Modern and post-modern artist at the same time, André Masson's production is a work in constant metamorphosis, changing according to the internal needs of the artist and his subject. In the 1920s he invented the first "drippings" in art history with his "sand" paintings. Confronted with the outbreak of war in Europe and the Vichy government, Masson escaped to the United States in 1940. Despite the upheavals of the war, the 1940s and 1950s represented a fertile period in the artist's work, which returned to the great themes that fascinated him - the sign and instinct.

After the complex intertwining forms of his Sables of the 1940s, La Fête represents the artist's full plunge into the question of the pictographic sign. Around 1955 Masson began a new series of characters and signs: calligraphic forms that seemed to dance on monochrome backgrounds. The simplicity of the writing of La Fête, combined with the pictographic, sometimes even anthropomorphic character of its signs, recalls the divinatory inscriptions, thousands of years old, of Chinese Oracle Bone Script . For Masson, an artist always interested in the flow of energy that animates the world, the work would take on the same magical and incantatory role. In a text entitled "A painting of the essential", Masson expresses himself on the influence that painting and Far Eastern thought have on him, in particular the freedom of the gesture in an infinite space and the vital, elementary forces of the Zen philosophy of the Liezi. If the pictogram is one of the great preoccupations of the avant-garde movements, in the utopian quest for a universal language, what Masson does in his works is a more subjective and free translation of the underlying forces of nature.

On a shaded red background, strongly punctuated by brushstrokes, delicate black signs emerge. Masson's work from this period is characterised by a more exuberant chromaticism and by the "all over" of signs and symbols that overwhelm the canvas. If the Fête seems abstract at first, certain memories of anthropomorphic forms can be discerned. The composition is dynamic - a centrifugal force seems to animate the background, taking the thin black figures with it. The figures thus resemble dancers on an incendiary background. The red, vitalist, could be the torchlight of the party. The theme of the festival runs through Masson's work. The festival is equated with the Dionysian Bacchanalia, an opportunity to get out of oneself and open up to the world. While the Dionysian theme can take on a violent and orgiastic side in the Massacres and Combats of the 1930s, here the celebration is joyful and natural, but no less dynamic. In his pictorial works Masson always deals with natural phenomena or celebrations - such as Dans le Vent and Au coeur de l'orage, contemporary works of the Fête, or the series of Chinese Actors from 1955, which the artist later had engraved.

The Fête is the natural continuation of the Sables of the 1920s and 1940s. The automatism of the paint thrown onto the canvas is fully transformed into the pictographic sign, revealing the figurative and magical power of the plastic form. With its symbolism and vitality, the canvas is perfectly inscribed in the "ritualistic" and pictographic renaissance of a post-war period in search of communication. The great movements of the post-war period were to be nourished by Masson's avant-garde work: the shamanic painting of Pollock and Arshile Gorky, the simplified signs of Adolph Gottlieb and the lyrical abstraction of the Second School of Paris - of which Zao Wou-Ki, returning to the sources of his own country, would take up again the Chinese Oracle Bone Script in his own plastic language.