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Lot Essay
Executed in 1937, Le fauteuil dates from André Masson’s second Surrealist period. Capturing the convulsions of an eerie metamorphosis, the work is the first in a series of pictures in which furniture awakens to mutate into anthropomorphic, erotic creatures. In Le fauteuil an austere chair has extended its extremities into grabbing hands and feet, interacting with an amorphous, sexualised form, made of breasts, fissures and fleshy details. Confounding the limits between animate and inanimate and attributing the sexual urges of a human body to an object made to accommodate it, Masson created a hallucinatory scenario in which human desires and erotic fantasies take control of the exterior world.
In its sexual drive and fantastical dimension, Le fauteuil signals Masson’s return to Surrealism in the late 1930s. The artist had first joined the Surrealist group in 1924, at the time of the movement’s beginnings. With his impulsive works Masson had championed automatic drawing, opening a door onto the possibility of Surrealism in visual art. Eager to enlist Masson in Surrealism’s ranks, André Breton hailed the artist as a ‘discovered surrealist’, placing him at the forefront of the group. In the late 1930s, Masson would once again grow closer to Breton and the Surrealists. In 1937, at the time when Le fauteuil was executed, Masson had just returned from Spain, for where he was forced to fee due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Back in Paris, Masson sought out his old friends, joining them in their latest exploits.
In 1938, Le fauteuil was indeed featured in one of the most remarkable, groundbreaking exhibitions in the history of Surrealism, the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. Seeking the shock and outrage of the Parisian bourgeois audience, the exhibition was conceived as an overwhelming environment, in which works of art where enhanced by installations, smells, lights and sound. Masson’s decision to present Le fauteuil in occasion of that major collective Surrealist exhibition suggests that, to the artist, the present work represented a particularly important achievement, expressing themes and forces that were at the core of the Surrealist Revolution the event intended to trigger. In the exhibition’s display, Le fauteuil hang not far from Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra-meuble – a table whose legs had transformed into four, sensual female legs in heels – and Wolfgang Paalen’s ivy-covered armchair. Turning furniture into a metamorphosing, erotic creature, Masson’s Le fauteuil exemplifies the sense of subversion and the uncanny dimension which pervaded the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme.
In its sexual drive and fantastical dimension, Le fauteuil signals Masson’s return to Surrealism in the late 1930s. The artist had first joined the Surrealist group in 1924, at the time of the movement’s beginnings. With his impulsive works Masson had championed automatic drawing, opening a door onto the possibility of Surrealism in visual art. Eager to enlist Masson in Surrealism’s ranks, André Breton hailed the artist as a ‘discovered surrealist’, placing him at the forefront of the group. In the late 1930s, Masson would once again grow closer to Breton and the Surrealists. In 1937, at the time when Le fauteuil was executed, Masson had just returned from Spain, for where he was forced to fee due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Back in Paris, Masson sought out his old friends, joining them in their latest exploits.
In 1938, Le fauteuil was indeed featured in one of the most remarkable, groundbreaking exhibitions in the history of Surrealism, the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris. Seeking the shock and outrage of the Parisian bourgeois audience, the exhibition was conceived as an overwhelming environment, in which works of art where enhanced by installations, smells, lights and sound. Masson’s decision to present Le fauteuil in occasion of that major collective Surrealist exhibition suggests that, to the artist, the present work represented a particularly important achievement, expressing themes and forces that were at the core of the Surrealist Revolution the event intended to trigger. In the exhibition’s display, Le fauteuil hang not far from Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra-meuble – a table whose legs had transformed into four, sensual female legs in heels – and Wolfgang Paalen’s ivy-covered armchair. Turning furniture into a metamorphosing, erotic creature, Masson’s Le fauteuil exemplifies the sense of subversion and the uncanny dimension which pervaded the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme.