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Litho van de Franse kunstenaar André Masson

Masson André

André Masson was a French artist who was born in 1896 in Balagny-sur-Thérain and who died in Paris in 1987. He was a painter and graphic artist. He started his art studies at the age of 11 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, under the supervision of Constant Montald, and later studied in Paris. His earliest work was cubistic. He was one of the earliest French surrealists and an important Parisian friend and mentor of the Spanish abstract surrealist Joan Miro. More specificly, he was a line artist. Towards the end of the 1920s, however, he found automatic drawing rather restrictive and left the surrealist movement and instead turned to a more structured style, often with works in a more violent or erotic theme, and made a number of paintings in response to the Spanish Civil War (he again associated himself with the surrealists in the late 1930s). Under the German occupation of France during the Second World War, his work was condemned by the Nazis as degenerating. He fled to New York. His work there had an important influence on American abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock. After the war he returned to France and settled in Aix-en-Provence, where he painted a number of landscapes.