André Masson, Study For The Cover Of The Magazine Acéphale, 1936, Ink

André Masson trained as a painter from an early age, studying at the Académie royale de Bruxelles from 1907 to 1912, where he received a first prize for decoration. In 1912, he left Belgium and enrolled at the Beaux-Arts de Paris until April 1914. After a trip to Tuscany, he enlisted in the infantry. Badly wounded in the chest and for a time left for dead in a bomb crater, he stayed in various hospitals until the Armistice. Since the war, he has maintained a lifelong repulsion for warmongism, which is reflected in several of his works, including Les Massacres, 1934.

After the conflict, Masson went to Collioure, following in the footsteps of Henri Matisse and André Derain, and finally to Céret, allowing himself to be influenced by both Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. He married Odette Cabalé and settled in Montmartre after the birth of their daughter.

His career began in earnest in 1922. While his works testify to his interest in Cubism, his contact with Miró, with whom he shares the same studio, moves him towards a quest for the irrational. He became friends with Kahnweiler, with whom he exhibited in February 1924, selling all his works. The poet and writer André Breton played a decisive role in his career, showing a keen interest in the theories of the unconscious developed by psychoanalysis. He joined the Surrealist group. In 1927, inspired by the principle of automatic writing developed by Breton, Masson creates his first "automatic drawings".

The year 1929 is one of ruptures: with his wife, with his first dealer, Kahnweiler, whom he leaves for Paul Rosenberg, with Breton whom he deems dogmatic. He forged a close friendship with Georges Bataille, for whom he illustrated Dossier de l'œil pinéal. L'anus solaire in 1931. Reconnecting with Breton, he took part in Surrealist exhibitions in London (1936) and Paris (1938), but continued to collaborate with Bataille in the magazine Acéphale until 1939, for which he was the sole illustrator.

Masson arrived in the United States in May 1941. He first settled in New York, where he found other European intellectuals and artists. His work stimulated abstract expressionist and gestural abstraction painters such as Jackson Pollock.

Returning to France in October 1945, Masson designed the sets for Hamlet for Compagnie Renaud-Barrault and Jean-Paul Sartre's La Putain respectueuse. In 1950, he published Le plaisir de peindre. In 1954, Masson was awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts and, in 1965, André Malraux commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the Odéon theater. Various retrospectives were devoted to him: in 1964 in Berlin, in 1965 in Amsterdam and Paris, in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and another the following year at the Grand Palais in Paris.

More than 90 works by the artist are held at the Centre Pompidou, but also at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as at the Tate Gallery, and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Parisin particular.