny for the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, music by Arthur Honegger) and La Putain respectueuse (by Jean-Paul Sartre, at the Théâtre Antoine).

Discovering Provence following an invitation from René Char to participate in an exhibition in Avignon, Masson settled in 1947 in Le Tholonet, near Aix-en-Provence, at the foot of the Sainte-Victoire mountain.

A new period began for him, punctuated by walks, readings and visits to friends, thus relatively calm compared to what he had experienced until then. In 1950, he published Le plaisir de peindre. His style softened considerably, to the point that he showed an interest in Impressionism: in 1952, he published an article in the magazine Verve entitled “Monet the Founder” in which he established a Turner-Monet-Renoir-Cézanne filiation and in which, praising Monet”s Water Lilies, he wrote: “I am very seriously pleased to say that the Tuileries Orangery is the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.

The titles of the paintings systematically evoke his relationship to the landscape (Bibemu”s quarry, The countryside of Aix in November, Mountain after the rain, The Mistral…), his “Aix period” is often disdained by critics.

Honors

In 1954, Masson received the Grand Prix National des Arts, a sign of official recognition, while he himself “opened up to the world”, making various trips until 1955 (mainly to Venice and Rome) and, until 1957, living in Paris intermittently.

In 1958, the filmmaker Jean Grémillon devoted a twenty-minute documentary to him, which was presented the following year at the Cannes Film Festival: André Masson et les Quatre Éléments.

The period of the Algerian war constitutes a parenthesis, his painting becoming violent and tormented again. Having retained his anti-militarist principles since his injuries in the First World War, he signed in 1960 the Manifesto of 121, a declaration on the right to insubordination. And in 1964, two years after the death of Georges Bataille, he wrote the obituary of his friend with a tortured temperament in the review of the Ecole des Chartes.

In 1965, André Malraux entrusted Masson with the decoration of the ceiling of the Odéon theater and various retrospectives of his work were organized: in 1964 in Berlin, in 1965 in Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum) and in Paris (National Museum of Modern Art).

In 1969, he and his wife traveled a lot, especially in Germany. From that date on, he regularly went to the Bayreuth Festival.

In 1974, he recounts in his memoirs the impact of the war on his work.

In 1976, a retrospective exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed by another the following year, this time in Paris at the Grand Palais.

In 1979, following health problems, he gave up painting and devoted himself only to drawing.

On the night of October 27-28, 1987, he died at his Parisian home, 26, rue de Sévigné. He was found in the morning, “bedside lamp lit, his square hands with long and thin fingers holding an open book placed on his chest”. He and his wife are buried in the cemetery of Le Tholonet.

Gladys Masson, known as “Lily”, daughter of André Masson and Odette Cabalé (born in 1920 in Paris) became a painter.

Diego Masson (en) and Luis Masson, the sons of André Masson and Rose Maklès (born in June 1935 and September 1936 in Tossa de Mar), trained in music and theater respectively and married two of the daughters of the architect Fernand Pouillon, who designed the plans for the painter”s studio in Tholonet. Conductor trained by Pierre Boulez, Diego is also a composer and percussionist. During the Algerian war, he was a member of the Jeanson Network.

Alexis Masson (born in 1965 in Paris), painter and engraver, works in his grandfather”s studio in Tholonet.

More than 90 works of the artist are at the Centre national d”art et de culture Georges-Pompidou: 94 paintings, drawings, illustrations. His works can also be found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at the Musée d”art moderne de la ville de Paris.

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Paint

Oil on canvas, unless otherwise noted.

Sculpture

Bronze, unless otherwise noted.

Theater

In the 13th arrondissement of Paris, a square bears his name.

Sources