About the Artist
Andre Masson
Andre Masson (1896 – 1987) was a French artist born in Balagny, France. He began his study of art at the age of eleven at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and later he studied in Paris. His early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink. Masson experimented with altered states of consciousness with artists such as Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Joan Miro, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Malkine, who were neighbors of his studio in Paris. From around 1926 he experimented by throwing sand and glue onto canvas and making oil paintings based around the shapes that formed. By the end of the 1920s, however, he was finding automatic drawing rather restricting, and he left the surrealist movement and turned instead to a more structured style, often producing works with a violent or erotic theme, and making a number of paintings in reaction to the Spanish Civil War (he associated once more with the surrealists at the end of the 1930s). He came to America to escape the Nazi occupation of France, and living in Connecticut his work became an important influence on American abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock. Following the war, he returned to France and settled in Aix-en-Provence where he painted a number of landscapes.
