ART - ANDRÉ MASSON'S SEEDED EARTH

ANDRÉ MASSON'S "SEEDED EARTH"Author(s): Dominic RicciottiSource: Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1976), pp. 184-190Published by: Detroit Institute of ArtsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41504578 .

Accessed: 06/10/2013 00:19

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Detroit Institute of Arts is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Bulletin of theDetroit Institute of Arts.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 186.125.44.154 on Sun, 6 Oct 2013 00:19:22 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=dia

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41504578?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


ANDRÉ MASSON'S SEEDED EARTH

By Dominic Ricciotti Wayne State University

FIGURE 1 . Seeded Earth, 1942, André Masson, French (b. 1896); oil and sand on canvas, 30 x 40 in. Gift of W. Hawkins Ferry (52.28).

184

During World War II the Surrealist movement, which had evolved in France in the 1920s, trans- ferred its activities from Europe to New York City and its environs. In America it continued to show vitality; significant work was produced and critics responded favorably. In view of the Surrealists' special concern with the forms of nature, the American landscape was an important factor in stimulating and renewing their art during its final phase "in exile." This is most forcefully demon- strated by the experience of André Masson. Of all the Surrealists-in-exile, which included Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Matta,1 only he underwent a major stylistic change in response to his new environment.2 Seeded Earth (Fig. 1), painted in 1942 at the beginning of Masson's American stay and presented to The Detroit Institute of Arts in 1952 by W. Hawkins Ferry, is a prime example of his new style, which continued into 1943 and produced a distinguished series of works.3

During the later 1930s, Masson's art had become encumbered by a complex literary style. Seeded Earth and the other paintings of his American stay are the result of a search, initiated by the artist after coming to America, for greater clarity of expression by simplifying his formal language. Seeded Earth is characterized by a shallow spatial depth within which lines and planes elide in Cubist fashion: the flattened forms are sometimes broken and transparent, sometimes twisted and opaque, while lines interweave throughout the dense spatial structure. Masson uses a black ground, which seems to surround and define his images and extends to the edges of the canvas. The shallow darkness makes the painting almost inpenetrable, adding to its mystery. The density and pervasiveness of this darkness is emphasized by delicate shapes which flicker within it as if for a moment: the sharply highlighted tear-shape shoot- ing off the lower left of the red ovoid at the top, the white wisps hanging in the upper portion of the



FIGURE 2. Meditation on an Oak Leaf, 1942, André Masson; tempera, pastel and sand on canvas, 40 X 33 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

painting, the curling line dropping off at the lower right. Within this primordial darkness smolder larger forms defined by Masson's deep, rich color, ranging from the sonorous reds and yellows at the painting's perimeters to the luminescent blues, greens, and purples in the center. In the lower left-hand corner the flowing horizontal red forms evoke a rolling, rocky terrain that seems to be opening up under the force of a plough-like image at the center, its black handle edged in blue light and its large arc-shaped yellow blade furrowed deep into the earth. Above the yellow "blade" tiny points that double as seeds of grain seem ready to implant themselves; a variety of lines al- ternately imply root tendrils or insect antennae.

Masson is unconcerned with distinctions between the human and nonhuman, or even between the animate and inanimate. Eyes double as fish and then again as leaves. Quite literal suggestions of biological forms occur in the uterine shapes at the

top and right. Within the top form looms a geo- metric image of an eye (which reappears in or- ganic form below), while the other ovoid carries a tree-like, totemic shape that is joined to a fetal image. These are linked as if by a bright red umbil- ical cord to the furrowed fields at the lower left. All are subsumed in the overall metaphor of fer- tilization and germination. Staring eyes, lumpy orificial forms, and eerie plant life combine in a biomorphic fantasy choreographed in curves and swoops that intensify the erotic implications of the work.

Since his first years in Paris in the 1920s, Masson had used the forms and processes of nature as his subject matter, variously employing images of violence and reproduction. However, his involve- ment with nature received renewed emphasis and focus with his move to the United States in 1 941 . Unlike most of the other Surrealists, who gravi- tated toward New York City, Masson immediately 185



settled in the Connecticut countryside. He was thrilled by the rich colors of the New England autumn and this is reflected in the fiery tones of Seeded Earth. Having little interest in the attrac- tions of urban civilization, Masson took a romantic view of his new environment. In a 1946 inter- view with James Johnson Sweeney he recalled:

Naturally I had already enjoyed the romantic outlook in France before I came here. But this aspect [i.e. nature ] made a deep impression on me. I would be an idiot to speak of the city ... I always told my friends that if they wanted to talk with me they had to come to the country. Consequently, I know nothing of city life in your land. Perhaps I am temperamentally better fitted to understand the life of the pioneers, their struggle with the elements. In fact, I think I understand the life of the past and the problems of the past in the new world better than the city life of the present.4

FIGURE 3. Figure, 192 7, André Masson; oil and sand on canvas, 18 X ЮУ2 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Masson asserted that many of his impressions of the American landscape were derived from the works of René de Chateaubriand, who had trav- eled to the New World in the 18th century and whose experiences were reflected in his popular romantic novel, Atala (1801). Acknowledging the effect of his new environment on his painting, the artist declared:

Here I keep imagining a virgin forest about me. This has had its psychological influence on my painting in America. There has been no influence of the cities. What characterizes my American work is rather its manner of expressing this feeling for nature. Such pictures as Printemps Indien , Paysage Iroquois , La Grande Melle , Le Gens de Maïs , Méditation sur une Feuille de Chêne embody a correspondence - express something which could never have been painted in Europe. Noctur- nal aspects, aspects of reverie; savage aspects - Emblematic Landscapes of my life in the countryside of the United States. None of them ever could have been painted in the Ile de France - the wickedness, the violence of nature - the hurricane, the tempest, the fury of the storms.5

Seeded Earth represents the artist's imaginary nocturnal journey through an unknown space and is an eloquent expression of Masson's profound re- discovery of nature. Its metaphors are similar to those of all the paintings in his American series, such as those mentioned in the passage above (Fig. 2).

In these paintings the artist has symbolically reenacted the mysterious forces of nature through improvisational handling, returning in a modified way to automatism and the Surrealist premises of his first years. Between 1924 and 1929 Masson, along with Joan Miró, had pioneered the use of automatic procedures. Attempting to work his art out of a Cubist stalemate, he had embarked on a series of drawings in which his hand freely wan- dered across the drawing surface in an effort to liberate images buried within the psyche. Because oil did not readily lend itself to this approach, Masson developed another technique. After pour- ing glue over portions of the canvas he applied variously colored sand which adhered only to the moistened portions. Then the forms and images suggested by this process were brought into "conscious" play by the application of pigment through a large, specially constructed tube. The paint was subsequently reworked, enhancing the 186



FIGURE 4. Drawing from the Nocturnal Notebook, 1942, André Masson; black ink on paper, page size 1 1 x 8% in. New York, 1944: n.p. expressive properties of the automatic method (Fig. 3). Centuries of manual and mental habits were revised in a refreshingly novel approach to matters of form and expression.

Seeded Earth springs from a linear matrix that is automatist in character. Many of the picture's flat shapes derive from intersections of improvised lines that have been filled in with pigment. The forms in the lower left, for example, suggest a meandering arabesque whose overlappings create interstices that were subsequently painted in or otherwise modified. Between the tense biomorphic shapes are additional lines that activate the center of the canvas. Here Masson essentially has drawn with paint, keeping his medium fluid enough to facilitate the free movement of his hand. The thin pigment produces a mat surface resembling tempera, a medium Masson often used during these years. Occasionally he employed a dry-brush technique to achieve varied surface effects such as the mottling near the lower center. He heightened his textu ra I effects by the use of fine sand in the red ovoid form at the top.

While automatism was his point of departure, Masson clearly subjected his painting to disci- plined control. Calling himself the "severest cri- tic" of automatism, Masson readily proclaimed his own secession from Surrealist orthodoxy. In fact, the tension in Masson's work arises precisely from the dialectic between free improvisation and the exercise of reason. However nonrational the con-

FICURE 5. Drawing from the Nocturnal Notebook, 1 942, André Masson; black ink on paper, page size 11x8% in. New York, 1944: n.p. tent, the forms are the product of conscious esthetic decision. Masson considered himself "more of a surrealist [i.e. automatist] in my illustrations than in my painting" and declared that the principles revealed in his American work involved the need to "respond freely to sensations; and discipline them later."6 The graphic media more readily lent themselves to automatic methods; his prints and drawings constituted a kind of raw material for the paintings - "studies after nature accepting any ob- ject whatever without any a priori intentions, without any attempt at analysis, without any esthetic preconceptions."7 The preface to Nocturnal Notebook , a set of automatic drawings done during a sleepless night in 1 942 (the same year as the Detroit painting) sums up Masson's approach to the drawings:

A visit to the zoo the day before; the arabesques of a 9th-century evangelis- tary admired on a friend's table; all this mingling with recollections of a drawing suggested by Martinique [where Masson had stopped off en route to the United States], and with the meander- ings of pictures already started: such are the traces that would appear to have given birth to certain of these graphisms. Others, of less discernible origin, seem to be the germs of future forms.8

Indeed, there occurred a free exchange be- 187



FIGURE 6. Search for a Symbol , 1943, Jackson Pollock, American (1912-1956); oil on canvas, 43 x 67 in. Lee Krasner Pollock, New York. Photograph courtesy Marlborough Gallery.

188

tween Masson's paintings and his drawings at this time, and this is corroborated by a com- parison of Seeded Earth with drawings from the Notebook. The eyes in the painting can be re- lated to two such drawings (Figs. 4 and 5), where eye forms are treated within the context of the human face. Each form has the same diamond shape as the eyes in Seeded Earth. Of the two ocular forms in the painting, the phan- tom in the lower left is the more specific, the great pupil, fluttering lashes, and half- submerged quality adding a macabre element to an already mystifying work. Suspended within the red ovoid form at the top, itself sug- gestive of an eye, is another ocular image, now diamond-shaped, penetrating the nocturnal void through its spiral ing pupil, similar to the spiral in the eye of Figure 4.

Masson's need to subject his automatism to pictorial discipline is rooted in the French classical tradition. He, in fact, contended that French formalism militated against a French- man being an orthodox Surrealist. (Indeed, in marked contrast to the number of French literary contributors to the movement, none of the major Surrealist artists except Tanguy and Masson were French.)9 It must be emphasized, however, that Masson's approach to nature could hardly be described as "classical." As we have seen above, Seeded Earth is fully romantic. Masson's purpose in imposing discipline was to distill his perception of nature into expressive, abstract form.

Masson's deep interest in nature was shared by many other Surrealist painters such as Dali, Ma- gritte, Ernst, and Matta, their work governed by the Romantic conception that nature is but an exten- sion of the mind. In contrast to Masson, these Sur- realists used predominantly i I lusionistic means to visualize states of the psyche. Space in their hands has the character of reality, but its rules are suspended to create vast, lonely, and frightening ex- panses. By uniting man's inner and outer worlds, landscapes by these artists become vivid and haunting projections of inner states.10 Drawing less than other Surrealists upon a dream iconog- raphy or fantastic imagery, Masson created images whose psychological and objective realities are fused without recourse to illusionism.

Masson believed that his art constituted a "new esthetic" whose implications by 1946 were being felt by the Abstract Expressionists. Clearly, his automatism of the 1920s anticipated by many years Jackson Pollock's "drip" method of the later 1940s. Masson's dictum: "Only so much as can be reabsorbed esthetically from that which the automatic approach provides should be utilized. For art has an authentic value of its own which is not replaced by psychiatric interest,"11 was of great theoretical importance to the New York School. These painters in fact strongly rejected the "psychiatric interest" implicit in the anti- estheticism of pure automatism.12

Acknowledging the importance of Masson's influence on Abstract Expressionism, Clement Green-



FIGURE 7. Painting - 1951 , 1951, Clyfford Still, American (b. 1904); oil on canvas, 93 Va x 753á in. Gift of W. Hawkins Ferry (65.8).

berg wrote in 1 953, "André Masson's presence on this side of the Atlantic was of inestimable benefit to us. . . . He, more than anyone else, anticipated the new abstract painting, and I don't believe he has received enough credit for it."13

FIGURE 8. The Pond , 1955, William Baziotes, American (1912-1963); oil and pencil on canvas, 72 x 66 in. Gift of The Friends of Modern Art (56.53).

Pollock, the spearhead of the new movement in American painting, comes stylistically closest to Masson.14 This is clearly notable during his pre- "drip" period, which coincided with Masson's stay in America. Pollock's Search for a Symbol

FIGURE 9. River in Autumn , 1950, André Masson; oil on canvas, 21 Ул x 295Ae in. Galérie Louise Leiris, Paris. 189



(Fig. 6) offers significant similarities to Seeded Earth , but his expressive violence is alien to Mas- son's more measured humanism and, as his title implies, Pollock's concerns are more universal.

It was not only Masson's automatism but also his approach to nature that made an impact upon the younger generation of American painters. He was convinced that present in American nature was a rich "mythology" awaiting exploration.15 During the 1 940s Barnett Newman, who was interested in North American Indian art, seized upon a quality of myth buried in the remote past of an ancient America, expressing this mythic experience through archetypal emblems.16 He was joined by Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still (Fig. 7), and William Baziotes (Fig. 8), in addition to Pollock (Fig. 6), in evolving abstract idioms which carried elements of primitivism and myth, with nature as its point of reference. In Still's later work, an experience of landscape survives in forms that

NOTES

1 . Besides the Surrealists, other notable European artists in America were Mondrian, Ozenfant, Léger, Lipchitz, and Chagall; all except Dali were featured in the 1942 "Artists in Exile" exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.

2. Matta contributed the last major artistic statement by a new adherent to Surrealism during its final phase; cf. William Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art , New York, 1968: 344. Rubin's book deals fully with the Surrealist exile in New York (see pp. 342- 407).

3. Many of these were included in the important retrospective exhibition of Masson's work held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, during the summer of 1976. (See the exhibition catalogue by William Rubin and Carolyn Lanchner, André Mas- son , New York, 1976: 159-176.)

4. James Johnson Sweeney, "Eleven Europeans in America," Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, 13, nos. 4-5 (1946): 3.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.: 4, 5.

7. Ibid.: 5.

suggest rocky ridges and fissures; his huge can- vases even approximate the sublime scale of the landscape of the American West.17 While Mas- son's evocations of landscape are often more explicit than these painters, all responded to American nature in abstract terms, translating the objective reference into form and symbol.

Shortly after his return to Europe in 1 945, Masson fashioned a more literal landscape style based on elements derived from Monet and Turner (Fig. 9). In the last two decades, however, he has continued to experiment with the themes of germination and growth characterizing his American period. Thus, despite the changes in style that occurred after Masson's return to Europe, Seeded Earth illustrates how profoundly the American environment affected his work. It is the result of both a physical and emotional journey to an unknown land, a land in which, as he perceived it, past and present, imagination and myth, all intertwined.

8. André Masson, Nocturnal Notebook , New York, 1944, n.p. 9. Jean (Hans) Arp was Alsatian.

10. William Rubin, Dada , Surrealism , and their Heritage, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1968: 64.

1 1 . Sweeney (note 4): 4.

12. See Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, New York, 1970: 40-41.

13. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston, 1961 : 126.

14. See William Rubin, "Notes on Masson and Pollock," Arts, 34 (Nov. 1959): 36-43.

15. See Sweeney (note 4): 3.

16. See Sandler (note 12): 62-71 for a discussion of this phase of Abstract Expressionism.

17. See Robert Rosenblum, "Abstract Sublime," Art News (Feb. 1961): 39 ff. In American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1969, Barbara Novak finds continuities between various 19th-century American landscape painters and the work of Newman, Rothko, and Still (p. 285).

190



ART - ANDRÉ MASSON'S SEEDED EARTH

Documents

jstor terms

jstor archive

massons art

new style

terms conditions of

new environment

amall use subject

experience of andr masson