Original Andre Masson Poster Musée Cantini 1968 - Mourlot

Artist André Masson Year 1968 Exhibition André Masson — Musée Cantini, Marseille Printer Mourlot Frères, Paris Size 52 × 76 cm (19.75 × 28.5 in) Type Original vintage lithographic exhibition poster Condition A — Excellent This is an original lithographic poster created in 1968 by André Masson for an exhibition of his work at the Musée Cantini in Marseille — one of the most important museums of modern and contemporary art in the South of France, housed in a 17th-century hôtel particulier in the heart of the city and long dedicated to the Surrealist movement with which Masson was so intimately connected. Printed by Mourlot Frères, the poster is a direct emanation of one of the most turbulent and fertile periods in Masson's career: a return to the mythological and biomorphic imagery that had defined his earliest Surrealist work, reimagined with the chromatic richness of his mature practice. André Masson (1896–1987), born in Balagny-sur-Thérain and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and Paris, was one of the founding figures of Surrealism — among the first to develop automatic drawing as a systematic artistic method, translating the Freudian concept of free association directly into line and form. His studio on the rue Blomet in Paris was the original gathering point of the Surrealist circle, adjacent to Joan Miró and frequented by Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and André Breton. Masson's work — mythological, erotic, violent, ecstatic — explored the deepest currents of the unconscious with a visceral energy that set him apart even within the movement. His influence on American Abstract Expressionism, particularly on Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, is now recognised as foundational. The Musée Cantini was a fitting stage for this retrospective moment. Marseille, with its Mediterranean light and its long history as a port of exile and encounter — the city through which many Surrealists had passed on their way to the Americas during the war — had a special resonance for Masson, who had himself fled France in 1941. To exhibit there in 1968, in the year of the great upheaval, was an act charged with personal and historical meaning. This example is in excellent condition — grade A — and is presented unframed, ready for the wall it deserves. A rare and charged piece — Masson at his most mythological, in the city that understood exile and reinvention best.