A small sheet, into MoMA by purchase
This is one of several automatic drawings Masson made in 1924, a small cluster that share the plain habit of the line and not much else; the bare title “Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924” is attached to more than one sheet, which is a real trap. The one we have been looking at is the drawing the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds under that plain title: ink on paper, the small upright sheet, MoMA’s object number 38201. (The provenance, the documented chain of who has owned a work in order, is thin for this sheet before it reached the museum; the sources do not lay out the earlier owners, so the chain stays unstated.)
The museum records how it came in with a single word: Purchase. The exact year MoMA bought it, and the named fund the money came from, are not in the record we can read, so no year or fund is given here. What is solid is the end state: the small 1924 sheet is in MoMA’s collection by purchase, where it stands as the textbook example of Surrealist automatic drawing.
From a Paris pen to American paint
The drawing’s real afterlife is not in its ownership but in its method. The idea that the mark could come before the subject (that an unplanned, racing line could be the real content of a picture) did not stay in 1924. It crossed the Atlantic, and so did Masson: he spent the war years (1941–1945) in exile in the United States, drawing automatically again after years away from the method, and the younger New York painters watched him do it. When the Abstract Expressionists there in the 1940s made the act of painting itself the subject of the canvas, the automatic line was one of their inheritances, and Jackson Pollock’s debt to Masson’s automatism is one of the best-documented lineages in modern art. The poured and dripped canvases that became the most famous American paintings of the century have a grandparent in a nine-inch French sheet covered in one continuous line.
One footnote on rights, because it is genuinely two-sided. The drawing was first published in France in 1924, which puts it in the public domain in the United States, the basis is the early date of publication, not anything about the artist’s life. Masson, though, lived a very long time and died in 1987, so by the life-plus-seventy rule the work is not public domain in France or the rest of the European Union for decades yet. It appears here on the US public-domain footing. The line that was meant to escape every rule still runs into one or two on its way to your screen.