Executed in 1939, La légende de Thésée belongs to what has been termed Masson's 'Second Surrealist period'. This period is so-called not because of any dramatic change in direction in Masson's work at this time but primarily because of the reconciliation that took place between the artist and André Breton in 1937. This reconciliation led, for a time, to Masson once again becoming an important part of Breton's Surrealist fold and to his exhibiting with the group at several important Surrealist events such as the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1938.

Throughout the 1930s Masson's work had often centred upon mythological themes and the visual expression of these archetypal subjects through a loose swirling conglomeration of dream-like images rendered in a semi-automatic style of drawing and painting. Close with Bataille, the rebel of Surrealism, Masson visited slaughter-houses, and then left for Spain, where he enterprized an important cycle of Tauromaquia.

Through his love of Nietzsche and Heraclitus, Masson had sought to explore the enduring power of the ancient myths by a kind of psychological exorcising of his own personal demons through his art. It was Masson who had persuaded Tériade and Skira to entitle Bataille's periodical Minotaure after the dark half-man half-beast of the unconscious who lay at the heart of the deepest recesses of the labyrinth of the mind, and along with the story of the Minotaur, such psychological interpretations of the ancient myths formed a central part in much of his work in the 1930s. What better image to represent the subconscious forces that guide the human mind than the Minotaur, the half-man and half-beast born out of the union between a Queen and a bull? The Minotaur, seen here peaking menancingly from the background, a single red eye, was a perfect metaphor for the surrealists, and especially for Masson. The artist executed several paintings around the subject, from Pasiphae to Ariadne and Theseus.