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Nature represents one of the through-lines in Surrealist André Masson's oeuvre. In 1923, one of his earliest series that captures the interest of Surrealist founder André Breton is his forests, in which the cubist style combines with a more symbolist, philosophical view of nature in order to create strange environments.

On his return from Spain at the end of 1936, André Masson rejoined André Breton's Surrealist group, and took part in the group's International Exhibitions in Paris and London in 1938. Faced with the rise of fascism, and hastened by the Spanish Civil War, Masson held the belief of the Greek stoic philosophers in an eternal return of things. Settling in Lower Normandy in 1939, Masson declared that he was ‘taken back by the poetry of the forest’. But he adopted the posture of a hermit philosopher, that of Heraclitus as described by Nietzsche - ‘the non-consideration of present and instantaneous things making up the essence of the great philosophical nature’.

Between 1938-1939, the artist is working on his Mythologies, a work he considers to be his swan song. The mythical impetus of these large drawings blends with the quest for a universal principle of nature, above all metamorphosis and genitor eroticism. Dans le pur néant shows the desire, the meeting of a mineral couple, gigantic, which feeds the continuous flow of an unfinished world, in perpetual becoming. In this great mythological nature, the plant, the mineral and the human intertwine in a kind of osmosis, a wedding where everything transforms and germinates. As in German Romanticism, especially with Goethe and Novalis, nature is perceived as a supreme truth.

This quest for natural delurium and métamorphosis will pursue with the Martinique drawings, which the artist himself characterizes as a "vegetal delirium". On hiw way to New York escaping the Occupation in 1941, Masson and Breton are stopped in Martinique, where they will remain for a month. There, they are surprised by the discovery of savage, exotic jungles, which will feature heavily in their poetic work, published in "Martinique charmeuse de serpents", which masson illustrates entirely. Much like his earlier cubist forests, nature is presented as a sort of "horror vacui", all-encompasing, organic and hidding a deeper meaning.

Born in 1884 in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, near Paris, Dunoyer de Segonzac began his artistic training in Paris in 1903. He attended the Académie de la Palette and the studios of Luc Olivier Merson and Jean-Paul Lorens.

From 1909, Dunoyer de Segonzac regularly took part in exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants, and exhibited at the Salon de la Section d'Or in October 1912 and at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. His paintings of the period show the inﬂuence of Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Expressionism. Mobilised in August 1914, he left Saint-Tropez to join the army corps in Fontainebleau and, during the First War, produced a series of drawings of the trenches. After the war, the engraver Jean Emile Laboureur introduced him to the technique of etching. This was the defining moment in Dunoyer de Segonzac's artistic output, and he never left printmaking until the end of his life: he created more than 1,600 prints.

Between the two wars, Dunoyer de Segonzac was recognised by the critics, along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, as one of the most important modern artists. In 1925, together with Moreau and André Villeboeuf, Dunoyer de Segonzac bought Charles Camoin's villa in Saint-Tropez, which he renamed Le Maquis. Not falling into the trap of the Mediterranean sun, he devoted himself to translating the rare moments of grey light or dark skies, expressing a timeless feeling and a melancholy atmosphere. Looking at Cézanne's work towards the end of his life, he turned more and more to watercolours. It was his watercolours that brought Dunoyer de Segonzac commercial success as well as oﬃcielle consecration when he was appointed curator of the Musée de L'Annonciade in Saint Tropez when it was created in 1955. He died in Paris in 1974.

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