Born in Picardy, in France, he moved with his family to Belgium, where he began to train as an artist at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He moved to Paris in 1912, enrolling in the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts and displaying a strong interest in Cubism.

When World War I broke out in 1914, he was drafted into the armed forces. Sustaining a serious chest injury, he was sent back to Paris to convalesce.

In the immediate postwar period, he began to frequent Surrealist circles through the good offices of André Breton.

Abandoning the Surrealist movement in the late 1920s, he turned to painting works of a violent or erotic nature, frequently in connection with events in the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, he designed the front cover of the first edition of Acéphale, a magazine founded by French philosopher Georges Bataille, and he continued to work with the publication until 1939.

At the outbreak of World War II, when France was occupied by German troops, his work was branded “degenerate art”. He managed to flee the country on a ship bound for Martinique, and from there to reach the United States. On his arrival in New York, the customs officials who inspected his luggage confiscated a number of his erotic drawings, destroying them before his very eyes. He settled in New Preston in Connecticut, and his work was to have a considerable influence on such abstract expressionists as Jackson Pollock.

Returning to France at the end of the war, Masson settled in Aix-en-Provence, where he began to paint landscapes. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the last private owner of Gustave Courbet’s controversial painting L’Origine du Monde, commissioned Masson to build a wooden frame for the picture with a sliding panel that could hide it as needed. Masson produced a surrealistic and evocative version of Courbet’s painting for the front of the panel.

Considered by now to be a master of Surrealism, he was the object of major retrospective exhibitions in Berlin and Amsterdam, also showing his work at the Venice Biennale of 1972.