The year 2024 marks the centenary of the Surrealist movement’s founding by André Breton. Accordingly, the Centre Pompidou’s Metz branch, in French Lorraine, is marking the event with an exhibition on André Masson (1895–1987). The choice to feature Masson in connection with Surrealism is interesting—the painter, who is also regarded as a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism, was only intermittently a Surrealist, falling out with Breton, the movement’s tyrannical pope, in 1929. The two patched up their differences in 1936 but quarreled again in 1942, when Breton denounced Masson as a nationalist after the latter created a panel titled Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité for the France Forever society, an organization of Francophiles and French exiles living in America.
The exhibition “André Masson: There is No Finished World” includes rarely seen works from French and American private collections as well as a partial replica of Masson’s library, including the artist’s 1940 sketch of one of his favorite authors, Goethe. The library reveals that Masson enjoyed lighter reading too, such as the work of Georges Simenon and, in translation, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. There is even an Oxford English Dictionary, though Masson had little English despite spending most of the Second World War in America.
Masson was born in the Oise region of France, but his working-class family moved to Belgium when he was nine. While still a child, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and then at the Academy of Painters & Sculptors in Paris when his family moved to the French capital in 1912. In 1914, he began living an “ascetic life” in Berne, inspired by his hero Nietzsche. He enlisted in the French army in January 1915 and was badly wounded in 1917. The experience tormented him, and a psychiatrist told him to avoid cities. Even so, in 1923 he took a studio at Paris’s rue Blomet, where friends like Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Breton, and Masson’s neighbor Joan Miró often gathered to recite poetry, including Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and play card games. At one of these fêtes, perhaps, Masson gained the inspiration for his otherworldly 1924 drawing of Louis Aragon, a key literary Surrealist and later a fervent communist. Here, Aragon seems to be cowering beneath a giant pen.
Masson worshipped Poussin, Delacroix, Mantegna, Bosch, and Uccello, though Cézanne became his principal artistic guide. But Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, his dealer, introduced him to paintings by Cubism’s pioneers Picasso, Gris, Braque, and Léger. Masson clearly admired these works: much of his early period, such as the work Card Trick (1923), shows Masson to be a Cubist turning surreal. Kahnweiler wrote that Masson’s world differed from that of the Cubists in being made of forces rather than forms. In the 1920s, Masson also began practicing the automatic painting prescribed by Surrealism and produced his “sand paintings.” On these canvases, typically muted, Masson mixed oil and sand to create paintings that look to have been dug out of a mystical beach.
Breton wrote that eroticism was the “cornerstone” of Masson’s art. If so, his eroticism is of a grotesque variety, one in which sex organs replace faces and body joints are popped out of place. It is an eroticism closer to that of Marquis de Sade, a favorite of Masson, than of Titian’s sumptuous Venuses. Masson sought to channel the Dionysian impulse in his automatic paintings, giving way to instincts and dispensing with reason. This spirit is captured as well in the artwork he designed for Acéphale, a magazine (and secret society) he started with Georges Bataille in 1936: the first issue’s cover bears a headless figure with two stars for breasts and a skull and crossbones for sex organs.
In the early 1930s Masson’s colors became richer. He painted a series titled Massacres and another depicting ghastly visions of giant insects, reminiscent of Bosch, including Le Jardin saccagé (The sacked garden) (1934). Fearing the rise of Nazism in France, he moved to Spain in 1934, and he was there in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He joined the Anarchist Militia Committee, and the exhibition features several examples of his anti-Franco, antifascist, and anticlerical paintings and drawings made between 1936 and 1939. Masson’s reds in this period are as strong as Van Dyck’s, as can been in his Returning from the Execution (1937). A wall of clerics seem responsible for the execution here, and Masson has given each of them nightmarish beaks for noses large enough to be worn by a Punchinello. This type of caricature is typically associated with anti-Semitism, but, as Anthony Daniels points out in Buried But Not Quite Dead, anti-Catholics have deployed it as well.
Masson considered himself an anarchist but endorsed communism as a way of defeating fascism. Nevertheless, he and his wife, who was Jewish, took refuge in the United States rather than the Soviet Union during the Second World War. They were aided by Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped numerous French artists during the period. Masson and Breton spent three weeks in Martinique on their way to New York, and the island inspired them both. The result for Masson was Antille (1943), a lush blending of rushing colors twisting around a woman’s body and her laughing face.
A house on Lake Waramaug in New Preston, Connecticut, became Masson’s new home. There he was fascinated by the new climes—he found the light to be much sharper than Europe’s—and he discovered that American Indian mythology fascinated him just as Greek mythology did. Meditation on an Oak Leaf (1942), a boiling swirl of colors, captures Masson’s impressions of the Connecticut atmosphere and its vibrant nature. He inspired and was inspired as well by his friends Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock; the latter was influenced especially by Masson’s Iroquois Landscape (1942) and Pasiphaë (1942), which he saw at Buchholz Gallery in 1944. Masson went on working—often in the theater—as he moved into old age. In the Fifties his painting grew even more abstract, and he resumed his Massacres series with 1963’s Panique, in which a tangled mass of figures float across the canvas.
“There is No Finished World” is an elegant portrayal of Masson’s tormented vision. It will intrigue those who know little about him as well as those already familiar with his work. (But the squeamish should approach with caution.)
