André Masson

Galerie Simon, Paris

Wildenstein & Co., London (acquired by 1936)

Mayor Gallery, London

Private Collection

London, Wildenstein & Co., Exhibition of Works by André Masson, 1936, no. 11

Patrick-Gilles Persin, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler - Aventure d'un grand marchand, Paris, 1990, illustrated p. 170

Guite Masson, Martin Masson & Catherine Loewer, André Masson, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint 1919-1941, vol. 2, Paris, 2010, no. 1934-9, illustrated p. 179

This painting is in excellent condition. Original canvas. The paint layers are stable. Under UV light no inpainting is apparent. There is an uneven and old layer of varnish, most likely applied by the artist.
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Masson painted Le Jardin saccagé while living in Spain during the tumultuous years leading up to the Civil War. He moved to Spain in 1934 for two years, shortly after he had broken with André Breton and the increasingly propagandistic Surrealist circle. Shortly after moving there, he embarked upon a series of works focused on insects set among brilliantly-colored landscapes, invoking the violence in Spain at the time. Masson carefully orchestrated the interplay of these characters, creating a compositional tension between the effusive palette and the complex anatomy of the insects.  Le Jardin saccagé presents this motif on a monumental scale, one rarely seen in Masson's early work.

William Rubin has written of the significance of these this series, "Though hallucinatory in character, the Insect pictures began from very close direct observation. Masson, who can spend hours 'interrogating' a square foot of earth, wanted to express in these pictures what he calls the 'magnetic aspect' of the Spanish landscape. The insects are the best works Masson produced during his stay in Spain from 1934 through 1936, perhaps because they were prompted by an immediate and personal kind of motif" (William Rubin & Carolyn Lanchner, André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting, 1976, New York, p. 40). The celebrated dealers, Wildenstein and Company launched a seminal exhibition for Masson that highlighted the most successful of these works, including Le Jardin saccagé, in London in 1936.