531 - Andre Masson* (Balagny-sur-Thérain 1896 - 1987 Paris)

Andre Masson* (Balagny-sur-Thérain 1896 - 1987 Paris) Le cœur volé, 1960 color lithography/paper 52 x 41 cm signed Andre Masson SCHÄTZPREIS / ESTIMATE € 80 - 150 STARTPREIS / STARTING PRICE € 80 André Masson was a French painter, draftsman, and printmaker, as well as a key figure in Surrealism and Art Informel (informal abstraction). Born on January 4, 1896, in Balagny-sur-Thérain near Paris, he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between 1912 and 1914 before being severely wounded in World War I in 1917. His wartime experiences—manifesting in much of his later work as themes of violence, menace, and bodily fragmentation—became a crucial backdrop to his artistic output. In 1924, Masson joined the circle of Surrealists surrounding André Breton. Alongside artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst, he sought artistic methods that would bypass rational planning and make the unconscious visible. Automatic drawing and painting became particularly significant for Masson; from spontaneous lines, gestures, and associations, he developed pictorial spaces in which organic forms, fragments of figures, landscape motifs, and symbols from the unconscious overlapped. Beginning in 1926, he created the sand paintings for which he is best known. In these works, Masson combined sand scattered onto the canvas with adhesive, paint, and drawn elements. The materiality of the surface thus became a central feature of the image itself, foreshadowing the later Art Informel movement. Works such as Labyrinth (1938) and Gradiva (1939) demonstrate his fusion of mythology, eroticism, violence, and the inner psyche through a dynamic and often unsettling visual language. In 1941, Masson emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where he associated with artists such as Roberto Matta. His working methods proved influential for the younger generation of the New York School; Jackson Pollock, in particular, adopted aspects of automatism, physical gesture, and the open pictorial field, subsequently developing them into "Action Painting." After returning to Paris in 1946, Masson continued to develop his work in the space between figuration and abstraction. His increasingly gestural and material-focused painting combines spontaneous movement, drip techniques, and expressive traces of color with Surrealist imagery. Masson’s work thus occupies a pivotal position between Surrealism, automatic painting, sand painting, and Abstract Expressionism. His art demonstrates how the unconscious, chance, and the physical act of painting can become independent pictorial elements. PLEASE NOTE: The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights and platform fee. In the case of normal taxation (marked ° at the estimate), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax is added to the sum of the highest bid, the buyer's premium and platform fee. This amounts to 13% for paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures and 20% for photographs and all other items. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.