The first surprise of Massacre is how little the bodies resist. Three nudes lie entangled across the sheet: a broad back turned toward us, a figure folded over itself, and a woman reclining at the lower right with one breast caught in a single unbroken line. Masson gives each of them the slow, sensual, almost classical contour of a life study. They are not torn. They are barely even alarmed. The brutality the title promises is real, but it has been displaced off the bodies and into the space that surrounds them.

That space is the violent part of the drawing. Around and between the figures the pen erupts into a hail of small marks: crosses, hooks, dashes, broken hatchings, zigzags, a written static that fills the open paper and presses in against the skin. Read closely, the marks behave less like shading than like script, an asemic writing scattered through the field, as if the violence had taken the form of language rather than wound. The bodies are not assaulted by a blade. They are besieged by notation, encircled by their own drawing.

This is the idiom of the Massacres, the sequence Masson began at the opening of the 1930s and returned to for years. By 1931 his break with Breton, formalised in the schism of 1929, had carried him into the orbit of Georges Bataille and the journal Documents, where the opened body, the sacrificial and the base were matters of doctrine. Bataille’s eroticism, the assent to life pressed to the edge of death, runs straight through this sheet, and so does Masson’s lifelong fixation on the bullring, the arena in which desire and slaughter are staged as a single event. The knot of nudes reaches back further still, to the antique battle sarcophagus and to the interlaced fighters of Pollaiuolo’s engraving, the Renaissance topos of bodies locked in combat, here drained of heroism and given over to something nearer ecstasy.

What distinguishes Masson is his refusal to resolve the scene into either sex or death. The figures are caught at the threshold where the two become indistinguishable, exposed rather than destroyed, suspended at the instant before. He withholds the climax the title seems to guarantee. There is no blood, no visible wound, no narrative we can follow to an end; there is only the charged interval, held open by the swarming marks.

That restraint is the source of the sheet’s power, and of its strangeness. A lesser draughtsman would have drawn the carnage. Masson draws the air around the bodies as a hostile medium and keeps the contours beautiful inside it, so that tenderness and menace arrive in the same gesture, inseparable. The result is a work in which violence is never an event depicted but a condition of the marks themselves, a massacre conducted entirely in the grammar of drawing. Set down as Europe drifted toward its own decade of slaughter, it reads now less as a scene of cruelty than as an intuition of one, made by an artist for whom the line had become a seismograph of appetite and dread.

NOTES

This drawing is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Comité André Masson, Paris, formally the Association pour la Protection et la Diffusion de l’Œuvre d’André Masson (APDOAM).