The creation of a "Modern Mythology" is essential to the Surrealist project. In the 1930s, André Masson together with Georges Bataille separate from the Breton-led surrealist group, becoming dissidents to a vision increasingly dominated by dreams and Freudian psychoanalysis. The two artists looked at slaughterhouses, a watershed moment for both, accomplices from then on in the search for the primordial impulses of the human spirit.
André Masson, haunted by the specter of the Great War and by rising political tensions in Frabce both, shares with Bataille his transgressive vision. Together, they will create Surrealism's first lasting myths, culminating in the 1937 "Acéphale". The series of massacres and pursuits becomes, between 1931 and 1933, one of the most fecund themes of the artist’s repertory, putting forth scenes of collective death of a brutal violence, an exaltation of death and dismemberment, of fights of a primeval energy. Masson commences his reflexion on the theme of the massacre through the portrayal of animal combats, a totemic mirror of the natural order.
Both modern and post-modern, the art of André Masson is placed under the sign of metamorphosis. Experimentation without any preconception is his fundamental value, a technique that is always adapted to the internal needs of the artwork that springs freely from the artist’s vision. The form is dynamic, the execution fast, the line, errant, embraces the coloured touches of vivid paint posed freely on the canvas. The rigidity of contours dissolves in a coloured rhythm, in pulse and enraged passion. A primordial energy springs from the composition, as Masson is always able to capture the mysterious system of vital forces that animates existence. As Michel Leiris once remarked on the artist, Masson manages to “fix in place the absence of fixity”, the unforeseen and elusive side of life. The colour is bright, loud and chaotic, the forms are angular and impossible to grasp here we find the Futurist aesthetic of exaltation of war and the untamed colour of Fauvism that had once made the critics gasp that we find ourselves amongst the beasts (fauves in the original French).
In these scenes of Pursuits, Masson operates a double-exorcism : that of the specter of the war and its thater of cruelty, as well as that of contemporary society.
