Mist in the Valley of the Arc 1956

Andre Masson made this dreamlike landscape, *Mist in the Valley of the Arc*, with lithographic ink on paper. The colors are muted; soft grays and delicate yellows. Looking at the strokes, I can almost feel Masson’s hand moving across the stone, deciding where to apply pressure, how to build up the image. It's a landscape, but it's also an abstraction; the horizon line dissolves into dabs of pigment. Did he start with the mountains and then let the valley emerge? Or was he led by the shapes as they appeared? I think about Masson, surrounded by the French countryside, trying to capture not just what he sees, but what he feels. He was working during a really interesting moment in art when painters were trying to convey inner states as well as, or instead of, outer appearances. It makes me wonder: how do we translate a feeling into a mark? And how does that mark then convey that feeling to someone else? It’s a conversation across time, all these artists, responding to each other, working it out on the canvas, the paper, the stone.