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GERMAN

Masson, Andre
born: 1896 Balagny, Oise (France)
died: 1987 Paris

The depiction of violence was a key theme for the Surrealists, and it played a great role in the work of Andre Masson. While serving in the army during the First World War he had been wounded in an air raid, and left behind helpless in a bomb crater. This first-hand experience of physical violence and sufFering contributed to Masson's belief that all men were mutual enemies. The idea gripped him to the point of obsession, and he attempted to come to terms with it in his art. In 1922 Masson moved to Paris, where he joined the avant-garde circles around Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, joan Mirö, Michel Leiris, Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, and Pablo Picasso. In Masson's work the memory of the merciless carnage of war is generally evoked and embodied by animals. For Horses Devouring Birds (1927) the artist chose a narrow, vertical format, then applied a light, warm ground on which he spontaneously inscribed rhythmic lines - "Before you paint your picture, dance it!" Masson once exclaimed. The heavy strokes were allowed to taper into hair-thin marks, which in turn were anchored in the composition by colored shapes in matte red and green. Then Masson added the "eyes," and finally pasted birds' feathers onto the canvas, to conjure up a poignant image in the viewer's mind. The year 1927 saw Masson paint a series of pictures in which fish, horses, and birds were locked in combat - creatures of water, earth and air, figures in a new and disquieting myth ofthe elements. Involved in a kind of permanent metamorphosis, the creatures blur into one another in a play of cantinuous movement, then suddenly reappear - the cantours af a harse's head, a bird, eyes large and smal) - only to vanish again. Fragmentary actions and suggestions of objects materialize and disappear. The result, quite in contrast to the subject itself, is imagery of an extreme grace, graphic elegance, and sophisticated nuances of color. The pictures were created in a trancelike state, and, in accordance with Masson's artistic credo, with "energy, not brutality," for in his eyes, there could be no great art without delicatesse. Far Masson, the moment when life and death meet was a moment of eruption, when the individual physical life returned to a state of amarphousness, as expressed in the bodily parts scattered across his canvases. Masson's passionate imagery recalls the Surrealist doctrine that "Beauty will be convulsive, ar it will not be at all."

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