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Lot Essay
The present painting is among Masson's most powerful and explicit figurative works, charting one of the most formative and turbulent periods of Masson's life and in the world around him. Pasiphaë pays testimony to many of the artistic avenues the artist had explored by 1937, combining elements from mythology, current events and his own personal inner life.
The infamous 1936 siege of Toledo which lasted several months and became one of the main focuses of the early stages of the Spanish Civil War must have greatly informed the painting. The papers were filled with news from the Spanish Civil War and with the growing omens of a greater war, and Masson's art was rare in its age as its own tormented energy was more than a match for the newspapers, becoming a surreal barometer of the violent age that created it. A veteran of the First World War, Masson was particularly sensitive to the tension around him, and even more so as he had fallen in love with Spain while traveling there in 1934. Spain to some extent had rehabilitated him after a deeply troubled period during the early 1930s when his life and his art appeared to reach a crisis point; he had moved to the seclusion of St.-Jean-de-Grasse following his divorce from his wife and his break with the surrealists. In Spain, he had found great solace, and so his anxiety at the Civil War that tore the country apart was all the greater and came to dominate many of his paintings of the period.
In a sense, Pasiphaë is Masson's equivalent to Picasso's Guernica, fusing national identity, mythology and current events. The bull and the corrida are inextricably linked to Spain and Spanish identity, and in many of his paintings mourning the Civil War there, he used the bull as a rousing theme. The present work illustrates the Greek myth of Pasiphaë and the bull. Pasiphaë was the wife of King Minos, and when Minos had the misfortune of insulting Poseidon, the god kindled a passionate love in Pasiphaë for a bull. She had Daedalus design a construction so that she could mate with the bull, and thus she became the mother of the Minotaur. Like Freud, the Surrealists saw ancient myths as clues to eternal truths about life and human nature. The voluptuous Pasiphaë, writhing beneath the bull's mass, represents life; the bull, and thus the Minotaur, serves as a potent symbol of violence, of the beast within, and of death. The Minotaur became an explicit mascot for the surrealists with the publication of Minotaure, a title that was suggested by Masson and his friend the writer Georges Bataille. Although Masson's interest in Spain had briefly eclipsed his interest in myths, in Pasiphaë the two strands have become inextricably linked.
The infamous 1936 siege of Toledo which lasted several months and became one of the main focuses of the early stages of the Spanish Civil War must have greatly informed the painting. The papers were filled with news from the Spanish Civil War and with the growing omens of a greater war, and Masson's art was rare in its age as its own tormented energy was more than a match for the newspapers, becoming a surreal barometer of the violent age that created it. A veteran of the First World War, Masson was particularly sensitive to the tension around him, and even more so as he had fallen in love with Spain while traveling there in 1934. Spain to some extent had rehabilitated him after a deeply troubled period during the early 1930s when his life and his art appeared to reach a crisis point; he had moved to the seclusion of St.-Jean-de-Grasse following his divorce from his wife and his break with the surrealists. In Spain, he had found great solace, and so his anxiety at the Civil War that tore the country apart was all the greater and came to dominate many of his paintings of the period.
In a sense, Pasiphaë is Masson's equivalent to Picasso's Guernica, fusing national identity, mythology and current events. The bull and the corrida are inextricably linked to Spain and Spanish identity, and in many of his paintings mourning the Civil War there, he used the bull as a rousing theme. The present work illustrates the Greek myth of Pasiphaë and the bull. Pasiphaë was the wife of King Minos, and when Minos had the misfortune of insulting Poseidon, the god kindled a passionate love in Pasiphaë for a bull. She had Daedalus design a construction so that she could mate with the bull, and thus she became the mother of the Minotaur. Like Freud, the Surrealists saw ancient myths as clues to eternal truths about life and human nature. The voluptuous Pasiphaë, writhing beneath the bull's mass, represents life; the bull, and thus the Minotaur, serves as a potent symbol of violence, of the beast within, and of death. The Minotaur became an explicit mascot for the surrealists with the publication of Minotaure, a title that was suggested by Masson and his friend the writer Georges Bataille. Although Masson's interest in Spain had briefly eclipsed his interest in myths, in Pasiphaë the two strands have become inextricably linked.