André Masson (1896 -1987)

   
The Ecstasy of

                Discontent

André Masson fought in the Great War because he wanted to experience "the Wagnerian aspects of battle" and know the ecstasy of death; Otto Hahn's biography of Masson explained that ecstasy "the day a bullet ripped into his chest. He remained on his feet, standing still, unconscious of pain. The world around him became something wondrous and he experienced his first complete physical release, while in the sky there appeared before him a torso of light."Every person is unconsciously convinced of his own immortality, but when he faces his destiny, testing ceases and reality comes into its own. Because of that "ecstatic experience" Masson became a perverse theologian of a world that had suffered a Fall. From that alembic bullet and that torso of light, death became a total vision for the artist. But the war left him nervous with nightmares; he suffered from insomnia and spent long painful hours dreaming new paintings. He explained that the relationship between life and death is as between two sides of the same coin; in his greatest moments of illumination and metamorphosis he painted what transpired on both sides.

Many young men suffered traumatic war experiences that shaped their lives and changed history. 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; Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, 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.

          

After the war Masson's life was far from serene. He had already developed a masterly cubist style (Picasso praised him highly); but he was subject to fits of rage, and was frequently in a violent, emotional state. There followed a succession of hospitals and confinement in a psychiatric ward. His new gore-scarred art was a meditation on death, concentrating on Masson's realities: metamorphosis, erotic violence, death and chaos. He opened himself to the provocations of Surrealist ideology and his work became a medium of poetic exploration, a realm where dark myths and metamorphoses of the psyche held sway.

The "crisis of 1929" was precipitated over the question of the Surrealist movement's relationship to the Communist Party; Masson left and eventually broke with the movement entirely. He decided Surrealism was a closed system; and any system, as Nietzsche said, lacks integrity. André Masson, that terrifying Cassandra, explored the imagery of his unconscious, consciously projected it as evocative subject matter and creatively opened the way to emotional and philosophic expression. His work was a dreadfully accurate depiction of the psychotic aspects of European life. Just as Heidegger dismissed Kierkegaard as just another religious writer, Masson was often thought of as just another Surrealist, and much of the resentment of his work as that time stems from the very things it predicted. Life can be fearful, but the artist and his work were lifted above fear into a visionary rapture.There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem [...] You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

                                                                                                                                       André Masson      

La vie est une maladie de l'esprit.

Devenir fleur, animal, pierre, étoile.

Lorsque nombres et figures ne seront plus les clefs de toutes les créatures, lorsque dans les champs et dans les baisers il y aura plus de savoir.

 The specter of death haunts Masson's work and the twentieth century as one of the signs of the times. By asserting that death held sway over all things, death became a tutelary divinity as he attempted to purge memories of horrible events. He fused his dreams with broader and higher levels of meaning, and his personal myths were expressed in images that are themselves difficult to understand pictorially as well as interpret verbally. Masson's work is full of archetypal content; the ingenious complexity of his mental processes, his randomness of composition, and his non-formalistic paintings suggest to a younger generation that he is saying something else (to use one of Rilke's favorite words, unsäglich, something extreme and unsayable - or even unpaintable). Picture-making as a neat Gestalt package was dissolved as art served revelation. Surrealism, essentially literary and psychological rather than plastic and formalistic, was hyperbolically ready to trust its effects to the morbid shocks of repugnant objects in an attempt to endow the absurd complexity of our world and  our pysche.

         


Masson invented new labyrinths to search for new Minotaurs without regard for the dependability of Ariadne or her thread. Whether he encountered the Minotaur, or was transfixed by the torso of light or found his way out of the maze, this did not concern him; he contemplated the experience of the journey. He would not slay the Minotaur but interrogate it for revelation; he would portray the line of Ariadne's thread wherever it led as he drew each beholder into the vital unstable center of his energy. Masson's art is a means of knowing; the intricate passages of his thought are so flowing as to leave the door open for others to find their way to the essential center. The highest achievement of man, he seems to say, is a program of discontent; and within the blight of our dislocated sensibilities Masson's Surrealism was a form of wisdom and courage. (Martin Ries)