André Masson was a French painter, illustrator and sculptor who trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although at the onset of his career he was associated with Cubism, he became involved in the nascent Surrealist movement between 1924 and 1929. During this time he experimented with automatic drawing and developed his sand paintings, throwing coloured sand and glue onto his canvases and basing his compositions on the shapes that took form. Masson’s pieces often explore themes of combat, violence, eroticism and the metamorphoses of animal and human forms. After moving to Spain and then America during the War years, Masson eventually returned to France in 1945. Although he broke from Surrealism at the end of the 1920s his work exerted an important influence on the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Through Surrealism, Masson attempted to access the irrational and psychological roots of art. Works such as Belier pourissant were reminiscent of his earlier automatic style or écriture automatique of the 1920s, a subconscious script in which the pen is allowed to travel freely across the paper without the artist’s conscious control. In these works, fragmented bodies and objects, such as the ram that appears in this drawing, often emerged. In 1930 Masson came into contact with Kino Matsuo, a Japanese writer, who sparked his interest in Zen Buddhism and the incorporation of calligraphic style into his work, once suggesting that ‘the essential for a Zen painter means a manner of being in the deepest sense and not, as for us, a manner of doing. For them it means fusion in the life of the cosmos’. The intricate use of delicate ink lines in Belier pourissant and the surreal incorporation of various objects and creatures reflect these influences during this phase of Masson’s work. Masson’s ink drawing are comparable to the work of Yves Tanguy, a contributor to La Revolutión Surréaliste, who produced distinctly similar, highly cerebral ink drawings at around the same time.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Diego Masson at the Comité Masson on 28 February 2017.