André Masson received his early artistic training in Brussels and Paris. By the early 1920s, he was collaborating with the Kahnweiler Gallery and had become closely involved with leading figures of the Parisian avant-garde, including Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Max Jacob. In 1924, Masson formally joined the Surrealist movement, within which he developed the pioneering practice ofautomatic drawing, inspired by Breton’s theory of automatic writing. This approach sought to bypass conscious control, allowing spontaneous, unconscious forms to emerge directly onto the page. Through this radical method, Masson broke decisively with academic conventions and established a singular position within Surrealism.
Although Masson distanced himself from the Surrealist group in the late 1920s, his engagement with the movement remained significant: he contributed to the influential journal Le Minotaure and participated in major exhibitions such as the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London and the 1941 Art Fantastique exhibition in New York. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Masson fled to the United States, where he reunited with Breton and Marcel Duchamp. He eventually settled in New Preston, Connecticut, among a community of artists that included Alexander Calder and Arshile Gorky. The presence of Surrealist émigrés in the United States played a decisive role in shaping the New York avant-garde, and Masson’s experiments with automatism would later exert a strong influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism, and notably on Jackson Pollock.
In our drawing, executed in 1944, hence during his American exile, Masson offers a Self Portrait with a Hat. Rendered with swift, agitated brushstrokes that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, the portrait is stripped of colour as to emphasise the narrative potential of the black line. This self-representation reflects the artist’s rural surroundings in Connecticut: Masson depicts himself wearing a utilitarian hat associated with outdoor or agricultural labour, suggesting a deliberate identification with a more elemental, grounded existence. As Bernard Noël observed in Les Têtes d’Iljetu, Masson presents himself as a figure prepared for confrontation, yet his gaze remains measured in suggesting a tense balance between defiance and introspection.1 The sheet’s visual economy reinforces the introspective and confrontational character of our Self Portrait, which presents identity as a dynamic, unstable construction.