Although Masson is most often associated with Surrealism, his work evades
definition through any one twentieth-century movement. In some ways, the
identification with Surrealism has been confusing. Not only has it focussed
attention on a partial aspect of his career, but has obscured profound
differences between them. If it is true that some of his finest paintings
were produced when he was closest to Surrealism, it is also the case that they
were generated by deep tensions: as he wrote himself, "Painful contradictions
are sometimes the source of the greatest riches".
Masson had especially close relations throughout his life with poets and
writers, and they in turn responded to the qualities in his work that spoke
to their shared concerns. But that is not to say that he was a literary painter.
Andre Breton, for instance, celebrated the chemistry of the intellect" that
marked for him Masson as the painter who understood the full implications of
the surrealist project. But before his encounter with Surrealism in 1924,
others had made him their elective artist: Michael Leiris, Georges Limbour,
Antonin Artaud, and a little later Georges Bataille. For them, who were to
be the "dissident" surrealists, or, in the case of Bataille, "Surrealism's
old enemy from within", Masson's work possessed another, Dionysian,
character, as Leiris called it, that was to challenge Surrealism on its own
grounds.
From "Masson", Dawn Ades