Moonrise over trees in bloom
(Levée de lune sur les arbres en fleurs)
(1953)
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 60.0 × 73.0 cm
- Inscription
- inscribed in brown paint l.c.: André Masson
- Accession Number
- 3257-4
- Department
- International Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1955
© André Masson/ADAGP, Paris. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- Late 19th & early 20th Century Paintings & Decorative Arts Gallery
Level 2, NGV International - About this work
-
This is one of a group of landscapes painted after André Masson settled at the Villa L’Harmas near Aix-en-Provence in October 1947. During the Second World War, which Masson saw as the destruction of the Western world by materialism, he received what he called ‘Le choc de l’essentiel’ (the clash of essentials) from Chinese painting, Zen and other Eastern philosophies. Abandoning his earlier Surrealist obsessions, Masson wrote in 1953: ‘I reveal the illimitable expansion through light, universal fusion ... A delicate sensualism makes me burst the last chains that still bind me to the spirit of weightiness … The supreme lesson of Turner and the spiritual message of Zen painting have come to me.’
- Subjects (general)
- Abstract Art Landscapes Nature
- Subjects (specific)
- evening flowers (plant components) moonlight moons trees
- Movements
- Surrealism
