This year is the 100th anniversary of a riposte against the death and destruction of World War I:
the publication by the French artist, André Breton (1896-1966), of his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924:
the unknown of our subconscious and the power of our dreams are to militate against the rationality, morality and sensibility which had so failed Europe and the United Kingdom.
André Masson, a ‘rebel Surrealist’ as he called himself for his repeated disagreements with André Breton, fled France for the United States in 1941 with financial help from the Baltimore art collector, Saidie A. May.
His work had been classified as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. His wife was a Jew and his family faced deportation and murder.
He painted this image in 1942 and gave it to Sadie May.
There is No Finished World (Il n’y a pas de monde achevé), 1942, oil on canvas
André Masson, 1896-1987, French. Baltimore Art Museum
Masson was living through a “disturbed moment in history.”
It was his duty, he said, as an artist not to conceal the sickness of the ideology which fomented World War 2. It was his duty, Masson said, to open up the sickness, lay it out, explain it.
This painting was part of an attempt to do this.
The artist returned to France after the war.
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There is No Finished World (Il n’y a pas de monde achevé), 1942, oil on canvas and detail.
André Masson, 1896-1987, French. Baltimore Art Museum
There are three figures from Greek mythology in this painting:
Pan
On the left Pan, a nature god with the horns, hindquarters and legs of a goat.
He is the only god believed to have died in what some interpret as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ.
Pan, having died, lives still in every tree, blade of grass, flowering shrub, hovering raptor. Everywhere.
Demeter
In the middle, Demeter, the great goddess, who restored and ensures the fertility of the earth and bestowed agriculture and its techniques on humans after a lengthy stand-off with Hades and other Olympians on the arrangements for the return of her daughter, Persephone, to the surface of the earth. Hades had abducted her daughter.
Here she carries the seeds of her gift.
The minotaur
On the right the minotaur, one of the most widely used of Surrealism’s symbols, most prolifically taken up also by Pablo Picasso.
The minotaur is half human, half bull. He is a monster. He is blind which means that, while he is very strong, he is also vulnerable. He lives in the center of a labyrinth and feeds on human sacrifice.
The minotaur is a symbol of the dual nature of our species: creator of chaos and pain, destroyer of life, on the one hand;
Tauromachie, 1937, oil on canvas
André Masson, 1896-1987, French. Baltimore Art Museum
and, on the other, blind, weak, imprisoned in the vast puzzle of human consciousness; needing protective institutions.
In There is No Finished World, the three figures are not in equilibrium.
The minotaur, who is not divine and was himself slain by Theseus, is placed towards the rear of the picture plane. He has a body mass smaller than that of the gods and nowhere does he touch the goddess.
Demeter and Pan make up a dynamic and sinuous rectangle.
Masson points to the forces which counterbalance the monster:
Pan: our sustaining natural environment;
Demeter: our habituation to grief and constructive recovery; and our skills of negotiation, co-operation and altruism. Also our practical skills.
With these we may evolve ourselves to a maturity where violence – private and public – is no longer an acceptable expression.
Also, there is more than one French verb for ‘to finish’.
This contrarian of a Surrealist chose ‘achever’ whose Latin root – ad kapitum: to a head and to bring to a head – takes us, against Surrealist norms, to our heads, our minds, our rationality.
It is, Masson is saying, by use of our rational minds also that we will bring our monstrous propensity to violence to a head.
And master it.
as above