André Masson

b. 1896 – 1987

1896 in Balagny-sur-Therain, André Masson began his schooling in 1907 at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1912 he relocated to Paris, where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1914, the artist was called to military duty for WWI, where he was severely wounded and sent back to Paris. Much of Masson's work is clearly influenced by this trauma; his drawings and paintings executed during the 1920s represent for the most part battle scenes, blood, death. The strange realities of trench warfare and the immediate contiguity of life and death are here drawn upon, and his personal imagery suggests a confrontation of life at that abnormal level of experience. In 1945, Masson returned to France and executed a series of landscapes in Aix-en-Provence. His work was shown from 1955 to 1964 at Documentas I-III, and in 1964 a retrospective of his work took place in Berlin and Amsterdam . Masson also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972. André Masson dedicated his life as an artist to encouraging the non-rational purpose in art, to the direct transference of subconscious thought and to the primal forces of conflicts that he experienced in the trenches of WWI. Masson died in 1987 in Paris.