Born in 1896, André Masson was a French painter, etcher, illustrator, sculptor and stage designer. A member of the surrealist movement from 1924, he died in 1987.
In 1941, to escape the war, he moved to the United States where he frequented André Breton, among others. In 1945 he returned to France definitively.
Renowned for his automatic drawings and his sand paintings, he is the author of a multifaceted body of work, characterized by the ‘spirit of metamorphosis’ and the ‘mythical invention’. He had a notable influence on abstract expressionism, in particular on Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky.