Battle of Fishes

Mediums: oil, canvas, sand, pencil, coal.
Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Briefly about the painting:

The plot refers to the experience of the artist’s participation in the First World War, where he was seriously injured and was recovering for a long time at a hospital and at a psychiatric institution. His art consistently depicts massacres, bizarre confrontations, rape and dismemberment. Masson himself noticed that men in his paintings rarely remain uninjured. The battle of Fishes with their teeth-razors reveals the sadism and the senselessness of shedding blood. In this painting, Masson experimented with the technique: throwing sand on the canvas and shaking off its excess, he applied paints, blowing them out of a tube. As a result, the contours were “almost always irrational”, and he designated the general forms with pencils and coal.