The Fugitive: an eye on a wheel, floating over wood

The portfolio has thirty-four plates; the one shown here is a single representative sheet, plate 30, titled The Fugitive (in French, L’Évadé, “the escapee”). It is a small, landscape-format plate, roughly ten and a quarter inches tall by sixteen and three-quarters inches wide, the look of pencil dragged over something grained, and it is strikingly quiet: no color, no hard outline, just a soft, even graphite-gray field. Everything on it was rubbed up, not drawn.

At the center is the thing that holds the plate together: a round disc crossed by radiating spokes. It reads two ways at once. It is a single staring eye (a lone eye is one of the recurring motifs across the whole portfolio) and it is just as plainly a wheel, a rimmed hub with spokes running out to the edge. Look at how it is made: the spokes are not ruled lines but ridges of rubbed grain that your eye assembles into a rim and a hub. The picture never decides between eye and wheel, and it does not have to. Letting the shape flip between the two is the whole pleasure of it.

The disc does not float free. It is lodged inside a body, a soft, tapering, finnedform, something between a fish and a beast, that gives the eye-wheel a creature to belong to. This is the “organism” the deadpan title asks you to take it for: a fugitive specimen in Ernst’s invented natural history, the kind of thing a straight-faced atlas would caption and number. Nothing about it was observed from any animal. It is grain coaxed into anatomy, a body built out of the wood’s own pattern.

Springing off the body are thin curved whisker-like spines and longer blade or feather shapes. Follow any one of them with your eye and it dissolves, after an inch, back into the parallel striations of the wood it was rubbed from. That is the portfolio’s whole vocabulary in miniature (whiskers, blades, leaves, feathers, antennae) and all of it is the same trick: a recognizable natural part conjured out of nothing but rubbed grain.

The creature floats over a field of cross-hatched, striated grain, the “ground” or “sky” of the plate, and the literal rubbing of grained wood, the floorboard itself surfacing as texture. Trace the parallel striations across the lower half of the sheet and you are looking straight at the seam where board becomes image: it is a landscape and a plank at the same instant, and the plate will not let you settle on one. That oscillation, the eye flipping between “this is texture” and “this is a creature in a place,” is exactly the effect Ernst was after. It makes you do the seeing.

And keep one fact in view as you look: this is a reproduction. The plate has the smooth, faintly velvety tone of a collotype print, none of the bite of an engraved line and none of the tooth of an original graphite rubbing. You are looking at a photograph of a drawing, printed in a book. Histoire Naturelle publishes the frottages; the sheet in front of you is not the rubbing, but its careful, even-toned echo.