A pencil, a grainy surface, and a reader of accident

Frottage is so simple a child does it on a coin and a piece of paper. You take a grainy, textured surface (weathered floorboards, the grain of a plank, a leaf, a piece of sacking, the crust of a loaf of bread) lay a sheet of paper over it, and rub a soft pencil across the paper so that the texture underneath surfaces as a pattern of marks. The high ridges come up dark; the grooves stay pale. What you get is not a drawing of the surface but a direct imprint of it, the texture itself transferred straight onto the page.

The ordinary part ends there, and Ernst’s real move was what he did after the rubbing. He looked at the field of accidental marks and read images into them, the way you find a dog or a ship in a passing cloud, and then worked them up, nudging a grain pattern here, sharpening a shape there, until a forest or a feathered beast or a single staring eye stood clearly out of the chance texture. He was not inventing the forms out of his own head; he was finding them already latent in the marks the surface had handed him. The wood did half the work and the eye did the other half.

He extended it past floorboards fast. Any grained or rough surface would do, and the portfolio’s plates are rubbed from a whole catalogue of them. The result is a mock natural-history atlas: the frottages are presented as if they were the engraved plates of a straight-faced scientific book about nature, complete with deadpan, taxonomic-sounding titles, The Habit of Leaves, The Wheel of Light, Seismic Plants, The Fugitive. Wood grain stands in for nature itself, and the joke and the uncanny both live in the gap between the solemn caption and the accident that produced the image.

There is one distinction that matters for what you are looking at. Histoire Naturelle is not the original rubbings. In 1926 the Paris gallery of Jeanne Bucher published the portfolio as a set of 34 plates (numbered I–XXXIV), and those plates are collotypes (photomechanical reproductions, a printing process that photographs a drawing and prints it with an even, slightly velvety tone) after the frottages. So the portfolio reproduces Ernst’s pencil rubbings; it does not contain them. The original frottage drawings are separate works. Calling the portfolio “34 frottages,” as if the sheets were the rubbings themselves, gets it wrong: they are prints of the rubbings. The poet Hans Arp(also known as Jean Arp), Ernst’s old Dada comrade, wrote the preface.

One more thing not to confuse, because the two words rhyme and the techniques are cousins. Frottage (1925) is rubbing a pencil over paper laid on a textured surface, a drawing technique, and the whole basis of Histoire Naturelle. Grattage, which Ernst developed a couple of years later, in 1927, is scraping wet paint off a canvas laid over a textured object, the oil-paint cousin of the same idea. Histoire Naturelle is frottage. Rubbing, not scraping. Keep them apart.