One of the pioneers of automatic drawing, the French painter and graphic artist André Masson (1896­–1987) was an influential figure in Surrealism. Born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Masson was admitted to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels at the age of eleven, and later studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His work from the early 1920s was influenced by Cubism, before meeting André Breton (1896–1966) who attended his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Simon and invited Masson to join the Surrealists in 1924. Letting his pen travel freely across the paper without premeditation, Masson made automatic drawings characterized by fast-moving, meandering lines that delineate abstract and biomorphic forms. He also experimented with other media and unconventional practices. For example, by flinging sand onto a gessoed canvas, he sought to capture images created by chance. After Masson parted ways with Breton and the Surrealists in 1929, his paintings and drawings from the 1930s turned to themes of violence, eroticism, and physical metamorphosis. In danger of persecution from the Nazis for his art, Masson fled to the United States during World War II, where he lectured widely and became an important influence on American Abstract Expressionism. He returned to France in 1946, and his paintings from the postwar period drew on myriad sources, spanning from the Romantic landscapes of J.M.W. Turner (1775­–1851), Impressionism, Zen Buddhism, to Chinese ideograms and calligraphy.

Masson's work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. The Baltimore Museum of Art mounted the first major exhibition of his work in 1941, followed by a full-scale retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1976. Masson received the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1954, the Sao Paulo Biennial Prize in 1963, in addition to designations from the Legion of Honor and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He also regularly designed costumes and decors for the stage, and in 1965, André Malraux, then the Minister of Cultural Affairs, invited him to paint the ceiling of the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris.

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