Iconic views of Toledo 1936

Andre Masson made this painting, Iconic Views of Toledo, and it’s just explosive. Look at the deep oranges and reds, punctuated by an ochre yellow. You can almost feel him attacking the canvas, grappling with ideas of mythology, landscape, and the human form. I wonder what he was thinking about when he made this, trying to conjure up figures from the deep recesses of his mind. Did he feel any anxiety as he built up the image? I'm drawn to the figure at the top, with its almost anatomical rendering and how that contrasts with the minotaur figure to the right. There’s a tension between the classical and the surreal, with the city of Toledo almost floating in the middle ground. Masson had a big influence on the Abstract Expressionists. You can see a similar kind of energy in his paintings, like he was tearing open a new world. Artists are always in conversation with each other across time. It's like we're all just trying to figure things out together through paint, embracing uncertainty and ambiguity along the way.