Oedipe

Having passed directly from André Masson to the present owner, Oedipe of 1939 is an important painting in which the artist returned to many of the core themes that had preoccupied him for much of his career: birth and death, Eros and Thanatos. Masson himself described this composition, which takes the tragic mythological character of Oedipus as its subject: ‘Oedipus is flayed, he is trying to enter a kind of vessel which is like an immense flayed ox, itself surrounded by flames, and at the very back, the face of a woman appears, very beautiful, very attractive. And behind it, finally, there is the death’s-head hawkmoth: it is the symbolic game. It is the only painting I have done on Oedipus, and on the Sphinx’ (quoted in J-P. Clébert, Mythologie d’André Masson, Geneva, 1971, p. 38).
This dramatic composition takes on a greater resonance when seen in the context of the time in which it was painted. Having fought in the First World War, Masson was highly sensitive to the growing threat of conflict during the 1930s, and left France for Spain in 1934. ‘Europe increasingly resembles a refuge for the insane,’ he had observed in 1935 (quoted in C. Morando, André Masson, 1896-1987, Première partie, Vaumarcus, 2010, p. 145). Finding himself in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, he returned to France in 1936. In reaction to Europe’s turmoil, Masson took refuge in painting, working with a prolific energy. In contrast to the dark reality of impending war, Masson’s painting grew brighter, charged with colour and teeming with drama and often violence, as exemplified by the array of saturated hues and apocalyptic atmosphere of Oedipe.