Les cerfs-volants

Executed in 1927, Les cerfs-volants is one of André Masson’s revered ‘sand paintings,’ created by the artist at the peak of his Surrealist phase. At the time of execution, Masson lived on the famed Rue Blomet, in a studio adjacent to fellow Surreal artist, Joan Miró. The Rue Blomet was an important meeting place for many members of the burgeoning Surrealist movement throughout the early 1920s, and Masson’s studio served as a fertile hub of creativity and discussion for painters and poets alike. The movement originated with literature, as writers sought to express their unbridled subconscious through the written word, then subsequently expanded into the visual arts, inspired by the same aspiration of automatic production where the unconscious prevailed. The idea of the poetic captivated Masson, as well as Miró, who both sought to imbue their compositions with the spirit of poetry, and Masson later recalled that in this period, ‘poetry (in the broadest sense of the term) was of capital importance’ to him and Miró, ‘our ambition was to be painter-poets’ (quoted in C. Lanchner, ‘André Masson: origins and development,’ in André Masson, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, p. 87).
Masson, like many of his fellow Surrealists, had experienced the rise of Cubism, and although they were stylistically influenced by the abstracted forms championed in the movement, he and his contemporaries broke away from the Cubist tenets, looking to unveil an interior image in their art. Their desire to delve into the creative power of the subconscious was set out by André Breton in his famous 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme, where he defined Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation’ (quoted in W. Rubin, ‘André Masson and Twentieth Century painting,’ in ibid., p. 107).
Masson had begun using automatic techniques by the end of 1923, prior to the publication of Breton’s manifesto, and developed a ritualised procedure to enable him to enter into a trance-like state where he could draw forms without any rational conscious thought. He described his meditative practice: '(a) The first condition was to liberate the mind from all apparent ties. Entry into a state similar to a trance. (b) Abandonment to interior tumult. (c) Rapidity of writing. These dispositions once attained, under my fingers involuntary figures were born, and most often disturbing, disquieting, unqualifiable. The slightest reflection broke the charm’ (quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., André Masson: Line Unleashed, London, 1987, p. 33). Allowing the hand to wander freely, Masson would produce a web of strokes and lines on his canvas, before stepping back and reflecting on his creation. He would then add details to the composition, in order to provoke forms and figures from the initial abstract lines. However, while Masson pioneered automatic techniques in his paintings of 1924-1925, he found that the process could not be fully automatised, because the constant reloading of pigment on the brush broke both the subconscious state and the visual continuity of the line that he was creating.
Eager to find a way to accommodate automatism in painting, it was in 1926, while holidaying on the beaches of Sanary-sur-Mer in Provence, that Masson landed on the potential of sand as medium, and immediately began incorporating it into his oeuvre. Over the course of the following year, Masson created just over two dozen groundbreaking sand paintings, and many of these rare compositions are now held in major museums and collections. In composing these paintings, Masson enabled himself to be fully guided by his subconscious. The artist poured gesso, a gluey primer, across the canvas in pools, patches, and lines, before using his fingers to spread and swirl the fluid freely across the surface. Masson would then sprinkle sand over the entire composition, before tilting the stretcher, so that the sand would stick to the gluey areas, and fall away from the rest of the canvas. The artist would often repeat the process with different textures and colours of sand, and, working from the suggestive configurations they conjured, Masson would use tempera and oil paint to add new elements. By spilling tempera directly onto the canvas and applying the oil paint from the tube, Masson was able to continue working from his own subconscious impulse, enhancing his compositions with true automatic ‘drawing,’ just as Breton had encouraged. Masson’s revolutionary approach of pouring his media onto a horizontal canvas was unprecedented, and the technique would later be adopted some twenty years later by Jackson Pollock in famous drip paintings.
Never before seen at auction, Les cerfs-volants is an alluring example of Masson’s rare sand paintings, and was the only composition from this pioneering series included in the Centre Georges Pompidou’s momentous 2024 exhibition, Surréalisme, which celebrated the centenary of Breton’s manifesto. Les cerfs-volants also featured in the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s major recent retrospective of the artist. The present work was first acquired from the artist by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who, renowned for his exceptional and progressive taste, played a pivotal role in Masson’s career. Kahnweiler became a lifelong supporter of the artist, and it was the initial contract he gave Masson in 1923 that had allowed Masson to devote himself to his art. Inscribed on the swathes of sand and tempera, the schematised lines of oil paint in Les cerfs-volants create suggestive images, variously appearing like kites flying in gusts of wind, monumental faces in profile, or an abstract, stylized bird. As a result, there is a metamorphic quality to the composition, and an entrancing sense of transience; it is as if figures and forms are simultaneously resolving and dissolving before the eye. Yet, amid the swirling, otherworldly articulations of figurative shapes, there is a feeling of intensity and urgency. The artist found that many of his sand paintings seemed to invoke states of high emotive potency, tinged with elements of the erotic and violence. Gravely wounded in the First World War, Masson had experienced the horrors of conflict, and recalling his experiences of the Somme, ‘you made your body one with the ground’ (quoted in J-P. Clébert, Mythologie d’André Masson, Geneva, 1971, p. 22). The unity of humanity and earth was a motif Masson returned to throughout his oeuvre, likely sparked by his own experiences as a young man, and the idea is perhaps particularly powerfully communicated through the figures of the sand paintings, who are intrinsically made of earth.