André Masson

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Saidenberg Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above)
Galerie Île de France, Paris
Acquired from the above circa 2003

A remarkably agile artist, Masson created a diverse body of work that spans several movements including Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. After the artist fled France in 1941, in part due to the Surrealist movement’s supposed ties to Communism and because his art was deemed “degenerate” and “pornographic,” Masson settled in the United States and was introduced to Chinese art and Zen Buddhism. He gravitated toward Buddhist philosophy, and in the mid-1950s began to include forms resembling Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in his works; Masson’s output from 1950 to 1959 therefore became known as his période asiatique.

In Migration X, painted toward the end of Masson’s Asian period, the calligraphic lines and complex linear forms are executed in a manner that seem to suggest action, as if the lines indeed represent biomorphic forms engaged in a frenzied dance throughout, and particularly at the center of, the composition. Masson perhaps intends to evoke Chinese culture through both form and color, as his bright red hue calls to mind Communist symbolism.

According to Carolyn Lanchner, “a great attraction of Zen for Masson was its emphasis on the immediate mystical experience as the way to ultimate truth,” which appears similar, on the surface, to the Surrealist technique of automatism. “Masson himself well understood that, as an Occidental and an artist who had been passionately engaged for over thirty years, he could not attain the spiritual void or creative passivity of the Zen or Ch'an painter. In practice, conjuring the void brought forth in his painting a spontaneous effusion of his own past art whose tides were stemmed or redirected by the formal concerns of the sophisticated European artist” (Carolyn Lanchner, "André Masson: Origins and Development," in André Masson (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 186).