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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Mme Guite-Masson for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
"For us, young surrealists of 1924, the great prostitute was reason. We judged that Cartesians, Voltaireans and other officials of the intelligence had only made use of it for the preservation of values which were both established and dead, whilst at the same time, affecting a facade of dissension. And the supreme accusation was that it has given reason the mercenary job of making fun of love and poetry. At that time there was a great temptation to try and operate magically on things, and then on ourselves. The impulse was so great that we could not resist it and so, from the end of the winter of 1924, there was a frenzied abandon to automatism" (A. Masson, Painting is a wager, 1941, cited in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, London, 1968, p. 436).
André Masson was one of the first Surrealist artists to attempt to capture a spontaneous and unconscious flight of ideas in visual form. Developing the automatic techniques that André Breton and Phillipe Soupault had first developed in their writing of The Magnetic Fields, Masson translated their unconscious automatism first into drawing and later, painting. Les Ombres (Shadows) is an extremely rare and important example of the revolutionary series of sand paintings that Masson executed in 1927. There are only twenty eight sand paintings from that early period and many of them are in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. These ground-breaking paintings used the medium of sand and glue to allow the artist the painterly and unconscious freedom and fluidity that had previously only been discovered with pen and ink. In fact pouring glue, then sand and finally paint on the canvas proved to be an even better technique than the pen as it enabled the artist to express his unconscious in an uninterupted flow, without having to reload the pen or brush.
Responding to Breton's assertion that "If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them", Masson aimed to translate these "forces" through his work into visual images. Employing a technique that has echoes in the ritual sand paintings of the Navaho Indians of North America, Masson attempted with fluid lines drawn in the sand, to conjure powerful psychic incarnations from the labyrinthine complexity of his own unconscious mind.
In order to achieve this "magic", Masson developed a precise meditative practice that he developed into the following ritualised procedure: "a) the first condition was to liberate the mind from all apparent ties. Entry into a state similar to a trance, b) Abandonment to interior tumult, c) Rapidity of writing. These dispositions once attained, under my fingers involuntary figures were born and most often disturbing, disquieting, unqualifiable. The slightest reflection broke the charm. But when in the end images appeared, I could not prevent a movement of shame - an indescribable unease - combined with a vengeful exultation, like a victory carried over some oppressive power" (A. Masson, "Le Peintre et ses Fantasmes", Le rebelle du Surréalisme).
Through the results of this mystical approach to painting Masson discovered that his work "almost always had an erotic foundation. An eroticism that could have been that of the cosmos, but whose element was Eros" (cited in exh. cat. Surrealism Unbound, Tate Gallery, London, 2001, p. 105). In addition, he found that the images his paintings seemed to invoke often described a disturbing world of mythological conflict and violence that almost certainly reflected his suffering during the First World War.
Appropriately titled, Les ombres is one of Masson's most important early paintings on this revolutionary voyage of self-discovery.
"For us, young surrealists of 1924, the great prostitute was reason. We judged that Cartesians, Voltaireans and other officials of the intelligence had only made use of it for the preservation of values which were both established and dead, whilst at the same time, affecting a facade of dissension. And the supreme accusation was that it has given reason the mercenary job of making fun of love and poetry. At that time there was a great temptation to try and operate magically on things, and then on ourselves. The impulse was so great that we could not resist it and so, from the end of the winter of 1924, there was a frenzied abandon to automatism" (A. Masson, Painting is a wager, 1941, cited in H.B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, London, 1968, p. 436).
André Masson was one of the first Surrealist artists to attempt to capture a spontaneous and unconscious flight of ideas in visual form. Developing the automatic techniques that André Breton and Phillipe Soupault had first developed in their writing of The Magnetic Fields, Masson translated their unconscious automatism first into drawing and later, painting. Les Ombres (Shadows) is an extremely rare and important example of the revolutionary series of sand paintings that Masson executed in 1927. There are only twenty eight sand paintings from that early period and many of them are in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. These ground-breaking paintings used the medium of sand and glue to allow the artist the painterly and unconscious freedom and fluidity that had previously only been discovered with pen and ink. In fact pouring glue, then sand and finally paint on the canvas proved to be an even better technique than the pen as it enabled the artist to express his unconscious in an uninterupted flow, without having to reload the pen or brush.
Responding to Breton's assertion that "If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them", Masson aimed to translate these "forces" through his work into visual images. Employing a technique that has echoes in the ritual sand paintings of the Navaho Indians of North America, Masson attempted with fluid lines drawn in the sand, to conjure powerful psychic incarnations from the labyrinthine complexity of his own unconscious mind.
In order to achieve this "magic", Masson developed a precise meditative practice that he developed into the following ritualised procedure: "a) the first condition was to liberate the mind from all apparent ties. Entry into a state similar to a trance, b) Abandonment to interior tumult, c) Rapidity of writing. These dispositions once attained, under my fingers involuntary figures were born and most often disturbing, disquieting, unqualifiable. The slightest reflection broke the charm. But when in the end images appeared, I could not prevent a movement of shame - an indescribable unease - combined with a vengeful exultation, like a victory carried over some oppressive power" (A. Masson, "Le Peintre et ses Fantasmes", Le rebelle du Surréalisme).
Through the results of this mystical approach to painting Masson discovered that his work "almost always had an erotic foundation. An eroticism that could have been that of the cosmos, but whose element was Eros" (cited in exh. cat. Surrealism Unbound, Tate Gallery, London, 2001, p. 105). In addition, he found that the images his paintings seemed to invoke often described a disturbing world of mythological conflict and violence that almost certainly reflected his suffering during the First World War.
Appropriately titled, Les ombres is one of Masson's most important early paintings on this revolutionary voyage of self-discovery.