安德烈·馬森

Galerie Simon, Paris

Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago

Mr & Mrs Harold X. Weinstein, Chicago (acquired from the above by 1961)

Walter Lugiai, Milan (acquired circa 1975. Sold: Sotheby's, Paris, 3rd June 2010, lot 52)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Treasures of Chicago Collectors, 1961

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts & Paris, Galeries Nationales d'Expositions du Grand Palais, André Masson, 1976-77, no. 76, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

San Marino, Pinacoteca, André Masson - L'universo della pittura, 1989, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

André Masson, Retrospective Exhibition (exhibition catalogue), Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago, 1961, no. 18

Jean-Paul Clébert, Mythologie d'André Masson, Geneva, 1971, no. 125, illustrated

Christa Lichtenstern, Metamorphose in der Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Weinheim, 1990, vol. I, fig. 61, illustrated p. 135 

Guite Masson, Martin Masson & Catherine Lœwer, André Masson. Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, Vaumarcus, 2010, vol. II, no. 1940*7, illustrated in colour p. 397

This extraordinary portrait of the great German poet is one of the most accomplished of the imaginary portraits that Masson painted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During this time, the artist increasingly drew inspiration from legend, particularly ancient Greek mythology, which provided him with a variety of imaginary, dream-like imagery, as well as with metaphors that he used to comment on the world which surrounded him. He also executed a number of imaginary portraits, including several depictions of Goethe, two of which are now housed in The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (fig. 1), as well as Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Dante, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Heraclitus.

Writing about Masson’s portraits of Goethe, Carolyn Lanchner observed: ‘Marked by a geometric ordering of the support, low-relief modeling, and strong graphism, they are soberly modulated in clear, forceful colors. Masson recalls, “I reread a lot of Goethe at that time, especially the secret Goethe, the erotic Goethe… the Goethe of The Green Serpent, that alchemic tale.” All of the various portraits […] present us with a philosopher whose science is based on sensuous experience combined with poetic intuition. Here, indeed, is the seer’ (C. Lanchner in André Masson (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 154).

Masson saw in Goethe the quintessential incarnation of what he conceptualised as ‘The Emblematic Man’, the visionary for whom intelligence is not acquired through Cartesian pure logic but through the contemplation of Nature and the instinct for the sublime that was so dear to the Surrealists. In order to illustrate multiple dimensions of Goethe’s genius, Masson combines symbols from different languages: symbols from Nature such as the mineral forming the poet’s left eye, the vegetable leaf at the tip of his cloak or the plant growing on his cheek; and symbols of geometry or human reason such as the multi-coloured polyhedron emerging from the left eye which seems to represent the philosopher’s stone containing the hidden mysteries of colour and organic life, mysteries to which Goethe too devoted many of his works.