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**Andr e Masson's prestige**

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Arthur Rimbaud, André Breton, André Masson

Description

Manuscript by André Breton titled ‘André Masson’s prestige’, dated 31^st January 1939 and published in the magazine Minotaure in May 1939. 

On 31^st January 1939 Breton wrote this text on ‘André Masson’s prestige’ (‘Prestige d'André Masson’), having been asked to do so by the artist, with whom he had recently renewed contact. While Masson had requested he discuss the sand paintings of the period when they first met (1925-1926), on the contrary Breton opted to focus upon his more recent output, notably in response to the eroticism he saw as being the keystone of an endlessly inventive body of work – the very opposite of the “work of art as an inexhaustible ribbon at so much a foot”, as Breton writes, that clogs up the galleries. Note that Masson’s erotic works continue to be ignored to this day, as though to prove Breton’s lucidity in immediately grasping the most disturbing aspect of the practice. The text was published in issue 12-13 of Minotaure, in May 1939. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005] 

Signed handwritten manuscript, dated 31^st January 1939. 
- 1 large in-4° page manuscript, titled, dated and signed in green ink by André Breton: 
“It is a damning fact that art in France, at the beginning of 1939, appears to be mainly concerned with hiding the sickness of the world under a carpet of flowers. … We are not, of course, suggesting for a moment that artistic themes should be tied strictly to actuality. … But we still condemn as tendentious and reactionary any image in which the painter or poet today offers us a stable universe where the minor sensory pleasures are not merely experienced but actually extolled. There is simply no place left for this supposed art of theirs. … A taste for taking risks is undeniably the principal motivating factor capable of urging mankind forward along the path of the unknown, and André Masson has developed this taste to the highest possible degree. No other imagination is so firmly gripped by the great questions which have been posed agonisingly down the centuries, right up to the present day, by Heraclitus, the Cabbalists, Sade, the German romantics and Lautréamont, and no imagination has offered them a more sympathetically attuned field of reaction.” [Auction catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

- André Breton, « Prestige d'André Masson », Minotaure, n° 12-13, mai 1939, p. 13.
- André Breton, « Prestige d'André Masson », Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Paris, Gallimard, 1965.
- André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « André Masson, Prestige d'André Masson », Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p. 532-536.

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