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André Masson's Earth-Mothers in Their Cultural Context Author(s): ROBERT BELTON

André Masson's Earth-Mothers in Their Cultural Context Author(s): ROBERT BELTON Source: RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review , 1988, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1988), pp. 51-57 Published by: AAUC/UAAC (Association des universités d’art du Canada / Universities Art Association of Canada) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630380 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review This content downloaded from 154.59.124.59 on Sat, 03 Jul 2021 17:27:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms André Masson's Earth-Mothers in Their Cultural Context ROBERT BELTON University of Western Ontario In memoriam John Henry Belton RÉSUMÉ L'image mythologique présentée dans l'art surréaliste a fait l'objet de nombreuses publications. L'une d'elles, Myth in Surrealist Painting , 1929-1939 , de Whitney Chadwick, consacre toutefois autant de temps à l'analyse de mythes inventés de toutes pièces qu'au récit « sacré » tributaire de la tradition. Les sources mythiques vérita- bles d'André Masson s'en trouvent pour autant oc- cultées. Cet article s'emploie à récupérer une partie des significations originelles conçues par Masson, en prê- tant une attention particulière à un certain type d'image féminine : la figure nue acéphale, couchée et exhibant ses organes génitaux. Cette image plonge ses racines dans le milieu intellectuel extrêmement évolué de Mas- son, qu'on se réfère à des notions telles que le Mutterrecht de Bachofen, aux études de l'ami de Masson, Georges Bataille, ou encore aux ouvrages de Frazer et Freud. Le projet de Masson était de réinventer les mythes de la femme qui préside tout à la fois à la naissance et à la voie de ce qu'on pourrait appeler une théologie féministe. Mais ces images comportent aussi sa face cachée car Masson a puisé une partie de son inspiration dans des mythes soumis à l'interprétation de la psychanalyse freudienne qui implique en général une certaine dé- valorisation du principe féminin. Il subsiste donc dans son oeuvre une trace de l'ambivalence qu'il n'a pas manqué de ressentir dans sa démarche vers une « psychologie matriarcale » au sein d'un système pro- fondément patriarcal. In 1937, André Breton called for an elaboration of the "collective myth belonging to our period." Five years later, Max Ernst described himself as having been, at the end of the Great War, "a young man aspiring to become a magician and to find the myth of his time."1 Clearly, neither the leader of the Surrealist movement nor the artist who remained its most innovative exponent meant to examine myth as a straightforward ethnological phenomenon. They both singled out for attention the potential significance of primitive and ancient mythologies for their contemporaries. In practice, both men advocated a return to what they saw as a simpler form of life, one which could be lived within Western civilization but did not have its repressive effects on primal urges. The Surrealists' profound interest in the arts and myths of primitive cultures was a symptom of their desire to isolate these urges. Moreover, their interest in the arts of children and the mentally disturbed were reflections of contemporary scien- tific interest in comparing so-called savage states of mind and those that Western society deemed abnormal or immature. For these scientists, the child, the primitive and the insane were regressive in that they reverted to chronologically earlier or less adapted patterns of behaviour and feeling. For the Surrealist, on the other hand, "less adapted" would in fact mean less repressed, less inhibited by what was perceived as the constraints of bourgeois morality and the like. In rummaging around in the myths of presumably less-adapted societies, the Surrealists hoped to establish a new mythology expressive of their own dilemma. They wanted to be able to respond to their primal urges without restrictions; they wanted to live their lives according to the pleasure principle, or as Breton put it, "to live out the most beautiful poem in the world."2 The bulk of Surrealist myth research took place in the 1930s, a decade that had opened with the 1 André Breton, "Limites non frontières du surréalisme," Nouvelle revue française (1 February 1937) ; Max Ernst, Be- yond Painting, ed. R. Motherwell (New York, 1948), 29. 2 André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture , nouvelle éd. (Päris, 1965), 14. belton / André Masson's Earth-Mothers 51 This content downloaded from 154.59.124.59 on Sat, 03 Jul 2021 17:27:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms publication of L'Immaculée Conception , a volume of poetic exercises by Breton and Paul Eluard simulating mental disorders. This was less an exercise in style than an attempt to discover the "Points of Agreement between the Lives of Sav- ages and Neurotics," as the subtitle to Freud's Totem and( Taboo had put it.3 Known since its first French translation of 1924, Freud's study also of- fered psychoanalytical interpretations of various mythic structures, most of which were derived from James George Frazer's mammoth The Golden Bough. 4 Freuďs explanations were of great interest to the Surrealists, who while repudiating attempts to psychoanalyse their own work at every oppor- tunity,5 nonetheless subscribed to certain Freu- dian notions, such as his characterization of art as the only human endeavour that could bypass the intellect to manifest an approximate accomplish- ment of a person's desires. This process, which he called "the omnipotence of thought,"6 also ex- plained most occult phenomena, such as clair- voyance, as the intersection of the contents of the unconscious and those of the outside world. The contents of the outside world function as triggers, bringing to consciousness forgotten or repressed information. The Surrealists called this process objective chance, the expectation and interpreta- tion of signs, or simply magic art, and they prefer- red to retain the aura, if not the objective fact, of the occult.7 Most writers on the subject have acknowledged this element of pseudo-supernatural intervention, but few have fully examined how the whole pro- cess helps to reveal the character of the images that some Surrealists appropriated from the myths dis- cussed by Frazer and Freud. For example, Evan Maurer remarks that André Masson's painting The Earth (1939, Fig. 28) "evokes the underlying idea of a woman as an embodiment of the earth itself, a concept frequently found in Primitive beliefs." He gives several examples drawn from Frazer, noting simply that is was Masson's favourite source of myths. Whitney Chadwick does not go much further when she notes that the same paint- ing expresses "the female's double nature, simul- taneously nourishing mother and harbinger of death."8 What both writers fail to observe is that the image, drawn from a less-adapted or sup- posedly purer stage in human development, was a statement of contemporary significance. It speaks less of the eternal feminine than of the historical condition of women in Masson's era. It is tempting to say that The Earth is a very positive, even proto-feminist image, for it seems to dispense with Western religion in favour of a re- turn to a primeval mother-goddess. Readers of current feminist theology would no doubt agree. Carol P. Christ, for example, believes that the réin- troduction of the goddess is necessary and even revolutionary because it legitimizes characteristi- cally female powers and validates women's experi- ences. Furthermore, it fosters humankind's ac- ceptance of its rootedness in nature and its mortal- ity, both formerly suppressed by patriarchal soci- ety.9 In this sense, Masson's painting seems a straightforward illustration of the goddess as a new/old centre of the universe. The painter even foresaw Christ's feminist theology in adhering scrupulously to long-established conventions of representation: the goddess has no face or feet; unclothed and large-breasted, she lactates and ex- poses her genitals. Even the technique of the painting - sand mixed into the oil medium - assists in the identification of the subject with the soil, around which spins the rest of the cosmos. She is the landscape, and in her all creatures live and move and find their being. But of course, Masson could not foresee the future, and this irreducible fact has led most re- searchers to dwell on his reading of Das Mutter- recht , a thesis on matrilineal societies by Johann Jakob Bachofen published in 1861. For example, Chadwick writes: "Bachofen's description of a so- cial organization based on the principles of equal- ity, respect for human life and the power of love, advanced one alternative to the deeply entrenched patriarchal social and political order which had shaped the Surrealist revolt."10 Masson might even be said to have confirmed this reading, for he enthusiastically declared that he was matriarchal.11 But if Masson thoroughly accepted all that Bacho- fen had written, then he must surely have agreed uploads/Geographie/ andre-masson-x27-s-earth-mothers-in-their-cultural-context.pdf