Paul-Louis Guilbert lithograph abstract surrealism abstraction on vellum

  
Copy on Arches vellum format 43 x 33 cm. Good condition -------------------- REGISTERED FREE SHIPPING. Born in Oise, André Masson spent his childhood in Brussels before enrolling in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1912. At the beginning of the war, he enlisted in the army but was seriously injured at Chemin des Dames and discharged. Masson's early works adopted the cubist style, but he was very close to Georges Bataille. The painter joined the surrealist group in the early 1920s and painted a first canvas with symbolic content in 1923. The artist adhered to the movement and in 1924 created his first automatic drawing, then from 1927, sand paintings.

He illustrated erotic drawings of Bataille and Sade's sulfurous texts. Masson broke with Breton in 1929, but was one of the active contributors to the surrealist magazine published from 1933. In the 1930s, the artist produced series of drawings on the theme of. In 1941 he took refuge in the United States with several surrealists, including Breton. The influence of his automatic approach was decisive on the work of Arshile Gorky or Jackson Pollock.

Returning to France after the war, Masson settled in Aix-en-Provence and replaced automatism with a very colorful expressionist and lyrical landscape painting, on the verge of abstraction. In 1965, he was entrusted with the decoration of the ceiling of the Odéon theater, while the same year a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art dedicated to his work. He died in Paris in 1987, at the age of ninety-one.