The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of May 30, 2026

A vertically oriented drypoint and burin print in black ink depicts a dense composition of overlapping, elongated figures and animal-like forms on cream paper. Thick lines create intertwined limbs and curled shapes across the frame. Near the center, a circular shape contains a spiral. Dense vertical and cross-hatching fill the background, flattening the space. A rectangular plate mark borders the image, with pencil markings and a signature in the lower margin.

Entangled Beings

c. 1946–47

André Masson

(French, 1896–1987)
publisher

Galerie Louis Leiris

France
drypoint and burin
Sheet: 63.5 x 48.6 cm (25 x 19 1/8 in.)
Sundry Art - Miscellaneous Fund 2025.163
Catalogue raisonné: Passeron 6; Saphire 227
Location: Not on view

Did You Know?

André Masson was reticent to commit to a single visual style and reinvented himself repeatedly.

Description

This print was created when Surrealist artist André Masson returned to France, after having left the country during the Second World War. During time spent in exile in New York City, he worked at master printer Stanley William Hayter’s renowned Atelier 17, creating prints that built on his ongoing interest in biomorphic forms. The space of Tangled Beings is filled with contorted and overlapping limbs that evoke the human body, but only vaguely. The imagery borders on both abstraction and representation, deliberately intended by the artist to be unsettling. Masson used etched lines of varying depth—a technique that he learned and mastered under Hayter—to create a sense of spatial depth and recession in the composition.
  • {{cite web|title=Entangled Beings|url=false|author=André Masson, Galerie Louis Leiris|year=c. 1946–47|access-date=30 May 2026|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2025.163