André Masson spent his childhood in Brussels. He reveals very early donations draftsman and his parents enroll him at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. But before entering the artistic life, the First World War forced him to engage as an infantry soldier on the front. In April 1917, seriously wounded during the Chemin des Dames offensive.
After this painful period, Masson, finally, devotes himself fully to painting; He joined the Montmartre community, met Max Jacob, Joan Miró, who became his family, and the art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, who offered him a contract. His painting then feeds on an air of postcubic time.
His friendship with Michel Leiris, Desnos, Artaud, Queneau inscribed André Masson in a movement where the interest for Rimbaud, the German romantics and, above all, Nietzsche, is predominant. In 1924, he joined André Breton and participated in the foundation of the surrealist group. In his work, this adherence goes hand in hand with the development of automatism - technique that he makes his own - and the use of all kinds of raw materials. Masson multiplies the images of aggression and conflict, and his work tends a moment to pour on the side of an abstraction with exploded compositions, characterized by the schematism of graphics. His break with surrealism in 1929 signifies his desire for independence more than a real disagreement. His painting then developed between Eros and Thanatos, and the series of Massacres, published by the magazine Minotaure in 1934, testifies to the fierce energy it deploys to be in touch with the world to reach a consciousness of beings and human beings. things.
During the Second World War, he fled to New York. His role with the American artistic colony will not be without consequence on the later bursting of a gestural abstraction such as Pollock could have envisaged. By throwing the color randomly on the canvas, Masson observes how it finally gives meaning to the space thus created and, little by little, lets the form take its place in the sign.
The 1950s are those of an approach to Zen doctrine, Masson feeling the need for a little calm "after so many dramatic pictures"; his painting becomes more fluid and more graphic. He draws black lines on colored backgrounds. But this much desired moment of calm does not stand up to its own inner turmoil. That in the ceiling of the theater of the Odeon he represents, in 1965, the Tragedy and the Comedy sharing the field of human passion says enough that what animates it in the depths of his being, it is an anxiety sum all metaphysics on the destiny of man, on the springs of his becoming. Something telluric is at work in this visionary artist, who scares and fascinates at the same time. The literary aspect of the huge work (paintings, engravings, illustrations) by André Masson makes it all the singularity. The myth and the man occupy a capital place, so much the artist wanted to stage figures embodying the forces of nature and the different facets of the human condition.
In 1976, the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a retrospective, as well as the Grand Palais in Paris.