The rainy night the floor started drawing

On a wet evening in August 1925, a German-born painter named Max Ernst (1891–1976) was stuck indoors at a small seaside inn at Pornic, a fishing town on the Atlantic coast of France. He had nothing to do and a head full of nothing, and he found himself staring at the floor. The boards of his room were old and scrubbed, their grain worn into deep grooves by a thousand washings, and in the low light he could not stop looking at them. By his own account the grain began to behave like a picture, the way a water stain on a ceiling will start, if you let it, to look like a face.

He had felt this before. As a child Ernst had lain in bed in front of a panel of imitation mahogany, a cheap painted wood-grain, and watched it conjure half-asleep visions, faces and creatures swimming up out of the fake grain as he drifted off. The floorboards at Pornic woke that old habit of seeing. So he did the obvious experimental thing: he laid sheets of paper over the boards and rubbed a soft pencil back and forth across them, so that the ridges of the grain printed themselves onto the paper as a pattern of dark and light. (The technique he had just stumbled into is called frottage, pronounced “fro-TAHZH,” from the French frotter, “to rub.”)

What came up off the boards startled him. The rubbings did not look like wood any more. In his telling they “lost the character of the material being studied” and turned into something else entirely, forests, leaves, eyes, beasts, the sea. The grain of a floorboard had become a window onto a whole imaginary natural world, and all he had done was rub a pencil over it. He went on rubbing, that night and after, and out of the drawings he eventually assembled a kind of mock scientific picture-book of invented nature. He called it Histoire Naturelle, Natural History.

Two dates are worth keeping apart, because popular accounts collapse them. The frottages were made in 1925; the discovery on the floorboards is Ernst’s own dated moment, 10 August 1925. The portfolio was published a year later, in 1926, in Paris. Frottages 1925, portfolio 1926, two separate things, and the difference between them matters more than it sounds.