The massacre becomes, between 1931-1933, one of the most fecund themes of the artist’s repertory, putting forth scenes of collective death of a brutal violence, an exaltation of death and dismemberment, of fights of a primeval energy. Masson commences his reflexion on the theme of the massacre through the portrayal of animal combats, a totemic mirror of the natural order. At the turn of the 1930s the human element starts to enter his compositions, a slide from the animalistic to the human and not the contrary.

A primordial energy springs from the composition, as Masson is always able to capture the mysterious system of vital forces that animates existence. The line intervenes in the imprecise chromatic touches as in a hunt. As Michel Leiris once remarked on the artist, Masson manages to “fix in place the absence of fixity”, the unforeseen and elusive side of life. The colour is bright, loud and chaotic, the forms are angular and impossible to grasp here we find the Futurist aesthetic of exaltation of war and the untamed colour of Fauvism that had once made the critics gasp that we find ourselves amongst the beasts (fauves in the original French).

The rhythm of The Massacre of the Horses has something of a ceremony. It is a magical violence with cathartic connotations, that should prove capable of exorcising the demons of war and the darkest impulses of the human unconscious.