Frère et Sœur

André Masson, born in 1896 in Balagny, Oise, was a French painter, engraver, illustrator, decorator, and sculptor. Introduced to painting from an early age, he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1907 to 1912, learning the art of creating decorative murals. He continued his artistic education in Paris, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He spent much of his time mixing with Parisian intellectuals, and joined the surrealist movement at the invitation of André Breton in 1924. He would go on to meet major artists such as Max Ernst, Jean Arp, and Man Ray. In 1927, inspired by the principle of automatic writing developed by Breton, Masson created his first “automatic drawings” and “sand paintings”. His imagination was fired by the great myths of Ancient Greece.
In 1932, he received a commission from Les Ballets russes de Monte-Carlo to create sets and costumes for the ballet Les Présages, which was first performed in April 1933. A philosopher as well as an artist, Masson also illustrated works by Sade, Rimbaud, and Bataille to whom he was a loyal friend. He spent World War Two in New York and later Connecticut, where he influenced artists of the abstract impressionist movement, including Jackson Pollock. After returning to France, first to Provence and then Paris, he was regularly to be found in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1965, André Malraux asked him to decorate the ceiling of the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris.
Retrospectives dedicated to his work were held in Berlin in 1964, Amsterdam and Paris in 1965, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976, and the Grand Palais in Paris in 1977. In 1979, after suffering health problems, he abandoned painting and focused exclusively on drawing. He died in Paris in 1987. Today, his works can be found in the world’s most important art galleries, such as MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Musée d'Art Moderne and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.