Andre Masson: Surrealism and his discontents

Civilization obeys an internal erotic impulsion.

--Sigmund Freud

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

--Paul Valery

Andre Masson fought in the Great War because he wanted to experience "the Wagnerian aspects of battle" and know "the ecstasy of death." In his biography of Masson, Otto Hahn explained that ecstasy the day a bullet ripped into the young artist's chest during the offensive at Chemin des Dames in April 1917. Stretcher-bearers were unable to get him to safety and he was left on his back for the night. "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." (1)

Every person is unconsciously convinced of his own immortality, but when he faces his destiny, testing ceases and reality comes into its own. Gold must be tried in the fire until the dross is burned out, and when certain elements are exposed to high temperatures new substances are produced that are more than the sum of their components: likewise, the truly religious are essentially otherworldly. (2) Because of that ecstatic experience Masson became a stranger on earth, a perverse theologian of a world that had suffered a fall and experienced an incarnation, which changed all the relations of his past and future.

From that alembic bullet and that torso of light, death became a fateful vision for Masson. The war left him nervous with nightmares: he suffered from insonmia and spent long, painful hours dreaming new paintings. He defined the relationship between life and death as two sides of the same coin, l'envers and l'endroit, two faces of the same picture; in his greatest moments of illumination and metamorphosis he painted what transpired on both sides. (3)

Many young artists and poets suffered traumatic war experiences that shaped their lives and changed history Max Ernst bombarded the trenches in which his later close friend Paul Eluard was standing guard; Franz Marc and Raymond Duchamp-Villon were among those killed. Guillaume Apollinaire died on Armistice Day, "and we were able to believe . . . that Paris was bedecked in his honor." (4) Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Leger, Georges Braque, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and many others 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 and throwing into question the entire nature of human existence. (5)

There were others who fed on the horrors of war. One of them was Adolf Hitler (about forty of his wartime sketches survive). An almost suicidally heroic dispatch runner, he received nearly every medal available and two minor wounds, and was gassed and blinded. (6) While in a hospital suffering from mutism and hysterical blindness, he had a vision that he had a great mission to perform-- that he was chosen by Providence to liberate Germany from reparations and make it great. This conviction was the most outstanding characteristic of Hitler's personality, and it is what guided him with the "precision of a sleepwalker." (7) More significantly, he enjoyed his war experience and was excited by the new life opening up for him after the bleak failure of his early years. By his own account, the ecstatic feeling he had in the trenches persuaded him to the struggle ahead and toughened him for it. His frontline crisis, which contained all the psychological conditions for a conversion, fixed in Hitler's psyche the passio n and single-mindedness that changed him into the furious Creator of Warriors. No one evoked so much rejoicing, hysteria, and expectation of salvation during the 1930s as Hitler when, with displays of pseudoreligious pageantry and military power, he turned a demoralized nation into an unqualified instrument of defiance and conquest. The defeated German people accepted him as the messiah for whom they had been waiting. Germany, ruled by a failed painter, went berserk.

During the 1920s, Masson's life was far from serene. He had already developed a masterly Cubist style (Pablo Picasso praised him highly), but emerging from the war shattered and subject to fits of rage, he was frequently in a violent emotional state. There followed a succession of hospitalizations and, finally, confinement in a mental ward. Masson's new gore-scarred art was a meditation on death that focused on his realities: metamorphosis, erotic violence, death, and chaos. He opened himself to the provocation of Surrealist ideology, and his work became a medium of poetic exploration, a realm where dark myths and mutations of the psyche held sway over the forms invented for their depiction.

As he would later affirm, "I am more a sympathizer with Surrealism than a Surrealist or a non-Surrealist. The movement is essentially a literary movement. Gertrude Stein would quote herself quoting Masson: "What Gertrude Stein called 'the wandering line' is probably a key characteristic of my work, But it wasn't the line that was wandering, it was me." (8) Seeking deeper inspiration, the erudite Masson turned to the somber, chthonic Greek myths. L. M. Sapphire points out the appearance, in the artist's work of the 1920s, of cemeteries; men trapped in underground chambers; cruel, erotic, and violent combats; the butchering and devouring of animals; and finally the massacre of women, all of which continued through the 1930S and into the early 1940s (9).