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Andre Masson
(1896-1987)
 Born
in 1896 in Balagny-sur-Therain, Andre Masson sought to convey
in his work a deeper reality of man's behavior, his own complex
personal imagery, and his belief that painting is not a matter
of developing style but a part of life itself. His work explores
several techniques of painting, drawing, and sculpture, and
displays rich, colorful abstraction as well as monochrome
imagery and automatic linear representations.
Masson began his schooling in 1907 at the Academie Royale
des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1912 he relocated to Paris,
where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1914, the artist
was called to military duty for the First World War, where
he was severely wounded and sent back to Paris. Much of Masson's
work is clearly influenced by this trauma; his drawings and
paintings executed during the twenties represent for the most
part battle scenes, blood, death, birds and fish. The strange
realities of trench warfare and the immediate contiguity of
life and death are here drawn upon, and his personal imagery
suggests a confrontation of life at that abnormal level of
experience.
After the war, Masson came in contact with Andre Breton
and the Surrealist circle, which he became a member of from
1922 to 1929, and then again from 1937 until the group's dispersal.
The artist at this point began to experiment with automatic
drawing, a favorite activity of the Surrealists. Masson developed
a technique of automatic painting that retained the element
of chance; he dripped glue onto paper in order to form drawings,
and then covered it with sand. When Masson emigrated to the
U.S. in 1939, he strongly influenced several American painters
with this technique, the most evident example being the artist
Jackson Pollack.
In 1945, Masson returned to France and executed a series
of landscapes in Aix-en-Provence. His work was shown from
1955 to 1964 at Documentas One through Three, and in 1964
a restrospective of his work took place in Berlin and Amsterdam.
Masson also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972.
Andre Masson dedicated his life as an artist to encouraging
the non-rational purpose in art, to the direct transferrance
of subconscious thought and to the primal forces of conflicts
that he experienced in the trenches of World War One. Masson
died in 1987 in Paris.
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