Le Lit hanté (The Haunted Bed) 1942

Andre Masson made this drawing, called ‘The Haunted Bed,’ using ink on paper. Looking at it, I imagine him working quickly, intuitively, letting the black ink lead the way. There’s an energy here, a nervous kind of frenzy in those lines. I wonder what Masson was feeling when he made this? Was he trying to capture a dream, a nightmare maybe? I can imagine the pen scratching, dancing across the surface, almost like automatic writing, channeling the unconscious. Notice the cross-hatching, the splatters, the way the figures seem to be wrestling with each other. Masson was part of the Surrealist movement, along with artists like Miro and Dali. They were all interested in exploring the irrational side of the human mind. For me, works like this are part of a much wider conversation about what it means to be human, what it means to be an artist. Each generation responding to, and riffing off, the one that came before.