A heroine of French history, the ‘Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII’, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1854 (Fig. 1 – Musée du Louvre, Paris), sees her majestic likeness subverted by the painter André Masson. The Surrealists’ condemnation of nationalism – which they held responsible for the outbreak of the First World War – finds a caricatured and burlesque illustration here.

The Surrealists vehemently condemned the war, some of them having been called up to the front (Breton, Aragon, Apollinaire). André Masson, who was seriously wounded at the Chemin des Dames in 1917, was deeply scarred by this trauma. This is evident in a series of paintings from the early 1930s, contemporary with our painting and entitled ‘Massacre’, in which he depicts scenes of war, murder and rape in ink, pastel and oil.

Ingres’s solemn and virginal Joan of Arc is transformed: the inspired face becomes a fish’s head (screaming or bleating in the moonlight!), the shoulder pieces of the breastplate transform into an opulent bosom, the chivalric sword blasphemously pierces Joan of Arc’s belly, whilst the candlestick resting on the altar becomes a male phallus.

We shall pause here to consider the numerous visual puns of an erotic nature that pepper this otherwise highly comical little painting, a device with which André Masson is well acquainted throughout his oeuvre. But the creature’s draped body, in blue, white and red (and which becomes drenched in blood), clearly reveals the painter’s ideological target.