"André Masson: Surrealism and His Discontents" 
Art Journal, N.Y., vol. 61, no.4, winter 2002.

Martin Ries André Masson: Surrealism,  and His  Discontents

             André Masson fought in the Great War because he wanted to experience "the Wagnerian aspects of battle" and know the ecstasy of death; Otto Hahn's biography of Masson explained that "ecstasy" the day a bullet ripped into the young artist's chest during the offensive at Chemin des Dames in April of 1917. Stretcher-bearers were unable to get him to safety and he was left on his back for the night. "The world around him became something wondrous and he experienced his first complete physical release, while in the sky there appeared before him a torso of light."[1]

            Every person is unconsciously convinced of his own immortality, but when he faces his destiny, testing ceases and reality comes into its own. Gold must be tried in the fire until the dross is burned out, and similarly, when certain elements are exposed to high temperatures new substances are produced which are more than the sum of their components,[2] likewise the truly religious are essentially otherworldly. Because of that "ecstatic experience" Masson became a stranger on earth, a perverse theologian of a world that had suffered a Fall and experienced an Incarnation which changed all the relations of his past and future.

            From that alembic bullet and that torso of light, death became a fateful vision for Masson. The war left him nervous with nightmares; he suffered from insomnia and spent long painful hours dreaming new paintings. He defined the relationship between life and death as between two sides of the same coin, l'endroit and l'envers,[3]  two faces of the same picture; in his greatest moments of illumination and metamorphosis he painted what transpired on both sides.

         Many young men suffered traumatic war experiences that shaped their lives and changed history. Max Ernst bombarded the trenches in which his eventual close friend, Paul Eluard, was standing guard; Franz Marc and Duchamp-Villon were among those killed, Guillaume Apollinaire died on Armistice Day " and we were able to believe that Paris was bedecked in his honor."[4] Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Otto Dix, George Grosz and many others, all belonged to a generation for whom  this slaughter was an overwhelming trial in their lives, shattering their confidence in the moral and rational assumptions of Western culture and throwing into question the entire nature of human existence. [5]

               There were others who fed on the horrors of war. A would-be artist, Adolf Hitler (about  forty of his wartime sketches survive), an almost suicidally heroic dispatch runner, received nearly  every medal available, two minor wounds, was gassed, and blinded.[6]  It was while in the  hospital, suffering mutism and hysterical blindness that he had the vision that he had a great  mission to perform, that he was chosen by Providence to liberate Germany from its bondage and  make it great. This was the most outstanding characteristic of Hitler's personality, and it is this that guided him with the "precision of a sleepwalker."[7] More significantly, he enjoyed his war experience and was excited by the new life opening up for him after the bleak failure of his early years. By his own account the "ecstatic feeling" in the trenches persuaded and "toughened" him for the struggle ahead. His front line crisis, which contained all the psychological conditions of a conversion, fixed in Hitler's psyche the passion and conviction that changed him into the furious Creator of Warriors. No one evoked so much rejoicing, hysteria, and expectation of salvation during the 1930s as Hitler, when with displays of pseudo-religious pageantry and military power, he turned a demoralized nation into an unqualified instrument of defiance and conquest. The defeated German people accepted him as the Messiah for whom they had been waiting. Germany, ruled by a failed painter, went berserk.  

            During the 1920s Masson's life was far from serene. He had already developed a masterly cubist style (Picasso praised him highly); but emerging from the war, shattered and subject to fits of rage, he was frequently in a violent, emotional state. There followed a succession of hospitals and finally confinement in a mental ward. The artist's new gore-scarred art was a meditation on death, concentrating on Masson's realities: metamorphosis, erotic violence, death and chaos. He opened himself to the provocation of Surrealist ideology, and his work became a medium of poetic exploration, a realm where dark myths and mutations of the psyche held sway over the forms invented for their depiction.

             As he would later affirm, "I am more a sympathizer with Surrealism than a Surrealist or a non-Surrealist. The movement is essentially a literary movement." What Gertrude Stein called "my 'wandering line' is probably the key characteristic of my work. But it wasn't the line that was wandering, it was me."[8]  Seeking deeper inspiration, the erudite Masson turned to the somber, chthonic Greek myths. Sapphire points out the appearance, in the 1920s, of cemeteries, men trapped in underground chambers, cruel, erotic and violent combats, butchering and devouring of animals, and finally the massacre of women, which continued through the 1930s and into the early 1940s. [9]

            A crisis in the Surrealist circle erupted in1929, precipitated by the question of the movement's relationship to the Communist Party; Masson left and eventually broke with the movement entirely.[10]  He decided Surrealism was a closed system; and any system, as Nietzsche points out, lacks integrity. In France, during the 1930s, the Surrealists cultivated the Cult of the Erotic Female as revelation of truth and transcendence, and the only experience by which man could find final salvation. Masson twisted the arrow in the heart of this cult when he showed the world in all its impossibilities and spiritual nihilism. But Masson, that terrified and terrifying Cassandra, explored the imagery of his unconscious, consciously projected it as evocative subject matter and creatively opened the way to emotional and philosophic expression. His work was a dreadfully accurate depiction of the psychotic aspects of European life. Carolyn Lanchner, writing about Masson's 1938 drawing, Dream of a Future Desert (Rêve d'un future desert), contended that "this apocalyptic vision of the end of the world embodies the torment of the artist who saw in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler the sure portent of holocaust."[11]  

              To eat together is communion. Meals in an ancient household were sacred because the household god was present; in myths and dreams and in marriage ceremonies, eating symbolizes the sexual act, and on another plane this ingestion relates to the final digestion by the earth, the dissolution of the body. The window in Pygmalion becomes the square (meaning contemporary) halo of the Nietzschian god being consumed. The table is tilted so as to become part of the holocaust without. Chaos, the state descending on the Western World, and in another context the condition that precedes consciousness, had been described by Plato and Pythagoras as "the primordial substance," or the soul of the universe. Twentieth-century man was confused and his image distorted by the schism between different realities; until that alembic bullet and torso of light of World War I, Masson (and Western Man) felt at home in the world. After that he could find his way only by rejecting and/or transcending the world. Man had accepted le néant, le gouffre, the abysmal nothingness of Charles Baudelaire; the House of Horrors which Europe became in the spring of 1939 was built on that splenetic foundation.

             In Masson's metamorphosis of image and reality in Pygmalion, the sculpture on the right becomes the esurient monster at the table; indeed, it becomes the table itself, devouring its contents. In Virgil's Aeneid, Harpies attack Aeneas and his men: "Italy is the goal ye seek; ¼ until dread hunger and the hunger of violence towards us force you to gnaw with your teeth and devour your very tables."[12]  Praying Mantises, unlike other insects, do not eat plant life; they are the outstanding cannibals of the insect world and devour even members of their own family. They appealed to the Surrealists because of the fact that, while mating, the female devours the male.  Masson's sculpture is surmounted by an ominous beaked head more akin to a bird of prey than a praying mantis (Mantis religiosa); while the chair at the left, with bowed head, is similar to the male mantis about to be eaten, as well as the Dalíesque peasant in Jean-François Millet's famous painting, Angélus (The Angelus; 1857-59).[13]

            The decapitated bird's head on the chair (like the fish, the bird was originally a phallic image, with the power to heighten and spiritualize) corresponds to the Surrealists' desire to transform the world by amorous love and sexual passion. Elena Dimitrovnie Drakonova married Paul Eluard and was the object of his early love poetry. He renamed her Gala, as did Salvador Dalí, for whom Diakonova left Eluard. But Dalí also called her Galatea, a reference to the ivory maiden brought to life by Aphrodite in response to the prayers of the sculptor Pygmalion. This myth, used by the Surrealists during the 1930s, resembles Sigmund Freud's Gradiva theme in its blurring of the distinction between animate and inanimate, life and death, creation and destruction.

             The Surrealists adopted Gradiva as their ideal woman or Madonna; she could intercede between the real and the surreal, and was a "perceur de murailles", or piercer of walls, an expression used by Eluard in his poem, Au defaut du silence (1925), as a reference to his wife Gala, whom the Surrealists regarded as their muse. Later this expression was used symbolically by André Breton, Dalí, and René Crevel, to describe the unique ability of the muse Gradiva to perceive the surreal.[14]

            In 1931, Freud's essay, "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva," translated for the first time into French, impressed the Surrealists more powerfully than his other writings. That same year Dalí painted the first of a series of works treating the theme of Gradiva, which was eventually to unite the all-embracing figure of Gala, the elusive wife of Eluard and mistress of Max Ernst.[15]  After Gala married Dalí she received the name "Gala-Gradiva." One could interpret Masson's iconography for Gradiva (1939) as a Freudian illustration drawn directly from the Jenson story as it depicts the archeologist's dream of the eruption of Vesuvius. The archeologist, before his cure through the "medication of love," is disgusted by the sight of the sexual coupling of "evil and unnecessary flies," recalling Dalí's persistent insects as consumers of time and of life. Masson's Gradiva is beset by bees, which are not only concomitant with Cupid, representing the pains and sorrows of love, but also were used in ancient Roman libations for death rituals.[16]  The religious associations of honey (the god Priapus was a protector of bees) were derived from the notion that it was ros caelestis, (celestial dew) which bees gathered in the upper air.[17]  

            The decapitated image in The Louis XVI Armchair (Le fauteuil Louis XVI, 1938) represents the old culture and the new, the former aborted by the French Revolution and the latter by the Great War. Eighteenth-century nobility had claimed privilege by conquest ten centuries earlier; they claimed descend from the conquering Franks and deserved the lordship of the nation by might and by blood. Their opponents said no such conquest took place but both sides accepted the class theory as implying a fact of race. France revolted when the call to arms turned the ancient theory on its head: overthrow the nobility and by right of new conquest the commoners became the power. Coupled with the mystique d'Alsace, and beneath the nationalistic categories of class and race, humanity and individuality disappeared.[21]  The tragedy of Louis XVI was that of an ordinary good man, just as the calamity of Hitler was that of an extraordinary evil man. Whether monarch or Führer had executive ability or power, politics suggests a leader's primary function may be psychological: he acts as the center around which disturbed lives can be organized. The history of totalitarian political movements in Europe illustrates the process of national terror and the achievements of new identities. The appeal to racial identification was endemic in the twentieth century's attempt to supply new motive power for social revolution and war. Louis XVI, like Hitler, was representative of the Almighty, and beyond good and evil.  

            Masson returns to an illustrative depiction of a mantis in supine position in his Landscape with Praying Mantis (Paysage á la mante religieuse, 1939) with vagina dentata as barbed vise (the shell-vulva of Pygmalion and Gradiva, with their classical allusions, have been discarded for twentieth century "reality." Indeed, the mantis's legs are in the same position as Gradiva's and reminiscent of the table legs in Pygmalion). The giant mantis advances toward us over a non-spatial landscape of hills with mons veneris curves. This odalisque has metamorphosed into the more threatening Medea-like trap in Mansion of Birds and looks very much like an ancient Egyptian funerary bed.

            Symbolism, which once pointed skyward to the deity, now points to the brothel, and mutation is saturated with erudition, eroticism, and sadism. The bed and chairs[23] in Mansion of Birds are not only variations on the mantes, but become the genital persona / daemon of the sitter or recliner, and enact a primeval battle for the survival or destruction of the species. Tertullian, in the second century, wrote about the crimes alleged against Christians, including ritual infanticide and cannibalism in which the sacred Eucharist was dipped into the infants' blood before being consumed. During the Middle Ages it was claimed that witches smothered children in their beds; after the funeral they supposedly exhumed the bodies and took the dismembered parts to their meetings where they were eaten, according to Errores Gazariorum  (Errors of Gazarius).[24] Witches offered these dead children (symbols of their souls) to Lucifer (torso of light?) then copulated with each other and with Lucifer.  The shadows and vulva-shaped mirror in Mansion of Birds denote the "double" or "other self" of the body, the repressed dimensions of the psyche.  Freud pointed out that a factor of "hostility to civilization must have already been at work in the victory of Christianity over pagan religions. It was closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by Christian doctrine."[25] 

            A room without doors or windows evokes the absence of birth and death, an artificial existence, like Danaë sealed in the tower. A room in a brothel suggests shrouded thoughts and secret actions as well as repressive sexuality. In the center of the painting, instead of a door to the room, the chair faces a solid compositional divide - a jauna diaboli (devil's gate) through which devils enter, a patristic epithet for woman. The curtain, an old symbol of revelation, has been torn down and, instead of being used as swaddling clothes in the crib of the Mansion of Birds, is now used as a winding sheet for Western civilization and its values that were aborted by World Wars I and II.  

            The failure of Christianity to cope with religious pluralism over the centuries is congruent with the failure of the West to come to terms with the feminine side of the human psyche, or with women as persons. Medieval witchcraft was not a rebellion against orthodoxy so much as a continuation of heathen impulses (the Witches Sabbath resembled Dionysian revels). By excluding women and persecuting heretics, Christianity struggled against and repressed important dimensions of the Western psyche. In Nazi Germany Hitler offered men the full dependence of women, who were returned to the home where they were needed for reproduction for military build-up; hence the concept of "pure motherhood" and the men's denial of female sexual expression.

                                                Freud accused Europe of developing, before World War I, a timid "museum culture,"  caring only to preserve its facade. However much he loathed barbarism, he gave it a certain  therapeutic sanction and saw "The War to End All Wars" as a painful chastisement to an over- refined society that looked down on passion and excitement. Wars, Freud explained, return us to our sense of reality, and "death will no longer be denied."[27]  He believed politics was founded on the group's erotic relation with authority, as a lover presupposes an "object" and a group presupposes a leader. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he argues that the energy which made civilization possible subtracted from direct erotic experience;[28] it is no coincidence that Surrealism, in its early Dada phase, began as an anti-civilization movement. Is it a coincidence that Hitler's "ultimate purpose was ... aimed at the destruction of European civilization"?[29]  As soon as Freud described erotic man he found that the human psyche had to rise beyond the pleasure principle, like Nietzsche's and others' autistic soaring beyond good and evil.  If destructiveness was to be curtailed, it was necessary that the libido be sublimated. 

            André Masson shows us what was so special about the tragedy of the twentieth century and the uniqueness of its crisis. He invented new labyrinths to search for new Minotaurs without regard for the dependability of Ariadne or her thread. Whether he encountered the Minotaur, or was transfixed by the torso of light, or found his way out of the maze did not concern him; he contemplated the experience of the journey. He would not slay the Minotaur but interrogate it for revelation; he would portray the line of Ariadne's thread wherever it led as he drew each beholder into the vital unstable center of his energy. Masson's art, without the coincidence of form, is a means of knowing; the intricate passages of his thought are so flowing as to leave the door open for man to find his way to the essential center. The highest achievement of modern man is a program of discontent, and within the blight of our dislocated sensibilities, Masson's surrealism of the 1930s is an exercise in courage and wisdom.

                                                                  END

NOTES:

[1]  Otto Hahn, Masson, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1965,  p.6-7.

[2] "Everything that may abide the fire, ye shall make it go through the fire, and it shall be clean." (Numbers, 31:23)

[3] L'Envers et l'endroit, by Albert Camus, 1937; the term referred symbolically to the inside and outside of a garment, here it meant the horror of death and the love of life.

[4] Jean Cocteau, Journals of Jean Cocteau, New York, Criterion Books, 1956, p. 48.

[5] Only after her son was killed at the front did Käthe Kollwitz recognize the madness of World War I. Almost all the combatants entered what they thought would be a short and glorious war for aristocratic, idealistic, and patriotic reasons. As a medical student, Sigmund Freud was proud of his reservist uniform, and thought of his military service as a healthy antidote to the neurasthesia of "over-civilization."

[6]  Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, New York and Washington, Praeger Publishers, 1973, p.111-113, 120.

[7] Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: the Secret Wartime Report, New York and London, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1972, p. 29. See also John Toland, Adolf Hitler, New York,  Ballantine Books, 1976, Chapter 14, "With the Assurance of a Sleepwalker," 
pp. 528-561.  Marshall Göring flattered Hitler with the highest praise he knew when he said that the Führer proceeded with nachtwandlerischer Sicherheit [the security of a sleepwalker].

[8] Newsweek, 15 November 1965, p. 106. See also "...she was interested in his composition in the wandering line in his compositions."  From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1933, p. 258.

[9] L. M. Sapphire, André Masson, New York, 1973 (catalog for Blue Moon, and
 Lerner-Heller Galleries, New York), p. 8.

[10] Whitney Chadwick, "Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth,"
Art Bulletin, vol. LII, no. 4, (December, 1970), p. 417.

[11] William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson, New York,  
Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 158.

[12] Norma Lorre Goodrich, Ancient Myths (New York: New American Library, 1960, 217; Virgil, Aenead, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Cambridge and London, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 365.

[13] Salvador Dalí, Le Mythe tragique de l'Angélus de Millet (The Tragic Myth of the Angélus of Millet), Paris, 1963; cited in  William L. Pressley, "The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art," 
Art Bulletin, vol. LV, no. 4, (December, 1970), p. 601, n. 11.

[14] Chadwick, 418, n. 36.

[15] Jack J. Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art, 
New York and Washington,  Praeger Publishers, 1972, p. 156.  
Max Ernst's Premier mot limpide (At the First Limpid Word) (1923; Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), one of a series of decorations he created for Paul Êluard's house in  Eubonne, is based on the Gradiva motif. Werner Spies points out the possible link between the painting and Freud's analysis of "Gradiva." Werner Spies, Max Ernst, 1950-1970: The Return of La Belle jardinière (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971): 48, 53.

[16] Andrea Alciato, Emblemetum Libellus (Book of Emblems), Paris, 1542, Emblem # 112.
See also: http://www.mun.ca/alciato/. Samson Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer der Griechen und Römer (Sacrificial Rites and Offerings of Greece and Rome), Olms, Georg Publishers, 1977.

[17] Aristotle, Historia Animalium (History of Animals), Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965, 5.22, 553 b 29.               

[18] Jean-Paul Clebert, Mythologie d'André Masson (Mythology of André Masson), 
Geneva: Cailler, 1971. Cited in William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson, 
New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 227, n. 94. Freud describes her foot as "perpendicular" in Jensen's "Gradiva" (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1959]), 
10, 28, 46, 95.

[19] Virgil relates in his Georgics the belief that, should a colony of bees perish, a new swarm would be regenerated from the blood of a bull.

[20] Beefsteak, like Dalí's limp tongues, has genital references.

            [21] Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 30. "The one thing that held together all elements of the army, whether old guard or republican, Jesuit or Freemason, was the mystique d'Alsace." [Tuchman's italics]. The Alsace-Lorraine territory was originally part of the Holy Roman Empire, ceded to Louis XIV by the peace of Westphalia; restored to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war. Napoleon III's shameful defeat in 1871cost France two of its richest provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. The military resolved to restore them to France, and young officers were drilled on élan vital, the cult of the offensive.

[22] Pressley, p. 603

[23] They recall the Marquis de Sade's Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), in which women assume the role of furniture.

[24] Errores Gazariorum,1450, by an anonymous Savoyard Inquisitor. There is no edition, but see Jeffrey Burton Russell, History of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1972, p. 239; and Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols., edited by A. Howland, Phila., 1939; reprinted, New York, 1957. 
See also Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Origin and Examination of the History of Witch Madness and Persecution in the Middle Ages), Bonn, 1901; reprinted, Hildesheim, 1963.

[25] Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents," (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 87.

[26] William Jeffett (ed), Andre Masson: the 1930s, St Petersburg Florida,  Salvador Dali Museum, 1999,  p. 148.

[27] Freud, S. E., XIV, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," 14, 291.

[28) Freud, S. E., "Civilization and Its Discontents," p.103-4.

[29] Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 261; see also 95, 96, 118, 123.

[30] Dalí's creation of this painting (1929-33, Vicomte de Noailles Collection, Paris) coincided with Dali's initiation into the Surrealist movement, and with Masson's expulsion ("excommunication" was Breton's term) from it in 1929. Rubin and Lanchner, 214.

[31] Jeffett, p. 146. I wish to thank poet, critic and publisher, Edwin Treitler, for his suggestions in writing this study. A Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island University at Brooklyn enabled me to write the paper.  

CAPTIONS:

Pygmalion, 1938, oil on canvas,  46x55 cm [18-1/8 x 21-5/8 inches]. Mr. Francois Odermatt, Miami Florida.

Gradiva (Metamorphosis of Gradiva), 1939, oil on canvas, 36½ x 51¼ inches, former Nellens collection, Knokke, Belgium.

The Louis XVI Armchair (Le fauteuil Louis XVI), 1938, oil on canvas, 73x60 cm [29¼ x 24 inches], Mrs Henry A Markus collection, Chicago.

Landscape with Praying Mantis (Paysage á la mante religieuse), 1939, oil on canvas,
82x117 cm [32-7/8 x 47-7/8 inches], private collection.

Mansion of Birds (Hôtel des oiseaux),  1938, oil on canvas, 81x130 cm  [31-7/8 x 51¼ inches].  

The Labyrinth (Le labyrinthe),  1938, oil on canvas,  118.1x60 cm [47½ x 24 inches],  private collection, Rome.

Ariadne's Dream (Le rêve d'Ariane),  1938, ink on paper,  49.9x65.4 cm [19-5/8 x 25-3/4 inches].