An edition, not an object
Because Histoire Naturelle is a published portfolio and not a unique painting, its “provenance” (the chain of who has owned a work of art) is not a single trail but a scatter. In 1926 the Paris gallery of Jeanne Bucher printed an edition of about 300 copies(plus six set aside as hors-commerce, “not for sale”), on Japan and vellum papers, nearly all of them signed by Ernst. The portfolio went out into the world as a multiple, the way a book does, so that instead of one owner there are hundreds, and instead of one wall there are print rooms across several countries.
Where they landed is a list of the great collections. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds the full portfolio and catalogues many of its plates individually. Tate in London holds it; German Ernst collections at Bonn and at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl have shown it; and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne holds the very plate shown here, The Fugitive. Numbered copies of the edition still surface at auction now and again, which is exactly what you would expect of a published portfolio rather than a one-of-a-kind object. There is no headline sale, no single price to quote, no dramatic chain of hands. The work simply dispersed.
Chance, turned into a method everyone could use
What did not disperse was the idea. Frottage was a proof of concept: it showed that chance and found texture could be a real, repeatable engine for serious art, Dada had toyed with chance, but Ernst made it a method you could teach. Ernst himself carried it straight into grattage in 1927 (the scraping-paint cousin) and, around 1939, took up décalcomania(pressing and peeling paint, a chance technique the Surrealist Óscar Domínguez had pioneered); the broader Surrealist program of letting accident and the unconscious supply the image runs through these techniques and on into the chance-driven abstraction that followed the war. The eye reading creatures out of random marks (cloud-gazing made into a discipline) turned out to be one of the twentieth century’s most portable ideas.
And it leaves the artist in a strange new posture, which is really the point of the whole thing. Ernst stopped describing himself as the author of his pictures and started calling himself their spectator: the one who watches the floorboards draw and decides what he is looking at. The forms in The Fugitive (the eye that is also a wheel, the finned body, the whiskers that melt back into grain) were not, in his account, invented by him at all. They were already in the wood. He just rubbed a pencil over it and read them out.