French painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born on 4 January 1896 in Balagny-sur-Thérain (Oise), died on 28 October 1987 in Paris.
Life
André Masson trained in Brussels from 1907 to 1912, at the Académie royale des beaux-arts and the École des arts décoratifs, then in 1912 entered the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, in the studio of Paul Baudoüin. A volunteer in 1915, he was seriously wounded in the chest in 1917 at the Chemin des Dames and discharged in 1918.
In the early 1920s his studio at 45 rue Blomet became a meeting place for painters and writers. In the autumn of 1922 he met the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He joined the Surrealist group in 1924, the year of the Manifeste, then broke with it in 1929. He lived in Spain from 1934 to the end of 1936 and, with Georges Bataille, conceived the review Acéphale, which he illustrated.
On 31 March 1941 he sailed from Marseille for the United States; he lived for four years in Connecticut, near Lake Waramaug, before returning to France in 1945. In 1947 he settled at Le Tholonet, near Aix-en-Provence. In 1965 André Malraux entrusted him with the ceiling of the Théâtre de l’Odéon.
The work
Masson made his first automatic drawings in the winter of 1923, even before automatic writing had been theorised, and became the leading practitioner of the method among the Surrealists. From 1927 to 1929 he developed his sand paintings, which carried automatism into painting. His works of the late 1920s and the 1930s deal with violence, eroticism and the metamorphosis of bodies, through biomorphic forms close to abstraction.
“The authentic artist must find for himself the movement towards myth.” (André Masson, “Peindre est une gageure”, Les Cahiers du Sud, 1941)
The gallery showed his gouache Rue Saint-Denis (c. 1955, 32 x 50 cm, certificate from the Comité Masson) in the exhibition “Surrealist Prelude” (7 June to 6 July 2024).
Exhibitions and collections
- Retrospectives in Basel (1950) and New York (1976)
- “André Masson. Il n’y a pas de monde achevé”, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 29 March to 2 September 2024
At the gallery
- Surrealist Prelude 2024