André Masson

L'arte e i suoi pittori Improvvisazioni

Translation and editing by: Stefano Esengrini

 

André Masson (1896-1987), an early exponent of the Surrealist movement, is best known for his transposition of automatic writing into painting. With the intention of bringing out the complexity of the psyche and making the contents of the unconscious manifest, Masson let the pencil or the brush draw without a project, freely, without even the mind's control over the movement of the hand.

André  Masson then embarked on a path that progressively distanced him from the dogmatic acceptance of the models canonized by Breton, who not surprisingly nicknamed him " le rebelle du surréalisme ", pushing himself in search of a completely personal language that has its fulcrum in the imagination radiating. 

      This anthology, which collects for the first time in Italy a large number of writings on the French painter's art, allows us to retrace the meaning of his creative parable starting from the comparison undertaken by the artist with a large part of the Western artistic tradition between Nineteenth and twentieth century and beyond. So that the works of Cézanne or Matisse, Klee or Miró and many others, but also of Indian, Chinese and Japanese art, become for Masson a reason for critical or historical and at times even aesthetic reflection on the reasons for art, its goals, its paths.

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