André Masson: Surrealist, Survivor, Sage

Martin Ries

 

This is the

very ecstasy of love, Whose violent property fordoes

itself.

- William Shakespeare

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which

civilization is built

 upon a

renunciation of instinct.

-Sigmund Freud

 

 

 

      André Masson was born in 1896 and

spent his early years in one of the most beautiful provinces of Northern

France. Fresh rivers, fertile fields, and the rich forests of the

Ile-de-France, celebrated by Barbizon and Impressionist painters, were the

backdrop of his childhood and inspired his lifelong love of nature. His

father’s business took the family to Brussels, where he encountered Old Master

paintings in the local museums. He was admitted to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et l’Ecole

des Arts Décoratifs at age eleven. In cities all

over Europe at the turn of the century young people were enthralled by Art

Nouveau, Impressionism, and Symbolism, as well as Nietzsche and Wagner.

Something of a drifter in his teenage years, he became a vegetarian, went

barefoot, read avidly in literature and philosophy, considered himself a Wagnerian

and a Nietzschean,  resisted social

conventions – and was taken in by the authorities more than once. By 1913 André

Masson was in Paris, studying at the École

des Beaux-Arts, and first learned of the work 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

He experienced that “ecstasy” the day a bullet ripped into the young

artist’s chest during the offensive at Chemin des Dames in April of 1917 (Adolf

Hitler also fought at Chemin des Dames). Stretcher-bearers were unable to get him

to safety and he was left for the night, half-dead, on his back, where he was a

submissive spectator of the struggle, gazing at the conflict overhead. Masson

had spent three years in the trenches in conditions so horrible he was unable

to speak of them for years, and his wounds caused him psychic trouble to the

end of his life.

 

       There followed a

succession of hospitals for two years, and even padded cell confinement in a

psychiatric ward. His doctor advised that he never again live in a big city. The war left him nervous with

nightmares; he suffered from insomnia and spent long painful hours dreaming new

paintings. Crows (1922, Galerie Leiris, Paris) is permeated with an ominous quality;

Masson’s much-loved forest is now a gloomy labyrinth filled with mystery and

foreboding. A

variegated woodland holds three dead trees in center foreground while crows

fly overhead. Birds, often depicted in the branches of the Tree of Life, are

not harbingers of delight here but dark heralds of impending doom. Even a

branch falls at their approach.

 

       A Throw of the Dice (1922, Essen Museum, Germany) is doubtless a reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard, and/or Igitur. Anna Balakian wrote that the “throwing of the dice, of which we had the initial example in Igitur, is the representation of human power, and the “hasard,” which it cannot succeed in mastering…” “Igitur’s life, therefore, is directed toward one single act, symbolized in the blowing out of the candle followed by the casting of dice.” ³  In contrast to the bareness of Crows, A Throw of the Dice is filled with references to events and personal experiences as well as to acquaintances who gathered in his studio on the rue Blomet (this Cubist-influenced painting was bought by Ernest Hemingway directly from the artist’s studio). Guite Masson, Director of Comité André Masson, identifies the figure throwing the dice as Georges Limbour; the others as Roland Tual, Theodore Fraenkel, and “sans doute Michel Leiris.” Could this personage also be an allusion to Masson’s having survived the war in what Nietzsche called, “the great dice game of existence.” The dice, at bottom center, are about to slip off the bottom of the painting into the unknown – the “néant.” Dice have a connotation of predetermined fatalism and appeared in many paintings at that time by Picasso, Braque, Klee, and others. Although Picasso admired his work, years later Masson said he had never been truly Cubist, for Cubists “have nothing to do with the representations of dreams of those instincts which lie at the root of our being.”

 

      

To eat together is spiritual union; meals in an ancient household were

sacred because the household god was present. Masson’s close friends, artists,

philosophers, and poets, were often portrayed in a variety of shared

activities, as in The Repast (1922, Galerie Leiris, Paris).  The pomegranate has a long symbolic tradition, going back to

pagan mythology where it was the attribute of Persephone, signifying her

periodic return to earth in the spring. Because of its abundant red seeds it is

a symbol of fertility. However, the French word grenade means both

pomegranate and hand grenade.  For

Masson the pomegranate, “the only fruit that bleeds,” was a sign of death, for

he suffered a battlefield memory of a soldier’s head blown open and looking

very much like a gaping pomegranate. Yet the figure on the right holds a glass

of wine, another holds bread – the “liquid of life” and the “staff of life.”

Masson affirmed life even with conflicting flashbacks.

 

       In 1923 Hitler’s Nazi

putsch failed in Munich, while

General Primo de Rivera became dictator of Spain. Cubist influence was evident

in the artist’s work but with personal metamorphoses; even his still lifes were

charged with an intensity of feeling at odds with the spirit of Cubism. Classic

Cubist still life elements: tilted tabletop in shallow space, musical

instruments, drinking glasses, fruit, even a Braque-like white clay pipe, plus

Masson’s symbolic pomegranate, are apparent in Still Life with Candle (1922-23, Galerie Cazeau

Beraudierè, Paris). The lighted candle is fraught with

allusions: uncertainty of being, illumination in the darkness of life,

intelligence, and spiritual strength.

 

      However, this

candle burns but does not illuminate. The primary significance of the flame for

Masson stems from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who

regarded fire as the fundamental substance, “Everything, like a flame in a

fire, is born of the death of something else … the primordial element out of

which everything else arises.” 

Heraclitus, Masson stated, “remains for me the essential philosopher.” To a great degree Heraclitus foreshadowed

the modern conception of the uniformity of natural law. If we substitute

energy for Heraclitus’s term fire, as Werner Heisenberg⁴

suggests, virtually everything he says about change is acceptable from the

modern scientific point of view.

 

       The following year Masson became involved

with Surrealism,⁵ and by 1927 there were

depictions of physical conflicts in his animal world: fish, birds, insects, and

horses engaged in battle, as well as scenes of slaughter, massacres, copulation

and rape. Andre Masson was possibly the most consistent portrayer of cruel

confrontations and bizarre combat in Surrealism. He also painted some of his

most symbolic and speculative works as his erudition served insight and

revelation. In Ophelia (1937,

Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore Maryland), Shakespeare’s female protagonist

is surrounded by a countryside filled with ponds and lush vegetation, like the

fertile fields of the Ile-de-France where Masson grew up. Ophelia’s face is

made up of floral forms. Flowers are a traditional symbol of life, fecundity,

and joy, but Ophelia

says: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; …

there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me … O you must wear your rue with a

difference.” Rue was a sign of repentance. More importantly it was also known and

used in ancient times, and in the Renaissance, as a contraceptive and an

abortifacient.⁶ Rosemary

was an established emblem of betrothal, but the Prince must wear his “rue with a difference.”

 

      

Ophelia, like a supine non-erotic odalisque, is submerged in primordial

waters; only her face, echoed in the cloud formation above, is visible. Life

comes from water; immersion in water signifies a return to a pre-formal state,

like baptism, with a sense of birth and regeneration on one hand and death and

annihilation on the other. The sunlit sky is filled with cosmic forms and

astral bodies; Ophelia is transformed into a cosmic planetary constellation not

unlike Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne

(c.1520, National Gallery, London) where Bacchus, seeing the deserted, lovelorn

Ariadne, leaps from his chariot to embrace her. That event is mimicked by the

clouds whose shapes echo the drapery and gestures of the principles, and where

the starry crown of immortality awaits Ariadne as a constellation.

 

      Above Ophelia

is no Bacchic benefactor, but the reaper Death, Claimer of Souls; while

scorpion-like insects (similar to mantes, scorpions show cannibalistic

sexuality⁷) frolic, play, and serenade Ophelia – as their lives go

on unencumbered by Shakespearean tragedy. As Ophelia said, “We know not what we

are, but know not what we may be” (IV,5,45).

 

      

Masson witnessed the fascist riots of February 1934 in Paris; he anticipated

another war and decided to leave France. Recalling the doctor’s advice to avoid

city life, he decided Spain would offer a peaceful life. Hardly had he and his

family reached Spain than insurrection broke out in Barcelona. They found themselves

trapped in the home of a friend in the middle of shelling and sniper fire.

Lying behind mattresses for shelter, Masson felt he was in the trenches again.⁸

The Masson family returned to France when the Spanish Civil War broke out in

1936.

 

       The next year German planes bombed the

little town of Guernica, Picasso painted his mural, and Andre Breton was put in

charge of Galerie Gradiva for the Surrealist

exhibitions.  It is likely that

Masson, just returned from the terrible scenes of the Civil War, and disturbed

by the indifference of Europe to the fascist horror, was making a statement

about the existence of dreadful suffering and impending disaster. A titanic

figure, like Samson destroying the temple, seems to be bringing down the modern

world around himself in the disturbing

In the Tower of Sleep (1938, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore

Maryland.). Vital fluid gushes from his genitals and a gaping head wound spills

forth seeds like an open pomegranate. Blood flows, fires (Heraclitean?)

are burning. At upper right a woman’s nipples are bleeding as though pierced

from within with sword-points. A humanoid, Bosch-like musical instrument (left

of the central figure), reminiscent of the scorpion-like insects in Ophelia, tears its own strings with a

saw-like bow in a sadomasochistic serenade.

 

      

The flayed figure “came from a memory of the war,” explained

Masson, “a figure lying in a trench with his head split open;”⁹  it all takes place in a tower “from

which there is no way out except into the abyss.”¹⁰ In ancient

and medieval warfare, a tall tower was used in storming fortified castles, and

terrible carnage ensued. The tower, in dream symbolism, represents elevation,

pedestal, and inaccessibility, with phallic connotations. Masson’s subconscious

flashback explains the chaotic composition of the painting, almost

psychotically* thrown together like a horrible nightmare with its plethora of

complex motifs. As with the infamous “Famine Tower” where Ugolino and children

were immured, horrific images grow in the imagination.

* William Rubin refered to the late 1930 pictures as “ugly” and In the Tower of Sleep as the “most

repugnant of these Guignols.” (William

Rubin, “Notes on Masson and Pollock,” Arts,

November 1959, p. 41). [Presumably, he meant Grand Guignol theatre [Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol] in

the Pigalle area of Paris that

specialized in horror shows, not Guignol, the character in a puppet show for

children].

 

       Masson had wide-ranging fascination

and interest in all things throughout his life. Sigmund Freud’s essay of 1906,

“Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,”

translated into French in 1931, impressed the Surrealists more forcefully than

his other writings. It was an analysis of a novel about an archeologist so

devoted to his profession that he had no place in his life for women.  He visited Pompeii where he met “Gradiva,” who turned out to be a childhood friend who,

in love with him, conformed to his delusions in order to cure him. Freud refers

to this revelation and final salvation as the “medication of love.”

The Surrealists adopted “medication” as their program, and Gradiva

as their Ideal Woman; Gradiva could intercede between

the real and the surreal, life and death, creation and destruction.

             

       Masson’s Gradiva (1939, Collection Parti, Paris) retains the right foot “in

erection,”¹¹ as in the ancient marble relief of Gradiva in the Vatican Museum – and similar to the

stance of a preying mantis. The body of Gradiva is in

both a birth and death stance, like a combination Aztec birth goddess and an

Ariadne sleeping pose.  Masson,

other Surrealists, Freud’s paper, Breton’s essay, all used the Gradiva theme as a myth of metamorphosis and regeneration

of life. Le rêve d’Ariane,

(1941, Francois Odermatt Collection, Paris)  betokens the mysteries of female organs,

just as the shell-vulva in Gradiva is associated with water and Venus, sources of

fertility and symbols of one generation rising from the death of the preceding

- similarities and parallels to motifs in Ophelia

and the Heraclitean concept. The profile of the

sacred white bull (darkened here) morphs frenziedly through spiraling tubal

labyrinths to the waiting Ariadne (the volute suggests a vaginal plexus). Knight cites Hommel as

finding Cretan and Babylonian evidence of a connection between the spiral

labyrinth and the internal organs of the human anatomy, one being a microcosm

of the other.¹² Indeed, in Leiris’ novel, Aurora¹³

the act of descending stairs is a descent into the self, a characteristic

surrealist form of a pursuit of self-knowledge:

“This stairway is … set

in a spiral which permits access to the various parts of the premises which

contain your attic, it is your very viscera, it is your digestive tract which

connects your mouth of which you are proud, to your anus, of which you are

ashamed, hollowing out through the body its sinuous sticky way.”

Does

Ariadne’s labyrinthine umbilical-thread help Masson to represent the “dreams of

those instincts which lie at the root of our being”? or

the “medication of love”?

 

       Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, poet and author, worked as a scientist in various fields such as

mineralogy, comparative anatomy, botany, and the theory of color. There were

years when science occupied him more than poetry. In Masson’s Goethe and the Metamorphosis of Plants (1940, Vera and Arturo Schwarz

Collection, Israel Museum, Jerusalem), Goethe, who wrote “the eye both

perceives and speaks,”¹⁴ gazes intently at a gorgeous vision of

primordial-looking germinations, crystalline radiations, and prisms. Perhaps

the geometric “prism” between Goethe and the plants is a reference to Isaac

Newton’s rationalistic documentation of color that Goethe resisted. Until then, most of the accepted concepts about color had

been advanced by artist-scientists, like Leonardo da Vinci, who based their

theories on their experiences with pigment rather than light. Paint and light

are fundamentally different: light is the source of all color, and pigments are

simply reflectors, absorbers and transmitters of colors. Eventually the

sensation of color is in our brain. Like Masson, Goethe knew that the

sensation of color was a psychological and sensual experience of the mind; his

“Theory of Color” (a premise now known as phenomenology of colors) he regarded

as proof against Newtonian optics.

 

 

       In his epoch-making, Essay on Metamorphosis of Plants Goethe set out to trace “the

specific phenomena in the magnificent garden of the universe, back to one

simple general principle.” He saw plants as reflections of life forces and

believed that the genera and species were variations of a basic archetype, the Urplanz, Ur-Plant, or First

Plant. He

published his scientific theory, but botanists and scientists snickered and

advised him to stick to poetry. He took their advice and rephrased his views in

a poem, “The Metamorphosis of Plants.” Gradually his theory accumulated

supporters, and is today the foundation for much of the study of plants, just

as his color theories have new adherents through Color Field paintings. Masson

felt great affinity for

this genius whose insight was illuminated by his study of nature.

 

       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, and because his

wife was Jewish. Shortly after finishing the painting, Masson and his family

fled to Auvergne in unoccupied France and eventually to America. Masson 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 he moved to the

seclusion of an old Colonial-style house in suburban Connecticut where he

painted Meditation on an Oak Leaf (1942, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the U.S. declared war. Masson’s

“American Period” began with what he called “triumphant tellurism

… symbols of blooming and germination.”¹⁵

 

       During the war Americans were urged to

grow their own food in “Victory Gardens;” accordingly the artist dug

into the dark rich Connecticut earth and grew his own vegetables. He was

impressed by the fertility of American soil; years later in France he

exclaimed: “In New England there are oak trees three times larger than

here, the leaves also! The weeds are three times larger than here and the insects

gigantic, for there is an astonishing fauna and it remains very wild 250

kilometers from New York … so I put a wildcat in my painting.”¹⁶

 

      No Cartesian meditation, no

contemplation on the Tree of Life, Meditation on an Oak Leaf  is organized in organic, cartouche-like

compartments, pinched in the middle like cell division; the entire configuration is a kind of totem

pole of private myths of pod and womb-like forms. The wildcat’s head surmounts this staff, and

next to it are two eyes – one glowing red connected by a figure-eight, symbol

of infinity. The painting is in primary colors: red, blue, yellow; and

white, on a black ground that stands for earth, as the source of growth and

regeneration, like Goethe’s “reflections of life forces.” Red is the energy

principle, yellow the solar force, and blue the color

of contemplation. “American energy fascinated me,” Masson said, “I painted the

power of the earth. The magic. The climate.” The saturated hues of his American

works, the sensual and mental experiences were an attempt to battle against the

light that he found so fiercely bright in his adopted country.

 

       There are suggestions of roots and

tendrils in the painting, of growing things weaving throughout the composition.

Compressed, bisected shapes are translated into “vegetable and human fragments:

leaf, worm, seed, flower, eye.”¹⁷  Below the oval,

womb-like compartment is a

depiction of the quiescent artist in meditation (not unlike the pose in

Matisse’s Girl Asleep, 1940, private collection, Paris) and reminiscent

of the figure in Repast, slumped over with his head in his arm and

a pomegranate in (Masson’s?) hand,

along with the umbilical threads of Le rêve

d’Ariane . At middle right is primordial,

cactus-like foliage, as in Goethe and the Metamorphosis of Plants. The

larva, seed, or embryo of nascent white below the peacefully dreaming painter has a broken line (always a sign

of movement in Masson’s art) indicating that fertilization has taken place.

 

      Masson designed

a curtain, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, in 1942 for a Society of American Friends

of France ceremony that showed his involvement with France’s plight in the

midst of war. Clement Greenberg stated that Masson’s visit to America played a

pivotal role in the development of Abstract Expressionism in New York. Jackson.

Pollock’s Totem 1 (1944) is considered an extrapolation of Masson’s Meditation

on Oak Leaf, ¹⁸ and his Pasiphaë

(1943) was painted soon after Masson’s work of the same title, while Gorky’s Garden in Sochi series (early 1940s. They

were neighbors in Connecticut) has parallels with Masson’s art of those years.

 

      With the end of

the war, Masson returned to his native France where he was the subject of

retrospective and solo exhibitions throughout Europe. He won France’s National

Prize for Painting in 1954. He had seen the large collections of Chinese art at

the Metropolitan Museum in New York and at the Boston Museum in Massachusetts,

and recognized sensibilities toward nature that paralleled his own. “At first glance

there’s no human trace in Chinese landscapes,” he said, “as the eye travels over the painting, a few

brushstrokes reveal the figure of a man. A grain of dust in that world” -

reminiscent of William Blake’s “To see

the World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild

Flower…” In the mid 1950s, calligraphic forms derived from Chinese and

Japanese ideograms began to appear in Masson’s works. He was enthralled by the

play of spontaneity and control in Asian art and was drawn to the philosophy of

Zen Buddhism. Interestingly, Surrealism and Zen share the concept that

surprising juxtapositions can inspire powerful insights and intuitions. “Having

left the realm of Surrealism, Masson was expressing a broadly humanistic,

existentialist conception of the artist’s activity,” stated Clark Poling. “In

their visual dynamism these works embody creative energy, thus recapitulating a

central aspect of automatism without bearing particular evidence of a source in

the unconscious.”¹⁹

 

      In

Pursuit of Hatchings and Germinations (1967, Mobilier National, Paris) is

a study Masson made for a Gobelin tapestry. Over an earth-brown underpainting is a fusion of subtle depictions of a bird, a

floating figure with fruit, heart-fashioned vagina, fish, insects, leaf, worm,

seed, flower, eye, egg and embryo shapes, – images that have long intrigued

Masson – and trailing hatchings of colorful meandering calligraphic lines,

veins and streaks. Masson is pursuing the hidden reality, the psyche, or spirit

of the dynamics of nature that can’t be detached from its aesthetic values. Zen, the meditative method of reaching serenity and imbued by a

deep sense of the cosmic order of creation, opened the way to inner tranquility

and enlightenment for Masson.

 

      In 1976 Masson

was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New

York; four years later he had to abandon painting because of ill health. In

early 1987 a large exhibition of his drawings was held at the Haywood Gallery

in London; he made his last trip to see it. He died, age 91, in his Paris home

in October of that year.

 

      Without “a

renunciation of instinct” André Masson sought the “ecstasy of death” as a young

man. He survived, and found the ecstasy of life, love and art, of courage and

sagacity, in the chaos and carnage that was the twentieth century. Sophocles

ended King Oedipus with:  “… learn that mortal man must always

look to his ending, for none can be called happy until that day when he carries

his happiness down to the grave in peace.” Masson’s valor and acumen, his

affirmation of life in the face of devastating odds, earned him the ancient Greek

maxim: “Satisfaction, all passion spent.”

 

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