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Cockfight

1930
André Masson (French, 1896–1987)

One of the battling gamecocks in Cockfight crows to communicate dominance, while the other appears defeated or dead. Just a few details are enough to express the corporeal reality of the two roosters: leaf-shaped combs, twisted geometric bodies, and spiky spurs all arranged along a whiplash line. It appears that their anatomies have already been dissected during combat.

André Masson’s deep identification with struggle and death was conditioned, in large measure, by his traumatic experience fighting and being grievously wounded as a twenty-one-year-old solider in the French army during World War I. Embarking on his artistic career in the war’s aftermath, Masson endeavored to change the austere formal innovations of modern painting by infusing them with violence, anguish, and darkness. Scenes of fighting animals evoking the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle for existence in nature are especially prominent in Masson’s work in the years leading up to Cockfight.


Object Details

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