André Masson: Bodies, Cities, Kingdoms brings together six drawings made between 1924 and 1941, tracing Masson’s transformation of drawing from automatic impulse into a language of metamorphosis. Across ink, watercolor, and gouache, the works show paper as one of the artist’s most vital spaces of invention, where line becomes a means of discovering bodies, psychic interiors, imagined cities, and unstable natural worlds.
The title identifies three recurring fields in Masson’s imagination. Bodies appear as fragmented, exposed, and in motion; Cities emerge when the skull becomes architecture and consciousness takes spatial form; Kingdoms opens the drawings toward animal, vegetal, mineral, and marine life. Rather than presenting nature, anatomy, and architecture as separate domains, Masson allows them to merge into a single field of transformation.
Created during decades of profound artistic and intellectual change, these drawings do not illustrate history directly. Their force lies in the way they turn instability into form. Together, they offer a concentrated view of Masson as one of the twentieth century’s great draftsmen of metamorphosis, an artist for whom the visible world was never fixed, but always becoming.
