Lot n° 218
Estimation :
160000 - 200000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 182 848EUR
* André MASSON (1896-1987) - Lot 218
* André MASSON (1896-1987)
Animal heads, 1927.
Mixed media, oil and collage of sand and feathers on canvas, signed on the back.
54 x 49.5 cm
Bibliography :
- Galerie Simon, Paris.
- Private collection, Paris.
- Sale Drouot Montaigne, Paris, October 24, 2009, n°11.
Exhibitions :
- Masson l'insurgé du XXe siècle, exhibition organized by Jean-Marie Drot, Académie de France, Rome, December 16, 1989 - February 15, 1990.
- André Masson, The Mythologie of Desire: Masterworks from 1925 to 1945 galerie Blain/Di Donna, Carlyle Hotel, New York, April 27-June 15, 2012.
- Galerie Guttlein, Paris.
- Galerie Beaudoin Lebon, Paris (N°BL 28893).
- Die galerie Franckfort.
Bibliography:
- Masson, l'insurgé du XXe siècle, Rome, Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1989, Villa Medici exhibition catalog, reproduced.
- André Masson, The Mythologie of Desire: Masterworks from 1925 to 1945 by Valery Oisteanu In: The Brooklyn Rail, June 2012, reproduced.
In the late 1920s, Masson was going through a particularly intense phase of research. After his experiments with automatic drawing within the Surrealist group, he sought to extend this free gesture into the very matter of the painting.
These years saw a proliferation of attempts in which line, chance and the intervention of external materials were all part of the same movement. Masson was no longer simply seeking to represent: he was setting up the conditions for the appearance of images that the material itself helped to bring into being. This period marks the transition from an essentially graphic automatism to a broader exploration of support, texture and organic elements.
In 1927, Masson pushed the logic of automatism to the limit, and began to develop his "sand paintings". The dossier for the exhibition André Masson il n'y a pas de monde achevé en 2024, Centre Pompidou-
Metz (2024) points out that between 1927 and 1929, he perfected a technique for extending the automatism of his drawings into painting, letting sand and matter draw part of the form.
Our painting, Têtes d'animaux (Animal Heads), is a perfect example of this technique.
The composition is based on a few free brush curves, suggesting animal profiles without confining them to strict figuration.
The glued feathers, scattered across the surface, shift the painting towards the object and the assemblage, while literally referring back to the animal world. The matt, monochrome ochre surface acts as a neutral field on which signs, fragments of figures and organic matter are deposited.
The whole acts as a kind of "latent bestiary". We're not looking at precise animals, but at apparitions: an isolated eye, an open mouth, curves that evoke horns or muzzles. The real presence of feathers blurs the boundary between representation and thing, between image and remnant of the animal body.
Here we find several of Masson's constants from these years:
- a taste for fragmentary forms, often linked to violence or desire.
- the use of non-pictorial materials (sand, feathers) to introduce accident and transform gesture into a surface event, as recalled in the Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition dossier.
- the interest in hybrid figures, between human, animal and vegetable, later seen in works such as Le sans des oiseaux, 1956, Tempera, sand and feathers on canvas (MNAM-Centre Pompidou), where the feather motif reappears in a more dramatic context (cf. center Pompidou-Metz exhibition dossier).
In Têtes d'animaux, this dimension remains more playful and experimental than tragic: the composition is airy, the background light. The work shows Masson at his closest to the Surrealist logic of the "found image": rather than a subject fixed in advance, he lets matter, feathers and automatic line generate a small theater of animal forms.
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