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Violence in Paradise: André Masson’s Massacres
Author(s) -
Monahan Laurie J.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00292
Subject(s) - tragedy (event) , paradise , power (physics) , art , alliance , literal and figurative language , politics , humanities , art history , literature , history , philosophy , law , political science , archaeology , linguistics , physics , quantum mechanics
Focusing on André Masson’s Massacres , a series of images depicting men killing women and occasionally boys, produced over a period of four years (1930–34) this article explores the ways in which violence and tragedy were imagined as a potentially revolutionary force. Disenchanted with the strategies of the organized left and the alliance the Surrealists had attempted to forge with the Communist Party, Masson reconfigured his political and pictorial strategies in the Massacres, using highly repetitive, figurative imagery of murder and catastrophe. Stripped of any traces of ‘civilized’ behaviour, Masson’s Massacres produce tragedy without resolution, a collective, unstructured violence that nevertheless turns on gendered power relations.