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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Mme Guite-Masson for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
The present work has been requested for the André Masson Retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid in February 2004.
La Sibylle dictant ('Auguring Sibyl') is one of the most important and technically complex works amongst the series that Masson created in New York around the mythological theme of the Sibyls around 1944-45. Masson was then shifting away from themes based on nature and was increasingly concentrating on portaits. He had then also definitely broken with André Breton in a reenacting of his rupture of 1929. His nonconformist nature conflicted too much with Breton's didactic character.
'The break with Breton did not affect the pattern of Masson's life, nor his participation in Surrealist activity... but it may have intensified feelings of isolation that his enforced exile had brought about. It was under these circumstances that he began at the end of 1943 to make a series of self-portraits, portraits of his wife Rose... that took on visionary depersonalized qualities... From sketches of Rose grew a whole series of Sibyls... the head is nearly always profiled, calligraphy defines form... And in another stylistic reversal almost as abrupt, line has become the central compositional element-fluid and curling in the pictures of 1944, thin and splintery by 1945'. Like his series of 'Demons' and 'Abysses', the Sibyl group 'objectifies the artist's introspection and expresses his feelings of anxiety and helplessness about the war.' Given his state of mind towards the end of his enforced exile in America 'it is entirely natural that portraits of his wife should have led Masson to develop his Sibyl series. His musings on the uncertainty of the future, combined with the reemergence of his interest in Greek myth, had already led him to oracular themes... Whether executed in pastel... or in a mixed medium the predominant element of which is sand, as in La Sibylle dictant of 1945, the contours of the head are described over shifting, organically shaped color areas, the effect of which is to evoke the "pneuma" which the ancients thought to be the source of sibylline clairvoyance' (all quotes from exh. cat. André Masson, New York, 1976, pp. 171-2).
The present work has been requested for the André Masson Retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid in February 2004.
La Sibylle dictant ('Auguring Sibyl') is one of the most important and technically complex works amongst the series that Masson created in New York around the mythological theme of the Sibyls around 1944-45. Masson was then shifting away from themes based on nature and was increasingly concentrating on portaits. He had then also definitely broken with André Breton in a reenacting of his rupture of 1929. His nonconformist nature conflicted too much with Breton's didactic character.
'The break with Breton did not affect the pattern of Masson's life, nor his participation in Surrealist activity... but it may have intensified feelings of isolation that his enforced exile had brought about. It was under these circumstances that he began at the end of 1943 to make a series of self-portraits, portraits of his wife Rose... that took on visionary depersonalized qualities... From sketches of Rose grew a whole series of Sibyls... the head is nearly always profiled, calligraphy defines form... And in another stylistic reversal almost as abrupt, line has become the central compositional element-fluid and curling in the pictures of 1944, thin and splintery by 1945'. Like his series of 'Demons' and 'Abysses', the Sibyl group 'objectifies the artist's introspection and expresses his feelings of anxiety and helplessness about the war.' Given his state of mind towards the end of his enforced exile in America 'it is entirely natural that portraits of his wife should have led Masson to develop his Sibyl series. His musings on the uncertainty of the future, combined with the reemergence of his interest in Greek myth, had already led him to oracular themes... Whether executed in pastel... or in a mixed medium the predominant element of which is sand, as in La Sibylle dictant of 1945, the contours of the head are described over shifting, organically shaped color areas, the effect of which is to evoke the "pneuma" which the ancients thought to be the source of sibylline clairvoyance' (all quotes from exh. cat. André Masson, New York, 1976, pp. 171-2).