Animals have always held a special place in André Masson's work. Integrated into the landscape, they become totemic, symbols of the primordial forces that govern nature. In the artist's bestiary, the fish takes a place of predilection - it plays a role in the still lifes and Cubist meal scenes of 1923-24, and is one of the actors in the Massacres of the early 1930s, caught in impossible struggles with horses, an exorcism of the spectres of war and human violence.

Masson's predilection for fish is no accident - a follower of Heraclitus' philosophy of flux, which postulates a world in eternal motion, the fish is, for the artist, the symbol of moving water. Masson's American period saw a change in style, inspired by the wild landscapes of America. The animal is often integrated into the landscape, both part of a telluric, untamed world. The confusion of genres is specific to Surrealism: the acquatic world enters the terrestrial here. Returning to France after the war, Masson comes back to his surrealist themes after an “impressionist” period.