Histoire Naturelle

A mock natural-history atlas whose 34 plates were not drawn but rubbed: pencil dragged over the grain of old floorboards until forests, feathers and staring eyes surfaced out of pure chance, and Ernst, who called himself a spectator of his own pictures, simply read them out.

1. 1
   The spoked eye, or wheel

   Upper center of the plate, the round disc with radiating spokes set into the creature’s body

   The plate’s engine: a circular disc crossed by radiating spokes, so it reads at once as a single staring eye and as a wheel. The single eye is a recurring motif across the portfolio. Look at how the spokes are not drawn so much as found, ridges of rubbed graphite that the eye assembles into a rim and hub. Whether it is eye or wheel is left for you; the picture lets it flip between the two.
2. 2
   The finned creature-body

   Wrapped around and below the disc, the soft tapering form the “eye” sits inside

   The disc is lodged in a body: a fish-or-beast shape, finned and tapering, that gives the floating eye a creature to belong to. It is the “organism” the deadpan title (The Fugitive) asks you to read it as, a specimen in Ernst’s invented natural history. Nothing here is observed from life; the body is grain coaxed into anatomy.
3. 3
   The whisker and blade forms

   Springing out from the body, the thin curved spines and leaf-like blades around the creature

   Fine whisker-like spines and longer blade or feather shapes radiate from the body. Trace any one of them and it dissolves back into the parallel striations of the wood it was rubbed from. This is the portfolio’s vocabulary, leaves, feathers, stalks, antennae, all conjured from the same grain.
4. 4
   The cross-hatched wood-grain ground

   The whole field behind the creature, the striated, cross-hatched ground it floats over

   The “sky” or “ground” the creature floats over is the literal rubbing of grained, cross-hatched wood, the floorboard itself surfacing as texture. Follow the parallel striations and you are looking at the seam between board and image: it is landscape and lumber at the same time, and the picture never quite lets you forget the second.
5. 5
   Frottage, the method itself

   Everywhere, in the soft, even, graphite-gray rubbing that builds every form on the plate

   There is no outline, no hand-laid shading, no observed contour anywhere on the sheet. Every form is built from pencil dragged over a textured surface (frottage, from the French frotter, “to rub”) and then nudged into legibility. The “drawing” is found, not laid down, the accident does the drawing.
6. 6
   It is a reproduction, and it shows

   In the even, slightly velvety tone of the print, with none of the bite of an engraved line

   The plate has the smooth, faintly velvety tonality of a collotype, a photomechanical print, rather than the tooth of an original graphite rubbing or the bite of an etched line. Histoire Naturelle publishes the frottages; it is not the rubbings. What you are looking at is a photograph of a drawing, printed.