André Masson (1896-1987)was a French painter, sculptor, illustrator, designer, writer, and graphic artist. After studying painting in Brussels and Paris, he joined the Surrealist movement in 1924 and became a leading practitioner of automatism. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he created intense images that explored themes of violence, psychic pain, eroticism, and physical metamorphosis. Masson lived in Spain from 1934 to 1936 and later moved to the United States from 1941 to 1945, where he became an important link between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.