The title of this study naturally alludes to the title The Rebel of Surrealism1, of the precious work on André Masson in which Françoise Will-Levaillant gathered the painter"s writings. However, the question posed is broader: it interrogates the object, even the very reality of this rebellion. The surrealist group is, for Françoise Levaillant, a "socially and professionally heterogeneous group" but "which founds its ideological unity on revolt against established values and rejection of power institutions2". André Masson's engagement in surrealism must be understood first in the very momentum of this spirit of revolt. However, the painter turned against the authority of the surrealist group itself, which he qualifies as "orthodox". Rebel then means, for Masson, "dissident3" and I will examine the stakes of this dissidence. I was mainly interested in texts, those of André Masson, but also those of Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour recently reissued. It is not, of course, a question of wanting to explain works by texts, as in the long tradition of Ut pictura poesis, but of recognizing to texts, to those of Masson in particular, the quality of a true writing practice and of questioning its relationship to literature.

André Masson, Surrealist Because Rebel

It should be noted, first, that the "rebel" character of André Masson is well before his encounter with surrealism. In his interviews with Georges Charbonnier, Masson punctuates the stages of his life with a series of ruptures: rupture with his family to leave for Switzerland (Ibid., p. 27), rupture with his first friend Loutreuil (ibid., p. 33), rupture with "everyone" (ibid., p. 10). He evokes his childhood and youth by emphasizing all the episodes that highlight this character trait considered as the foundation of his personality. A child"s word ("When I grow up, I won"t be a soldier and I"ll go to Algeria to raise lions" Ibid., p. 86) is interpreted as the first manifestation of his decision to never "be part of a group" (ibid.). "Being a very young child," says Masson, "I had a horror of everything that was conformist" (ibid.). He also willingly cites the doctor"s word who discharged him in 1918: "Never live in cities again" (ibid.). When Masson affirms: "Finally, I was immediately rebellious" (ibid., p. 87), he emphasizes of course an early taste for dissidence but also his indocile character: the refusal of the authority of the army, the church and the school, which he left in 1907 for the Academy of Fine Arts.

If rebellion is thus highlighted, it is because it is considered as the characteristic trait of a painter"s vocation that his mother Marthe's desire to become an actress may have anticipated and encouraged4. Masson"s artist legend is written in the choice of the first paintings chosen and loved. Signaling the early discovery of painter James Ensor"s work, Masson remarks: "a painter's biography can begin with this 5". The interest in Ensor"s work, "considered as a madman by his time" (ibid.), is increased by the knowledge of his author"s marginal situation compared to his contemporaries, by an identification with the latter"s situation. The marginality that is valued here is a construction of the 19th century from the representation of the cursed artist, thought and conveyed by romanticism which values freedom and independence. The notion of marginality begins to intervene at the moment when the work of art is no longer considered as a prestige object but as a singular object: Nathalie Heinich speaks of art"s entry into "singularity regime6".

The interest in Redon"s work is more complex because it announces both the vocation for dissidence and the future adherence to surrealist values. Masson analyzes it with an argumentative concern: "I liked Redon" says Masson. "For me, it proves that I was already pre-surrealist. Since the orthodox surrealist never liked Redon, it also proves that I was already dissident 7". André Masson thus distinguishes surrealism as a literary movement from surrealism considered as a "state of mind which, throughout history, has manifested itself each time a man does not accept life as it is made for him, as its broad outlines are traced, as soon as he deviates from the followed path" (ibid., p. 39-40). This way, for Masson, of considering himself as more surrealist than the surrealists appears in several of his writings and notably in the text he devotes in 1973 "to Joan Miró for his birthday": Miró, like him "future surrealist[s]", already was "before the letter8".

The sensitivity to surrealism as a state of mind is particularly vivid in periods that value opposition to dominant values. In 1944, in the context of the Liberation, Maurice Nadeau presents his History of Surrealism by opposing a "surrealist state of mind", or rather a "surrealist behavior" "eternal", which has manifested itself several times in history, to the surrealist movement which develops in a historically circumscribed time interval9.

In the spring of 1968, Michel Leiris begins the praise of Masson's "unbridled line", a line which, he says, "does as it pleases10". He thus requalifies Masson"s line, qualified by Gertrude Stein as "wandering line" because it seemed very different from that of cubist painters, as "vagabond line" (ibid., p. 124). About this line, Leiris links the "Dadaist spontaneity" of 1918 "to which Tristan Tzara attributed the lion"s share" to the "spontaneity" of 1968 "claimed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other students of the May and June movement" (ibid., p. 132).

In 1968 still, André Masson himself presents the "45 rue Blomet" workshop where he worked as an "anti-cenacle11" bringing together "fanatics" of "freedom", animated by the "certainty that there was no opening except in transgression", cultivating the "derangement of all the senses" dear to Rimbaud through the consumption of "excitants" and notably "opium" (ibid., p. 80-81) but, above all, the love of "marginals" and "outcasts" (ibid., p. 82). Convinced that everything one believes to "discover" in 1968 "in the domain long remained underground of the strange and discordant" "was already familiar in those years 1922-1925" (ibid.), he affirms that "those of rue Blomet" were already "fatally prepared, by their way of being, for future dissidences" (ibid., p. 84).

Among these "future dissidences", surrealism as a "literary movement" played, of course, a very important role prepared by the seduction that André Breton exercised on André Masson during their first meeting in 1924. Georges Limbour tells it in 1958 in the preface to the Interviews with Georges Charbonnier: he first notes this virtual surrealism, in power in Masson before even meeting Breton, this "enchanter" of whom he doesn"t quite know what he "had to give", "for men very often only give what is already in the hearts of others12". As early as 1945, Limbour noted that "it is not Masson who went to surrealism, for he had no need to renew his inspiration, he had nothing to learn from it; it is surrealism that went to him and dreamed of annexing him" (ibid., p. 199-200). Limbour also notes Masson"s availability in a situation to let himself be seduced by "the enchanter Breton":

Masson"s participation in the surrealist movement must doubtless be attributed to curiosity and the need for diversion, but perhaps also came into play a certain feminine element of his character, which these Interviews cannot totally hide from us and which made Masson attach more importance than it was worth to his role and presence in this movement, and which caused him, as he shows us, great troubles13.

Limbour then returns to the formula proposed by Masson: "They found themselves "immediately in agreement on all points"" and asks: "But which ones?":

First, doubtless, on what was called super-naturalism and what no one had yet invented the magical and revealing name of surrealism, since we were still in the "blur" although thinking of modernizing it with the help of psychoanalytic methods; then on the pleasure that one felt in exercising his charms on a genius painter and thus ensuring, what he liked so much, the recruitment of a new disciple, the other to let himself be courted, like a diva, by a poet with elegant gesture who enjoyed a certain renown and whose audacity was praised, I don"t know why because it was often made of that of others. It must be recognized that Breton had great seductions: the majestic attitude, the rather narrow but ennobled forehead with certainties, the Olympian gaze, above all the most affable and youthful smile, a somewhat sententious but charming voice. […] Thus, at this moment, the reciprocal seduction was total, with this difference however that, for the enchanter who had just made himself, by a reversal of roles that he knew how to practice so adroitly, what is called paradoxically a new disciple, the impression was not definitive, but subject to revision, and even likely to be rejected in case of failure or insubmission, while for the other who had more heart, and a passionate heart, and an anarchizing taste for friendship, the attachment was deep, likely to cause later ravages or wounds. So we will not be surprised to find in the expressions used here by Masson towards Breton, both so much veneration and so much enmity. (ibid., p. 918-919)

Beyond a seduction narrative, Limbour analyzes Breton's meeting with Masson as an ideally complementary relationship between André the poet and André the painter both born in 1896. He uses for this the description of a 1630 painting: The Inspiration of the Poet by painter Nicolas Poussin. Apollo, god of light, poetry and music, crowns the poet who, pen in hand, raises his eyes to the sky, source of his inspiration. This painting is also, as Marc Fumaroli noted, an allegorical portrait of the painter whose dignity Poussin celebrates, equal to that of the poet in this era when painting claims a liberal art dignity equal to that of poetry14. By taking up this image, Limbour makes Masson the painter crowned by the poet Breton:

What did Breton come to do at his place? He came to place on his head the crown of great painter of the movement that was to become surrealism, and one may well dispose of great ironies, such an honor always does something. No doubt, this crown, Breton was disposed to take it back from him, which would entail many heartbreaks, and to place it very momentarily on other heads, and to give it back to him a little later, but not yet definitively, until finally, alas! all movement flowing towards its decline, there was neither head nor crown15.

The image of the painter"s coronation by the poet suggests that what unites the two men is indeed a certain idea of painting whose paths are not distinguished from those of poetry. A year earlier, in "Distances", Breton attacked those who, "under the pretext that the manual work that [the plastic arts] are called upon to provide disposes the painter and sculptor differently than the poet and musician": "it is almost always with a mocking air that the author of a painting or monument undergoes the comments that those who "are not of the trade" believe themselves authorized to make on his work 16". He "persists in believing that more interesting revelations can be expected from painting" (ibid.) and thinks that "there is no reason to distinguish "literary" painting from painting, as some maliciously persist in doing" (ibid., p. 290).

In 1924, André Masson's painting offered itself at the right time as the "literary" painting that Breton calls for and, in 1928 in Surrealism and Painting, he will celebrate it as such:

Such considerations which, for Masson and for me, are at the base of everything we avoid undertaking and everything we undertake are not made to make us very bearable the attitude of those who, without thinking so far, through indigence or for pragmatic reasons, all in the care of their little construction, consenting to be only "hands to paint", contemplate their work with an air of day to day more satisfied. As if it were about that! As incredible as it may be, I have observed it to Chirico, this petty bourgeois spirit is unfortunately not as foreign to all surrealist painters17.

Masson, for his part, will defend until the end of his life the legitimacy of a "literary painting", as evidenced by an article of May 5, 1942 written on the occasion of a Daumier exhibition in New York:

Daumier Literary Painter

Today, for "pure painters" is denounced as literary any pictorial or graphic expression that aims at something more than the repetition on the canvas of the frame that supports it. Repetition which can be more or less varied but which strictly forbids any allusion, even distant, to anything other than the exaltation of the pictorial means; the latter being considered as "thing in itself". Viewed in this light, Daumier's work is therefore literary. Moreover, this is already Charles Baudelaire"s opinion. In his Romantic Art, speaking of Daumier, he expresses himself thus: "The genius of the painter of manners is a genius of a mixed nature, that is to say where a good part of literary spirit enters18.

Very significantly, what Masson retains from the 45 rue Blomet workshop are "the books at the foot of the paintings turned against the wall19". Until the end of his life, he will oppose the autonomy of the arts to defend on the contrary a way of linking poetry and painting in the name of what he calls "the poetic imperative". This is evidenced by the text dedicated in 1972 "to Miró for his birthday":

It is obvious that for Joan as for me poetry, in the broadest sense, was capital. Being a painter-poet was our ambition and by this we differentiated ourselves from our elders who, even frequenting the best poets of their generation, had a mad fear of being treated by criticism as "literary painters". – Painters claiming the poetic imperative, we crossed a great gap20.

If André Masson finds in surrealism a way to rebel against a too exclusively pictorial conception of painting, the one defended by Maurice Denis"s famous formula in the Art and Criticism review of August 23 and 30, 1890 ("Remember that a painting – before being a battle horse, a naked woman, or any anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order21"), he also meets there adepts of erotic art that André Masson practiced well before meeting Breton. From the immediate post-war period (1919-1921), the first known drawings are erotic drawings. Physical love appeared to him very early, according to Michel Leiris, "as the major theme" which finds its privileged expression in drawing rather than in painting "necessarily more premeditated22". Leiris notes on a correction sheet of the Official Journal this note:

I have as little respect as love for the great monuments of painting: I prefer the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel that I have never seen. But I will always have enough repressed desires – sexual or sensual – to be an artist23.

He considers that Masson, "when he takes carnal colloquy as his subject", "intends above all to show, under its most naked form, the great effusion impulse that pushes each human being to free himself from his bounds and to find, through commerce with other beings or handling of other bodies, a means of no longer being a stranger in the world and of constraining the exterior to provide him with a response.24" In 1939, in "Prestige of André Masson", André Breton values this eroticism which he considers as "the keystone25" of the painter's work.

Rebel against everything that enslaves desire, Masson was also very early rebel against what Leiris calls the "prison of reason26" and it is this freedom that frees itself from reason"s control that Breton praises in Masson"s practice of automatism:

André Masson at the very beginning of his course meets automatism. The painter's hand truly wings with it: it is no longer the one that traces the forms of objects but well the one that, enamored of its own movement and it alone, describes the involuntary figures in which experience shows that forms are called to reincorporate themselves. The essential discovery of surrealism is, indeed, that, without preconceived intention, the pen that runs to write, or the pencil that runs to draw, spins an infinitely precious substance27.

Finally, if the rebel Masson enlisted so easily in Breton"s service at the time of rue Blomet, it is because the latter, in his eyes, represented the future. To a question from Miro: "Should we go see Picabia or Breton?" Masson answered "Picabia no, it"s already the past. André Breton yes, him, it"s the future28". This formula could orient the response to the question that Françoise Levaillant leaves open at the end of her study on the beginnings of André Masson"s artist career, towards an "adaptation to new historical conditions" rather than towards a "revolutionary transgression29".

Even if, as Jean-Paul Clébert notes, after interviews in 1967, the painter continues to defend the group outside30, the indocile Masson however did not delay in rebelling against Breton"s surrealism, surrealism against which he entered quite quickly into "dissidence". From the end of 1928, Masson "distances himself and refuses to be labeled surrealist henceforth" (ibid.), before being excluded, by Breton, from the Second Manifesto. Reconciled at the time of the Spanish War and American exile, Masson and Breton distance themselves in 1942 and break definitively in 1943 (ibid., p. 371-372).

André Masson, Rebel Against Surrealism

To explain that André Masson's rebellion, first enlisted in the service of surrealism, then turned against surrealism itself, several explanations have been proposed.

The first is psychological. For Jean-Paul Clébert, it is obviously against Breton"s authority and his obstinacy in crystallizing surrealism around his own person that he rebels (ibid.). Georges Limbour also notes that surrealists "are by nature city dwellers", unable to "live except in groups, near the laboratory or the café", while Masson, throughout his life, preferred "the paths of the countryside to the streets of the city31", to live as close as possible to a nature that is a source of inspiration for all his work, beyond the fracture often noted between works before the Second World War and those after it32. Limbour also remarks that if the members of the surrealist group and Masson share the same taste for scandal, it does not have the same meaning in both cases. The surrealist scandal,

apart from a few bold provocations, like some attacks on the honor of the army, carried moreover by men who played an effaced role in the movement, was generally, deriving from Dadaist scandal, a dilettante scandal, a publicity scandal, quite well calculated and dosed so that it did not involve any risk.

Masson"s scandals were quite different:

The provocations, he did not make them cold-bloodedly, having taken all possible precautions […]. He made them generously, spontaneously, in a state of exasperation, at the most inopportune and dangerous moment, when he was not in force, or all alone, and he exceeded all measure33.

The second explanation is political:

In July 1942, "at Rosenberg"s request, Masson executes, on the occasion of July 14 that the Society of American Friends of France forever celebrates, a Liberty, Equality, Fraternity panel. This demonstration of nationalism, strongly disapproved by Breton and Tanguy, will be one of the causes of the rupture of Masson and the Surrealists34.

The third is an aesthetic explanation on which I would like to dwell longer. If the practice of automatism made Masson Breton"s model painter, their conception of it is also very different, as Limbour indicates who distinguishes Masson"s automatism from Breton"s:

If automatism was one of the great surrealist procedures, it should be noted that the one recommended by Breton in his manifestos was a methodical, voluntary, extremely disciplined automatism and whose rules were formulated with great precision. The automatism that presided over the elaboration of certain drawings by Masson is on the contrary involuntary and quite spontaneous, which is why it does not refuse, if it presents itself momentarily, on a hesitation, the intervention of lucidity. […] Automatism is therefore not for him a method of creation proper to replace other failing means, an experimental probing of the unconscious, it is the natural movement of inspiration, the vivacity of invention35.

For his part, in 1943, André Masson criticizes the dictatorship of the surrealist unconscious in the name of a "matter" that would have been sacrificed:

[…] the doctrine of pure automatism can only be dissolving […] if one takes it for an end. It is fallacious to believe that one can overcome the resistance of matter by denying this resistance. What remains, I believe to the surrealism"s credit is its initial revolt against a certain cubist formalism, it is having claimed the right to allude to something other than familiar objects. But to decree the superiority of the unconscious over the conscious, of delirium over reason, to deny study and knowledge in order to encourage "factitious vocations", what"s the use36?

This criticism accuses the distinction between two different conceptions of painting also noted by art historians like William Rubin who distinguishes, in surrealist painting of the thirties, Masson's painting, that of Miro (both pioneers of surrealism) and, partially, that of Max Ernst from that of other surrealists (Magritte, Tanguy and Dali) qualified as "illusionist" painters whose work is characterized by what he calls a form of "pictorial onirism":

A broader, and historically more just definition of pictorial surrealism would give equal place to the two genres of painting: one abstract, the other illusionist; both equally engaged in a common search for poetic art, for painting-poetry37.

Because it sacrifices the material dimension, surrealist painting takes the risk, for Masson, of academicism. In 1943, date of his rupture with Breton, Masson speaks in a letter to Saidie May of "most of the paintings of "the Surrealist Academy"" as the "true "pompiers" of our time38." In 1943 still, in the Mount-Holyoke college conference where he defends the "pictorial fact" and the "savor" (in the double sense of taste and knowledge) of French painting, he attempts a balance of what distinguishes him from the movement to which he no longer belongs:

if it is incontestable that surrealism is the only movement that has imposed itself since fauvism and cubism, I must however recognize that the surrealist label covers diverse and irreconcilable tendencies. The old academic devil can astutely wear the mask of modernity, it is only more pernicious; it insinuates that imagination must have recourse to the most vile, most enticing imitation to manifest itself effectively, thus flouting the creative spirit. We live in a time of such confusion that we have been able to see revolutionary painters inflict on us a "return to Bœcklin"39.

This place accorded, against the "illusionist" dimension, to the material dimension of painting, Masson will call it from the end of the 50s "pictoriality". He borrows the term from Heinrich Wölfflin whose Fundamental Principles of Art History he has read (as evidenced by the inventory published in 2011 of his library40) and whom he cites in his 1964 article on Delacroix41 and in a 1956 article on Oriental art. He regrets there that "for forty years, our painting (the one that occupied the forefront of the scene) was hardly pictorial. The wheel has turned and pictoriality (or emergence through light, and absence of delimitation) regains the upper hand42". It is in the name of this revaluation of pictoriality that he changes his view on impressionism and, in 1952, publishes a text entitled "Monet The Founder" in which he notes the "interlaced, disheveled, ocellated" touch of a painter that Masson defines in a formula: "Painter of appearances (he is not a theologian)"43.

The later writings will be for Masson the occasion to return to the points of discord that separated him from Breton from their meeting. I will retain three main ones: the place accorded to music, to the event and the reference to Nietzsche.

Michel Leiris affirms in his journal that Masson liked to tell that he went to concerts with Max Ernst in secret from André Breton who, according to Leiris, "had a horror of music44". Masson shares this taste for music with his friend Joan Miró: "Contrary to my surrealist friends, I have always been very interested in music" affirms Miró45. This passion for music is the symptom of an attention to the plastic dimension of the work more than to its meaning:

I have always been concerned with plastic construction and not only with poetic associations. This is what distinguished me from the Surrealists. (ibid., p. 60)

[…] I have never been completely in agreement with the Surrealists, who judged the painting according to its poetic, or sentimental, or even anecdotal content. I have always evaluated the poetic content according to its plastic possibility. (ibid., p. 116)

In the text he devotes in 1939 to Masson"s work, Breton opposes it to Braque"s because it "can hold next to the journal of each day46". Figurative painting is precisely, for Masson, the one that gives full place to the event. This is what makes the greatness, for him, of certain works of past painting like Poussin"s:

The simplest existence, the most humble life, is still history. Diogenes" broken bowl equals the temple pediment and the considerable laurel participates in Phocion's funeral47.

André Masson presents himself as "the only surrealist painter to [himself]" to have delivered himself to this act considered as condemnable: painting the event. […]. But surrealist painting wanted to be a little outside of History48".

I would finally like to quickly evoke the place of the reference to Nietzsche around which Breton and Masson separate. If the anecdote linked to the allusion to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky during the first meeting between Masson and Breton is known ("Ah! those, that"s what I detest most!" Breton would have exclaimed49), the place of the reference to Nietzsche"s work in Masson"s would deserve, it seems to me, a more in-depth study. It legitimizes, for Masson, the refusal to approach the work from a moral point of view while, according to him, Breton remained attached to this point of view (ibid., p. 43). It also justifies his interest in works of the past while Breton "retained", he says, very few things from the past50": "Finally my mind"s activity is of an untimely order51".

It also played a decisive role in the reflection shared with Georges Bataille on Heraclitus, notably on the value to be accorded to contradiction. This is evidenced by a letter from June 1936:

Last evening rereading "The Origin of Tragedy" I noticed that I had always forgotten to cut the pages at the end: Notes (they are extracted from little-known pages preserved by the Nietzsche-Archiv) – written in 1888. These remarks on Heraclitus are so dazzling that I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing them for you: it is a worthy conclusion to our (unforgettable) conversations of the month of April. "The tragic wisdom is lacking, – I have vainly sought its indices even among the great minds of pre-Socratic Greece. I had a doubt left for Heraclitus, in whose vicinity I was more at ease than anywhere else. The affirmation of perishability and destruction, what is decisive in a Dionysian philosophy, the approval of everything that is struggle and contrast, with the absolute recusal of everything that evokes the idea of "Being" – I must recognize there, in all respects, what is most akin to my nature, among everything that has been thought until today." I did not believe I was saying so well in affirming in a quite instinctive manner: that Nietzsche had only one spirit-brother in the past: Heraclitus52

By this valorization of a non-dialectical reading of Heraclitus" thought by Nietzsche, thought that preserves "struggle and contrast", Masson opposes Breton who, in the opening of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism of 1930, advocates the overcoming of "old antinomies" and gives to surrealist activity as motive to determine the "point of the spirit" from which "life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived contradictorily53", in a perspective that is Hegel"s.

Masson moreover explicitly opposes the Dionysian values he claims to Breton's. It is in this framework that the festival (the epigraph of The Memory of the World "Artists, prepare feasts for us!" is borrowed from Nietzsche54) and dance are valorized: "Nietzsche said: "If I believed in a god, it would be in a dancing god". Breton detested dance, taken in the broad sense of the word, namely a sort of somewhat mad physical liberation. He was not Dionysian at all55"). Masson considers Breton as Apollonian:

At bottom, I thought, contrary to Breton, that the primordial value would never be automatism, but the Dionysian spirit; automatism can very well integrate into the Dionysian spirit, which corresponds to a sort of ecstatic and explosive state allowing to get out of oneself, to give free rein to one"s instincts and, thereby, to lead to automatism. But, for me, the Dionysian feeling is more permanent than automatism, for automatism is absence of the conscious. [Breton] would have been rather Apollonian in a certain manner. The wanderings that I practiced were absolutely foreign to him. (ibid.)

Nietzsche especially played an important role in the place that Masson accords to form in his conception of art. The formula that Masson repeats several times in his texts on painting ("The painter"s spirit: form itself56") could be inspired by Nietzsche"s Posthumous Fragments (XIV): "One is an artist on condition of feeling as content, as the thing itself, what non-artists call 'form"". Masson undoubtedly owes him a properly literary reflection on the work of writing as evidenced by the variety of forms taken by the latter: aphorisms, fragments, notes. In the interview with Jean-Paul Clébert, Masson comments for Jean-Paul Sartre his use of wit about what he calls his aesthetic treatise:

I made Anatomy of my Universe like other painters, Dürer, Vinci, made painting treatises. However the didactic side of such works… with me it"s rather the opposite: there's nothing to learn. Nevertheless something sardonic, a frozen irony, but no humor. One day when I was showing Sartre Anatomy of my Universe, which is all the same a little bit my personal aesthetic treatise, he asked me under what angle he should read this book. I told him that I did not think it should be under the sign of humor, but that in any case there was a considerable part of irony. Take the word in its German romantic sense, a self-mockery57.

Rebel therefore surrealist, rebel against surrealism? It is, finally, to the influence of Far Eastern painting that Masson attributes in 1956 his evolution towards an art that is no longer an art against but what he calls a "painting of the essential":

Certainly, at the time of my first sand paintings (in 1927), it was indeed in the direction of an absolute spontaneity that I was exercising myself. On glue spots projected at random, sand was spread. It was a step towards pure movement. It was a question of making the most mute matter speak, of tearing it from its inertia, of animating it by gesture. But the instinct of aggression and the "defiance to painting" still possessed me. It took me long years before I could use the most hirsute means in a serene manner – without the slightest provocative or polemical intention58.

A more general remark finally: my study was based on remarks by Masson well posterior to the evoked events. It is therefore necessary, of course, to take into account the retrospective dimension of the reconstruction of his trajectory but also the different meaning it may have taken at several moments in the painter"s life. The relationship of the individual to the group certainly does not have the same meaning in the first part of the 20th century where avant-gardes linked innovation to the collective and in the second part of the century where, as the critic Michel Tapié indicates in 1953, "the era of collective movements is over59". The writings of or on Masson dating from the second half of the 20th century must be appreciated in the context of this revaluation of the individual against the group.

University PARIS VIII