Woman With Two Doves, André Masson, 1969

Femme aux deux colombes, 1969 — André Masson (1896–1987), felt-tip pen on paper, 37 × 27 cm

A mature, monogrammed and dated sheet, this work distills André Masson’s graphic aesthetics at the close of the 1960s. The female figure, enveloped by two doves, soberly combines a vocabulary inherited from Surrealism (free line, disciplined automatism, metamorphosis) with the modern iconography of peace, ubiquitous amid pacifist movements and the post-1968 climate. In a landscape traversed by Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Nouveau Réalisme, and Arte Povera, Masson chooses the field of drawing: economy of means, primacy of the sign, refusal of spectacle.
The bird motif belongs to the genealogy opened by Matisse, Braque, and Picasso; here, far from quotation, it becomes a mediator between symbol and body, returning to the paper an energy of thought. One recognizes the hand behind the decade’s major lithographic suites: continuous line, breathing whites, decisiveness of gesture.
A unique testament, this sheet fixes on a single plane the stakes of an entire period: a dialogue between myth and present, Surrealist memory and late modernity. At once a historical document—attuned to the cultural debates of 1969—and an artist’s piece—of exemplary coherence within Masson’s graphic corpus—it offers the collector a legible and rare signature, where the dove ceases to be a mere emblem and becomes once more an experience of looking.

A detailed catalogue entry is available on resquest