Entangled Beings

c. 1946–47

Galerie Louis Leiris

Culture

France

Medium

drypoint and burin

Measurements

Sheet: 63.5 x 48.6 cm (25 x 19 1/8 in.)

Credit Line

Sundry Art - Miscellaneous Fund 2025.163

Catalogue raisonné

Passeron 6; Saphire 227

State

State II/II

Edition

Edition of 30

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Location

Not on view

Did You Know?

André Masson was reticent to commit to a single visual style and reinvented himself repeatedly.

Description

This print was created when Surrealist artist André Masson returned to France, after having left the country during the Second World War. During time spent in exile in New York City, he worked at master printer Stanley William Hayter’s renowned Atelier 17, creating prints that built on his ongoing interest in biomorphic forms. The space of Tangled Beings is filled with contorted and overlapping limbs that evoke the human body, but only vaguely. The imagery borders on both abstraction and representation, deliberately intended by the artist to be unsettling. Masson used etched lines of varying depth—a technique that he learned and mastered under Hayter—to create a sense of spatial depth and recession in the composition.