Religious Narrative in André Masson's Painting: A Kierkegaardian Reading

Abstract

This paper advances a philosophical reading of André Masson's Dawn in Montserrat and Landscape with Miracles through the framework of Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Setting aside iconographic analysis, it identifies a structural and atmospheric analogy between Masson's visual language and the existential predicament of Abraham as Kierkegaard construes it, namely the individual held in absolute solitude before a decision that no existing ethical or linguistic order can legitimate. Dawn in Montserrat gives visual form to Abraham's silent approach to the mountain, rendering the individual encircled and indicted by the very universal laws he once upheld. Landscape with Miracles, by contrast, arrests the decisive moment of withstanding temptation and enacting the leap of faith, the sun rising not over a resolved narrative but over an act whose content remains, by necessity, unspeakable. What both canvases withhold from the viewer is not a suspense awaiting imaginative completion but an abyss resistant to any prior figuration. That the interpreter cannot disentangle bodily perception from cultural formation in reading these canvases is itself a reenactment of the pre-linguistic condition Kierkegaard describes. Masson's paintings are not representations of that existential state but instances of it.