André Masson
André Masson - Original Lithograph
1963

Name: André Masson - Original Lithograph
Brand: André Masson
Price: 734.05 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

André Masson - Composition Original Lithograph 1969 Dimensions: 32 x 25 cm Revue XXe Siècle Cahiers d'art published under the direction of G. di San Lazzaro. French painter born in Culan, Cher. He went to Paris in 1919 in the face of opposition from his father and took a variety of jobs, including designer for a furniture factory, while familiarizing himself with art in the Louvre. In 1923 he worked as draughtsman for a textile factory in Barcelona. On his return to Paris he studied at the Academie Colarossi and had his first exhibition at the Gal. Yvangot in 1930. During the 1930s he exhibited at the Salon des Surindependants and the Salon des Tuileries, selling his first picture in 1934 at a retrospective exhibition of French art in Gothenburg, Sweden. In 1937 he collaborated with Robert DELAUNAY on decorations for the Air and Railways pavilions at the Exposition Universelle. He was represented in the epoch-making exhibition 'Jeunes Peintres de la Tradition Francaise' in 1941 and from that time he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne. During the 1930s his style evolved in a manner akin to that of PIGNON. In his early days in Paris he planted the seeds of an enthusiasm for the Cezanne of Les Joueurs de cartes, as became manifest in his Les Partie de cartes and Canape Bleu of 1935. To this was added an influence from the post-cubist manner of PICASSO and BRAQUE, with both of whom he had a basic affinity as manifested in his Cantate de Bach of 1938. He gradually developed towards a colorful abstraction of semi-geometrical forms based upon the figure compositions, interiors and still-lifes which had been his principal subjects from the early 1930s. By the 1950s he was recognized as an outstanding representative of the school of TACHISM whose members derived their abstractions from natural appearances in the manner taught by Roger BISSIERE. His color remained always both subtle and bold. His reputation grew internationally and in 1956 he was given a one-man show in Copenhagen, in 1961 a retrospective at the Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf.

Creator:

André Masson (1896-1987, French)

Creation Year:

1963

Dimensions:

Height: 12.6 in (32 cm)Width: 9.85 in (25 cm)Depth: 0.04 in (1 mm)

Medium:

Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1960-1969

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU16122318681

View Invoice

Shop All André Masson

André Masson

Born in 1896 in Balagny-sur- Thérain, a small village in France, André Masson spent most of his youth in Brussels, Belgium working as a pattern maker at an embroidery atelier. Masson began his schooling in 1907 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1912, he relocated to Paris, where he attended the École 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 influenced by this trauma; his drawings and paintings executed during the 1920s represent battle scenes, blood, death, birds and fish. The strange realities of trench warfare and the immediate contiguity of life and death are drawn upon, and his imagery suggests a confrontation of life at an abnormal level of experience. His signature style deals with violence, evident in terrifying, fragmented figures, which reflect the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and WWII, as well as his troubled psyche in the aftermath of his service in WWI.

After WWI, Masson moved to the South of France, where he met Juan Gris, André Derain, Joan Miró and André Breton. Breton championed the Surrealist Manifesto and Masson joined in the group exhibition of the first Surrealists. An iconoclast, whose abrupt stylistic transitions defy classification, Masson also explored automatism (automatic drawing), a process that sought to express the creative force of the unconscious. These automatic drawings had no preconceived subject or composition. Like a medium channeling a spirit, Masson let his pen travel rapidly across the paper without conscious control. He soon found hints of images, fragmented bodies and objects, emerging from the abstract, lacelike web of pen marks. At times, Masson elaborated on these with conscious changes or additions, but he left the traces of the rapidly drawn ink mostly intact. Masson’s oeuvre explores several techniques of painting, drawing and sculpture and displays rich, colorful abstraction as well as monochrome imagery and automatic linear representations. An early Surrealist and student of Cubism, Masson went on to inspire the New York Abstract Expressionists. Masson developed a technique of automatic painting that retained the element of chance; he dripped glue onto paper to form drawings and then covered it with sand. These ‘sand paintings’ are unquestionably his most iconic style.

When Masson emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, he strongly influenced several American painters with this technique, the most evident example being Jackson Pollack. After his time in America, he returned to Europe and while living in Spain during the mid-1930s, he became enraptured with Spanish themes—bullfights, matadors and Spanish mythology. Masson finally settled down in France (Aix-en-Provence), where he took up a late interest in impressionistic landscape, but he ultimately came to a place where he painted nearly exclusively abstract images. Masson dedicated his life as an artist to encouraging the non-rational purpose in art, to the direct transference of subconscious thought and to the primal forces of conflicts that he experienced in the trenches of World War One. 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.