“This is the very ecstasy of love, whose violent property fordoes itself.” – William Shakespeare

“… mortal man must always look to his ending, And none can be called happy until that day when he carries His happiness down to the grave in peace.” – Sophocles

From childhood André Masson was introspective, contemplative—a youthful dreamer and reader of books. In cities all over Europe at the turn of the twentieth century young people were enthralled by Impressionism, and Symbolism, Nietzsche, and Wagner. Something of a drifter in his teenage years, Masson read avidly in literature and philosophy, became a vegetarian, went barefoot, considered himself a Wagnerian and a Nietzschean. Defying social convention, he was seized by the authorities more than once.

Above, left: André Masson, ‘Metamorphosis’ (1939) xxxxxx

By 1913, Masson was in Paris, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he first learned of the Cubists through reproductions (he thought they were obsessed with automobile accidents). When war was declared he volunteered because he wanted to experience “the Wagnerian aspects of battle” [1] and know the ecstasy of death. [2]

Right: ‘Torrential Self-Portrait’ (1945), ink on paper,   18-7/8×24 in. [48×61 cm]. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The young artist experienced that “ecstasy” the day a bullet ripped into his chest during the offensive at Chemin des Dames in April, 1917 (Adolf Hitler also fought there). Stretcher-bearers were unable to secure his safety and left him on his back for the night. “The world around him became something wondrous and he experienced his first complete physical release.” [3] Uncounted numbers of young men, including many artists, suffered traumatic war experiences that shaped their lives and changed both art and history. [4] During the 1920s Masson’s life was far from peaceful: emerging from the war, he was frequently violent. There followed a succession of hospitals and even confinement to a mental ward. The war left him plagued with nightmares; he suffered insomnia and spent long painful hours dreaming new paintings. 

Left: ‘The Massacre’ (1933)

Masson had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Simon in 1924 (to Picasso’s praise), and joined the Surrealist movement. Early in the 1930s, his theme of Massacres prevailed, leading to a series of violent, orgiastic drawings, erotic, violent combats and the slaughter of men and women.

A crisis within the Surrealist circle erupted in 1929, precipitated by the movement’s relationship to the Communist Party. Antagonistic toward communist ideas, Masson left, eventually breaking with the movement entirely. The artist moved to Spain to find respite from the disquiet and rising violence of French politics.

Masson’s traumatic experiences during The Great War, The Great Depression, February, 1934 riots in Paris, and May, 1937 riots in Barcelona affected him deeply. Still in Spain when the Civil War began, he wrote: “The violence, the fanaticism – so much love and so much hate – surpass anything that I could have imagined.” [5] Carolyn Lanchner, writing about Masson’s 1938 drawing, Rêve d’un future desert (Dream of a Future Desert), 1938, (right) contended that “this apocalyptic vision of the end of the world embodies the torment of the artist who saw in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler, the sure portent of holocaust.” [6]

He was the first twentieth century artist to turn to and initiate the resurgence of the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. He and Georges Bataille suggested the titles, Le Minotaure and Labyrinthe for Albert Skira’s publications. According to Masson he was to have illustrated the first cover for Le Minotaure, “but Teriade and Skira asked me to let Picasso do it. I did so. I did one myself a couple of years later.” [7]

The artist divorced his wife Odette Cabalé in June, 1930, and embarked on a very passionate, tempestuous relationship with English painter, Paule Vézelay. The couple almost married; “Paule experienced the most intense happiness and despair … was drawn into the intense, sexually exploratory, and with Masson often violent arena of surrealism. It was an ultimately tragic affair.” [8] “Masson does not lament what he views as the necessity of domination; relations based on inequality are treated as a given, while the inability of either party to concede some measure of power is identified as the fundamental problem.” [9] In a footnote, Professor Laurie J. Monahan remarks: “Masson used the more distant “vous” to address Vézelay during periods of relative estrangement.” [10]

In most of Masson’s Massacres series women are victims. He later stated, “I can’t believe that they grow out of some misogyny of mine that I’m unaware of.” [11] Created shortly after his divorce, however, and in a period of deep depression, these Massacres must express, at least on a subconscious level, Masson’s hostility toward la femme aimee: “My sleep … must have been troubled, by intimate conflicts I can’t discuss. And by the break with the surrealist group…After having, for the first time in my life, agreed to be gregarious, I found myself back in a solitude I had known since childhood…I had truly a feeling of deliverance. But the feeling was probably hiding a depression, a feeling of dereliction, solitude, and despair. I had severed something.” [12]

These romantic upheavals in his personal life—and especially his use of chairs in his work—are reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoire, in which women assume the role of furniture, and possibly a reference to de Sade’s Justine: “…he had her stand upon a chair and extracts from her just what he desired…”

‘Le fauteuil, The Armchair’ (c. 1937), oil on canvas, 23? x 12 in. [73×60 cm], private collection.

Masson specifies an armchair in his title, a chair that characteristically has wide supports for forearms. Le fauteuil shows an armchair, solidly on the floor, with the male(?) figure’s left hand holding a globe or orb-like sphere intersected with sectional divisions. An orb, customarily held in the left hand represents the dominion of a deity, as in the hand of God the Father, or the far reaching imperial command of a sovereign over the earth; or even the influence of Eve with her apple*, that emblem of temptation, sin, and Fall. Or the Apple of Discord?

*Not dissimilar to the geometrically cut apple in Max Ernst’s ‘Au Rendez-vous des amis’ (1922), Museum Ludwig, Cologne; however, Masson seems to have added a nipple instead of the stem in Ernst’s apple.

A feminine-appearing garment (bedding? shroud? veil? shawl?) seems to cover the man-chair that penetrates the clothing with a predator-like penis while the female(?) figure consumes a sphere, a act that recalls the praying mantis, the outstanding cannibal of the insect world, devouring even members of their own family. Mantises appealed to the Surrealists, since in mating, the female devours the male, whose basal ganglia control copulation—seemingly independent of the rest of the body. The male mantis continues “copulating with the female while she steadily devours him from the head, downwards.” [13]

‘Transmutation erotique’ (1938), oil on canvas, 39¼x19? in. [100×50 cm], private collection, Switzerland. 

In January 1937, André Masson took part in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris. Works in display there included his Ophélie and Le fauteuil, as well as his notorious Le Bâillon vert à bouche de pensée (the mannequin, since destroyed). Like la petite mort after the male-fantasy of fauteuil, Masson made Transmutation erotique the next year, whose carpet background table, and vagina-mirror are replicated in several other paintings of the period such as his Hôtel des oiseau.

The unusual word “transmutation” in the title possibly refers to the Freudian theory that sexual energy can be transformed into “socially useful” achievement—such as making art. In his classic theory, “The Ego and the Id” (1923), he speculates that sexual satisfaction renders Eros fatigued and leaves the field open to Thanatos (Greek for “death”, the word was introduced by Herbert Marcuse). Thanatos is the drive of aggression, as well as destruction, violence, sadism, and death, and the conclusion of Eros. Erotic energy, the drive of life, love, creativity, sexuality, is allowed a limited amount of expression, according to Freud, due to the constraints of society.

‘Hôtel des oiseaux (Mansion of Birds),’ 1938, oil on canvas, 31? x 51¼ in. [81×130 cm], private collection.

Rather than the female-garment covering the male, or predatory wolf, it is thrown back, in Transmutation erotique, and the couple are in orgasmic embrace, with tongues engaged, his arm and hand thrashing, anatomical parts inter-related and transmuted. The chair is tilted in excitement, the chair-leg that morphed into a masculine-looking limb in Le fauteuil becomes a leg regenerating into vegetation here, Daphne-like. There’s a sense of post-coital tristesse. But this erotic transmutation of normality into surreal sexuality is what makes these paintings fascinating to some, ugly and horror-ridden to others.

The chair is of great antiquity; for thousands of years it was viewed exclusively as an article of state and nobility, rather than an object for ordinary use. In Europe, owing in great measure to Renaissance craftsmanship, the chair became a standard item of furniture. But “The Chair” is still extensively used as the emblem of authority in government, boards of directors, committees, and academic departments, not to mention Cathedra Petri in St. Peter’s Basilica, or even Masson’s Le fauteuil Louis XVI [1938-39, Markus collection, Chicago]. Even Gauguin’s Chair (an armchair) by Vincent van Gogh (right) has a semblance of authority, and there’s an iconic chair in Masson’s Pygmalion of 1938 (Francois Odermatt Collection), where there is a sculpture on the right (it appears again, transformed, in Hôtel des oiseaux and in Dans la tour du sommeil).    

The chair becomes the esurient, or voracious monster at the table; indeed, it becomes the table itself, devouring its own contents. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Harpies attack Aeneas and his men: “until dread hunger and the hunger of violence towards us force you to gnaw with your teeth and devour your very tables.” [14] To eat together is communion. Martin P. Nilsson writes, “The god is invited by prayer to come to the meal. He receives his portion, and the men … feast on their portions.” [15] Meals in an ancient household were sacred because the household god was present; in myths and dreams, and in marriage ceremonies eating symbolizes the sexual act. On another plane this ingestion relates to the final digestion by the earth, the dissolution of the body.

Pygmalion, 1938, oil on canvas, 18? x 21? in. [46×55 cm]. Francois Odermatt Collection. 

To eat together is communion. Martin P. Nilsson writes, “The god is invited by prayer to come to the meal. He receives his portion, and the men … feast on their portions.” [15] Meals in an ancient household were sacred because the household god was present; in myths and dreams, and in marriage ceremonies, eating symbolizes the sexual act. On another plane this ingestion relates to the final digestion by the earth, the dissolution of the body.

The myth of Pygmalion, used by the Surrealists during the 1930s, corresponds to their desire to transform the world by amorous love and sexual passion. Masson’s esurient sculpture is surmounted by an ominous beaked head more akin to a bird of prey than a praying mantis, much less one brought to life by Aphrodite. The chair at the left, with bowed head, is similar to the posture of the male mantis about to be eaten.

Métamorphose des amants, (Metamorphosis of Lovers), 1938, oil on canvas, 39¾ x 35”. [101×89 cm.], private collection, Paris.

In Masson’s Métamorphose des amants (Metamorphosis of Lovers), the disemboweled female figure, with rope-like tresses and vagina dentata in action, ingests a globe, planet, or possibly an apple, while her flaccid left arm dangles like viscera, morphing into fecund plant buds and swollen pods below. If her internal organs evoke the germinal force of fertilized seeds, does the growing flower represent their progeny?

The male, seemingly in coital rapture, with painted lips, has a lotus blossom in his mouth. [16] As in Botticelli’s Primavera, the flowers in the mouth of the nymph Chloris symbolize fertility and regeneration. Carolyn Lanchner sees the flower in the mouth (part of the alimentary canal) as a reference to the vulva: “in the context of Masson’s iconography in which the vagina, as the entrance to life and the exit to death, symbolizes the eternally recurring cycle … the vagina or mouth serves as the entrance to a labyrinth…”[17] His right arm tenders a large seashell, an emblem of Aphrodite as well as a vulva analogy, that is filled with olives, symbols of peace and fertility. His eviscerated torso, with its intermesh of ligaments, membranes, organs, tubes and veins, is similar to a side of beef, and is splayed open like a dressed carcass in a slaughterhouse.

The side of beef recalls the huge slaughterhouses that Georges Bataille viewed at La Villette, “the City of Blood,” the national wholesale meat market built in 1867 by Napoléon III (relocated in 1974). Bataille was a French intellectual and literary figure in literature, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and art; eroticism, perversion, and transgression were at the core of his writings. He saw the slaughterhouses as contemporary successors to the ancient mystery rites associated with Dionysos; comparing them to the temples of ancient religions, used for both prayer and human sacrifice.

Left: Les abattoirs de la Villette (the slaughterhouses of La Villette) 

Slaughterhouses, on which man depends for much of his food, are now hidden from public view, but Masson confronted the subject openly. He visited the slaughterhouses of La Villette, because he was impelled to face the violence in history, in society – and in himself. In his Abattoir (slaughterhouse) paintings of the 1930s, flesh is represented as raw meat, linked to the wounds he experienced in World War I, as well as symbols of the transience, precariousness, and transformations of life.

Chaim Soutine made a series of Carcass of Beef paintings in the early 1920s; and both Masson and Soutine were undoubtedly familiar with Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox in the Louvre. But “meat” may also refer to the human body in a more sensual, even sexual, connotation. A meat market, in addition to simply denoting a market where meat is sold, also refers to a place or situation where humans are treated or viewed as commodities, a place where a sexual partner may be found, such as the filles isolées (streetwalkers) of the maisons d’abattage (slaughter houses); hence the woman as a piece of meat (from the Latin word car?, also the root of “carnal,” referring to the “pleasures of the flesh”).

Human nutrition depends on plants as well as meat; interestingly, the elements of the food one eats transmutes within hours to that person’s body—no longer food, but an integral part of the person. Are the lovers metamorphosing and regenerating into primary forms such as ripened plant forms, flowers, fruit, and other natural elements, or is the vegetation morphing into lovers in this paroxysmic fusion with nature? Plants symbolize the vital life-force of death and revitalization, representing the mystic union between humankind and plant, flowing from one state to another, the birth of life after death.

Many Surrealists rendered metaphorical correlations between vegetation and genitalia, such as the artichokes in de Chirico’s The Philosopher’s Conquest (1914) and bananas in The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913); abstract leafy stalks in Ernst’s At the First Clear Word (1923), and Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) with its flower growing out of an egg, as well as his Soft Construction with Boiled Beans – Premonition of Civil War (1936); and René Magritte’s The Great War (1964), right, with Aphrodite’s? Eve’s? Newton’s? Cezanne’s? apple levitating before the man’s head.

Masson depicted humans on an organic level; he equated sexual union as oneness with nature, signifying a union of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Pre-Socratic Heraclitus, Masson’s preferred philosopher, wrote “Out of life, comes death and out of death life, out of the young the old, and out of the old the young, out of waking sleep, and out of sleep waking, the stream of creation and dissolution never stops.” [Fragment 78] Robert Nadeau wrote that “…he alone among the early Western philosophers arrived at a conception of change in the cosmos that is almost entirely consistent with the view of change in modern physics.” [18] Heraclitus’ symbol for the perpetual transformation was fire. “If we substitute, as Werner Heisenberg says we might, energy, as the new physics uses that term, for his term fire, virtually everything he says about change is acceptable from the modern scientific point of view.” [19] Twentieth century physics, going full circle back to Heraclitus, hypothesizes that everything is in motion, that there is only energy.

The écorché couple’s vegetating liana limbs spread into the miasmic swamp below; large lotus flowers and leaves cover the water’s surface, the germinal element. From ancient times the lotus has been a divine symbol in Asian traditions, representing the virtues of sexual purity, just as the lotus, untouched by muck or fetid mire, is unstained as it floats above the filthy primeval waters of attachment and desire. The lotus is a symbol of regenerative powers.

According to Hindu tradition, “The lotus represents the universe, the flower that unfolds in all its glory from the formless endlessness of the causal waters. … The immaculate lotus rising from the depth of the shore is associated with the notion of purity … As the representation of the unfolding of creation the lotus is a symbolic equivalent of the egg of nescience, seed of endless millions of universes.” [20] Similar swamps are portrayed in Masson’s Ophelie and Le fauteuil Louis XVI.

Much of Masson’s architectural constructs are modeled on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), a series of etchings of labyrinthine vaults and dungeons [21], but here, the post-coital lovers are presented as on a couch, or loveseat, against a balustrade (possibly suggested by those in Ingres’ Odalisque à l’esclave). Rudolf Wittkower pointed out that the balustrade “had become such an important element in the sixteenth century that no architect … would have designed buildings without it.” [22] For, in it are the pillars or balusters, bulging in the form of half-open lotuses; while the balcony suggests the one celebrated as Juliet Capulet’s in Verona—although there is no actual mention of a balcony in Shakespeare’s stage notes for his Romeo and Juliet.

La chute, or Le viol (The Fall, or The Rape), 1938, oil on canvas, 16? x 13”. [41 x 33 cm], private collection, Paris.

This painting was originally published as Le viol [The Rape], erroneously dated 1939 in Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour’s André Masson and His Universe. [23] “In The Rape, two bodies, discernible amid a confused mass of limbs and furniture are locked in an intimate embrace, while between them yawns an abdominal [sic] chasm, the scene of their mutual penetration,” as described by Michel Leiris.

Does the “abdominal chasm” belong to chthonian Mother Earth, an archetype of fecundity? or to Paule Vézelay? The “abdominal chasm” or body cavity seems to contain viscera, flames and a small heart-shaped organ. Is the “abdominal chasm” the female’s uterine cavity, the womb from which living things are born? Amid the “two bodies” or “confused mass of limbs,” do the emaciated (drained of vital fluid), blue limbs belong to the artist? Does the vulture-like screaming head belong to Masson? Is the hand holding the breast his? And is “mutual penetration” a case of reciprocal ravagement? And was Masson also referencing the imminent war?

The “abdominal chasm” recalls the disemboweled horse in Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco, (1937), [etching and aquatint, panel 14] (detail, left). Indeed, the tumultuous composition is not unlike Picasso’s Femme Torero II (1934), [etching. G.426]. Undoubtedly Picasso was influenced by Goya’s The Disasters of War, in which, surprisingly, an armchair, in plate 30, appears as part of the turmoil.

More than a tumble from a restful armchair, the combination male-female figure, (mutilated, raped, gutted, internal organs exposed), or the “two bodies”, or the “mass of limbs and furniture” are dumped from a de Sadean chair of authority in a world upside down. (Interestingly, the same wicker seat and leg appear in Pygmalion and Chair by the Sea [1938, Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, Paris]. Breasts imply motherhood, nourishment, and love. Just as the male in Metamorphosis of Lovers is gutted while he proffers a scallop of olives, this disemboweled female, unlike the goddess Hera whose lactating milk created the Milky Way, spills her milk to a barren earth—an expenditure of the life force and primary source of nutrition for the young—into the abyss.

In France, during the 1930s, the Surrealists cultivated the ‘Cult of the Erotic Female’ as revelation of truth and transcendence, and the only experience by which man could find final salvation. In Germany Hitler offered men the full dependence of women; Lebensborn (Spring of Life) returned women to the home (Kinder, Küche, Kirche [Children, Kitchen, Church]), where they were needed for reproduction for military build-up. [24]

Right: Cover of German magazine (c. 1942), with the title, “Youth Serve the Fürher.”

Later, Masson’s painting was euphemistically retitled The Fall. Whether Alphonse de Lamartine’s pantheistic La Chute d’un ange (1838) or the Bible was influential is hard to say. Certainly ‘The Fall’ has Biblical connotations, although ‘The Fall’ is not mentioned by name in Genesis. However, the story of disobedience and expulsion is recounted in both Testaments in different ways and can refer to the wider theological conjectures for all humankind, as in St. Augustine’s Felix Culpa (Fortunate Fall).

From the “la petite mort” of Le fauteuil, and post-coital tristesse of Masson’s Transmutation erotique, from the predatory wolf to a foraging vulture of the battlefields, Masson’s vulture-like screaming head bears a striking resemblance to the predatory creature in Jacques Lipchitz’s Prométhée et son vautour (Prometheus and the Vulture). Sarah Wilson writes that “French authorities, encouraged by the right-wing Académie des Beaux-Arts, destroyed Jacques Lipchitz’s” enormous sculpture (an Exposition commission for the Palais de la Découverte) as the work of a “Jew” and “Bolshevik”. [25] Overtly anti-fascist, the vulture, a noted scavenger, was a substitute for the Nazi eagle, while the figure of Prometheus sported a Phrygian cap, the international emblem of the Republic.

Photograph of Jacques Lipchitz working on Prometheus and the Vulture, 1937.

Perhaps Lipchitz was prompted by the “Vulture Stele” [Mesopotamia, Early Dynastic period, c. 2450 BC] in the Louvre. The same year that Masson painted La Chute, the Germans annexed Austria; by October the Popular Front Government in France was ended, the next year World War II began.

The tragedy of Oedipus had a strong fascination for the ancient Greeks, demonstrating the conflict of moral laws and the supremacy of destiny and the gods. That was not dissimilar to the Surrealists who recognized sexual desire in its repressed state, transcended bourgeois “common sense”, brought it to the surface and helped release it to the world. The tragedy was adapted by many writers, including André Gide with Œdipe (1930) and Jean Cocteau with The Infernal Machine (1934). In Masson’s painting, the sightless eyes of Tiresias watch over a Michelangelesque, flayed Oedipus, as he thrashes and flails within Jocasta’s “abdominal chasm”. Her head rises above her eviscerated ribcage that exudes blood and flames. Is Masson portraying the moment Oedipus realizes that he is the son of Laius and Jocasta, and that he had murdered his father and married his mother?

‘Œdipe (Oedipus),’ 1939, oil on canvas, 13 x 16?”. [33×41 cm], private collection.

In a related painting of the same year there is a recapitulation of the flayed Oedipus struggling with a flaming ribcage. In Masson’s The Workshop of Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth for the Minotaur is not shown, but Masson’s “Chair of Authority” has morphed into Daedalus’s easel-like structure on a platform? stage? scaffold? with a spiral-labyrinth in the background. Is Oedipus, in the workshop of Daedalus, attempting to extricate himself from the intricate maze of “the vagina [that] serves as the entrance to a labyrinth”? [26] He holds a dagger (or Jocasta’s brooch) while two other Michelangelesque figures take away what seems to be a pallid package of bull, labyrinth, and amorphous body parts similar to the writhing bodies in Masson’s The Armchair (c.1937) and Transmutation erotique (1938).

Psychoanalytic theories available to Masson at that time, particularly those of Jacques Lacan (Freudian psychoanalyst and Masson’s son-in-law), provided meaning to the struggle of the self against urges toward immersion and absorption. Was Masson attempting to detach himself from Paule Vézelay who had “experienced the most intense happiness and despair … was drawn into the intense, sexually exploratory, and with Masson often violent arena of surrealism … an ultimately tragic affair”? [27] It recalls an unusual similarity to his war experience expression: “The world around him became something wondrous and he experienced his first complete physical release.” [28]

‘Le chantier de Dédale. (The Workshop of Daedalu),’ 1939, 25? x 31? “. [65×81 cm], private collection.

The abstruse Masson depicted humans on an organic level where conflicts manifest themselves deep down in the body, in society, and in history. His view of society was essentially biological; he saw the human varieties of animal energy to be the forces of life and death. Masson’s very passionate relationship with Paule Vézelay suggests domination, maltreatment and abuse in the “violent arena of surrealism”, probably an artifact of his de Sadean influence. The lust for libido dominandi, the power to transform an individual into someone else, is a common fantasy among many at some point in their lives.

Much of Masson’s work of the 1930s has been described as “Parisian patisserie”, “embarrassing” and “ugly”; but Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was considered stunningly repulsive in its day and, great as it is, can’t necessarily be deemed “beautiful”. André Breton, wrote “Prestige d’André Masson” in Minotaur, May 1939, where he contrasted the erudite Masson with other artists whose artwork “utterly fails to reflect this epoch’s tragic sense of dread … their heads are invisible, tucked firmly under their multicolored wings.” [29] We find Masson’s pictorial work nightmarish, disjointed, and outlandish because we recognize our own sea of troubles and “surrealistic” times in them.

When the Germans occupied France in 1939, Masson was in danger of persecution by the Nazis because of his “degenerate” work, because the Surrealists had ties to the Communist Party (he was anti-Communist), and because his wife was Jewish. With his family, he fled to Auvergne in unoccupied France and eventually to America. He found Manhattan “a sublime city … entirely made by our contemporaries.” Nevertheless, his old horror of the confusion of urban life was intensified by the city, so the Masson family settled in New Preston, Connecticut. His first solo museum exhibition in America was held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, in Maryland, in 1941.

With the end of the war in 1945, he returned to France, where an important commission was an invitation from André Malraux to paint the ceiling of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, in Paris, in 1965 (right). In 1976, he had a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work changed to an enhancing calligraphy and then to a Monet-influenced Impressionism. The course of his life’s work was marked less by stylistic unity than by his commitment to art as philosophical, psychological, and poetic exploration. By 1980 he was forced to cease painting because of poor health. Seven years later he traveled to London for a large exhibition of his drawings. He died in his Paris home in October of that year, at 91.

History is a succession of tragedies, farces, and more often than not, horrendous crimes. In time of war humans regress to the primal level; as Plautus said, “Homo homini lupus est” (man is a wolf to man). In early 20th century Europe became a killing field; but World War II was a “total war”, one seemingly waged against the concept of humanity, itself. Many thought Europe was at the end of an era, possibly the end of civilization.

One of the most profound investigations of Western Man’s self-awareness and mind-sets in antiquity was written by Sophocles, whose Oedipus Tyrannus suggests that self-knowledge might be a barely endurable torment. Sophocles took his cue from the ravaging plague that struck Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesian War: “none can be called happy until that day when he carries / His happiness down to the grave in peace.” What Sophocles meant, as classical scholar H.D.F. Kitto explained: “in the most complex and apparently fortuitous combination of events there is a design, though what it means we may not know.” [30] Surrealists attempted to find that “design” through the exploration of dreams, paranoia, experimentation, amour fou, derangement of all the senses, automatisms, etc.

André Masson (1896-1987), in 1958. 

One role of art is to organize the teeming data with which the world constantly overwhelms our sensory organs. Few would deny the libido’s part in who we are, with its neural systems and quantities of excitations radiating from primal regions of the brain and its neocortex. Sexuality, rooted in human anatomy, physiology, and psychology, helps explain the personality of humankind. Sex, carnage, and history are human beings’ primordial and constituted factors.

By Martin Ries, Contributing Writer

Martin Ries, emeritus professor of art and art history at Long Island University, is an artist who studied at the Corcoran Art School and American University in Washington, D.C. He has exhibited his artwork in this country and abroad. In New York he studied art history at Hunter College with Leo Steinberg, Ad Reinhardt, William Rubin, and E. C. Goossen.

This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University.

NOTES:

[1] Interview with Masson, Newsweek magazine, 15 November 1965, New York, vol. 2, no. 35, p. 106.

[2] An allusion to Tristan and Isolde’s Liebestod where death is the true consummation; Isolde’s final words were höchste Lust [highest bliss].

When Polonius said “ecstasy of love” (II,1,113), when Ophelia described Hamlet as “blasted with ecstasy” (III,1,160), and when Hamlet declared “ecstasy was ne’er so thrall’d” (III,4,74) to his mother, Shakespeare used the word “ecstasy” in the Elizabethan sense of disordered, madness, unbalanced—a derangement of all the senses.

[3] Otto Hahn, Masson, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1965, p.6-7.

[4] Martin Ries, “André Masson: Surrealism and His Discontents,” Art Journal, vol. 61, no.4, winter 2002, New York, p. 75. Almost all the combatants entered what they thought would be a short and glorious war for aristocratic, idealistic, and patriotic reasons. Max Ernst bombarded the trenches in which his eventual close friend, Paul Eluard, was standing guard; Franz Marc and Duchamp-Villon were among those killed, Guillaume Apollinaire died on Armistice Day, “and we were able to believe that Paris was bedecked in his honor.” Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Otto Dix, George Grosz and many others, all belonged to a generation for whom this slaughter was an overwhelming trial in their lives, shattering their confidence in the moral and rational assumptions of Western culture and throwing into question the entire nature of human existence. As a medical student,       Sigmund Freud was proud of his reservist uniform, and thought of his military service as a healthy antidote to the neurasthesia of “over-civilization.”

[5] William Jeffett, André Masson: the 1930s, Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, p. 146.

[6] William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 158.

[7] Martin Ries, “Picasso and the Myth of the Minotaur” Art Journal, winter issue 1972-73: André Masson was the first twentieth century artist to turn to the myth of the Minotaur and initiate its resurgence … it was Masson and Georges Bataille who suggested Le Minotaure as well as Labyrinthe as titles for Albert Skira’s publications. According to Masson he was to illustrate the first cover for Le Minotaure “but Teriade and Skira asked me to let Picasso do it. I did so. I did one myself a couple of years later.” Letter, 26 June 1967, in answer to questions by the author. [Cited in subsequent publications; excerpt reprinted in Picasso in Perspective, anthology edited by Gert Schiff, volume in “The Artists in Perspective Series”, H.W. Janson, general editor, Prentice-Hall].

[8] Sarah Wilson, “Paule Vezelay. – The Courtauld Institute of Art,”     www.courtauld.ac.uk/people/wilson-sarah/VEZELAY.pdf

[9] Laurie J. Monahan, A Knife Halfway Into Dreams: André Masson, Massacres and Surrealism of the 1930s, Ph.D. Thesis, Harvard University, 1997. p.134.

[10] Monahan, Note 208.

[11] André Masson, Mythologie, Paris, Editions de la revue Fontaine, 1946, p.41.

[12] Masson, p.43-44.

[13] Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, p. 127. See also Ries, n. 13 According to Carl Sagan “The extirpation of the brain removes sexual inhibitions and encourages what is left of the male to mate. Afterwards, the female completes her celebratory repast, dining, or course, alone.” [The Dragons of Eden, Random House 1977, p.67].

[14] Norma Lorre Goodrich, Ancient Myths (New York: New American Library, 1960, 217; Virgil, Aenead, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Cambridge and London, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 365.

[15]   Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion Harper & Row, New York. 1961, p.74.

[16] Possibly an allusion to The Man with the Flower in His Mouth (L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca), a 1922 play by Luigi Pirandello. It is noteworthy for becoming, in 1930, the television drama produced in Britain. The play is about a man who is dying of an epithelioma (“il fiore in bocca”), someone who intensely lives the little time left to him.

[17] Rubin & Lanchner, p. 145.

[18] Robert Nadeau, Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1981, p. 21.

[19]   Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, Harper and Row, New York, 1958, p.71; as cited in Nadeau, p.21-22.

[20] Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, ed. Joseph Campbell, New York, 1946, p. 34.

[21] David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 27.

[22] Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and Palladianism, George Braziller, New York, 1974, p. 41.

[23] Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour, André Masson and His Universe, Genève, Éditions de Trois Collines, Paris, 1947, p.139.

[24]   Martin Ries, “André Masson: Surrealism and His Discontents” Art Journal, N.Y., vol. 61, no. 4, winter 2002, p. 82. In antiquity rape had been regarded as part of the spoils of war; now it is considered a combat offense, no longer a trophy of hostilities but a crime against humanity. Interestingly, the Latin rapere, to seize or take by force, originally had no sexual connotation.

[25] Sarah Wilson, Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002, p. 239.

[26] Rubin and Lanchner, p. 145.

[27] Wilson, pdf.

[28] Hahn, p. 6-7.

[29] André Breton, “The magical eloquence of André Masson”, Surrealism and Painting, Icon         Editions, New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London, 1972, tr. Simon Watson Taylor, p.151-154. Cited in Dawn Ades, André Masson, Rizzoli, New York, 1994, p. 19.

[30] H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1951, p.177.