André Masson’s early artistic training took place in Brussels and Paris. By the early 1920s, he collaborated with the Kahnweiler Gallery and became involved with key figures in the Parisian avant-garde, includingvLouis Aragon, André Breton, and Max Jacob. In 1924, Masson joined the Surrealist movement, where he developed a groundbreaking technique of automatic drawing, which was inspired by Breton’s theory of“automatic writing”. This method allowed him to create spontaneous, unconscious sketches, breaking free from traditional artistic norms and establishing a distinctive role within Surrealism.
Masson briefly left the Surrealist movement in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, he contributed to Le Minotaure and participated in both the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and in the 1941 Art Fantastique exhibition in New York. When WWII began, he fled to New York, reconnecting with Breton and Marcel Duchamp. He later settled in New Preston, Connecticut, among other influential artists like Alexander Calderand Arshile Gorky. The influx of Surrealists into the United States helped shape the New York avant-garde and had a lasting impact on American Modern art. Masson’s automatic drawing technique would later inspire Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock.
Our Self Portrait by Masson is one of the rare drawings created by the artist just before his departure for the United States in 1941. This work, titled Le Paysan et la Semence, was designed in June 1940 in Freluc, in Central France, during a brief stay en route to Marseille, from where the artist and his family later embarked for the United States. The drawing belongs to a period of intense personal upheaval, and Masson’s output during these years is notably scarce, with only a few drawings surviving from this time. Our drawing is a powerful testament to Masson’s belief in the subconscious as a wellspring of creativity: on our sheet the eyes, quite literally, “cry rivers” that flood the sheet with blue watercolour. With the stars drawn in the background acting as symbols of his upcoming move to the United States, our Self Portrait captures the urgency and uneasiness of an artist at a moment of profound change and dislocation.