One line, and the bodies that almost form in it

It is small. The sheet is about nine and a quarter inches tall by eight and an eighth wide (a touch over 23 by 20 centimeters), an upright page you could hold in two hands, taller than it is wide, not a wide horizontal sheet, which is one quick way to know you are looking at this drawing and not at one of the other automatic sheets Masson made the same year. The smallness is part of the meaning: this is an intimate trace of a single hand, not a grand statement on a wall.

The line is almost the whole drawing. Pick a point anywhere in the ink and follow it, and you can travel most of the sheet without the pen seeming to lift off. It is one continuous, nervous skein that loops back on itself, doubles, races, and knots, a single unbroken thread laid down by a hand that was not stopping to plan. The speed is in it too: the line whips past a turn and overshoots, thickens into a worried tangle, then shoots across an open patch. That uneven rhythm is the pace of the drawing made visible. This is a fast mark, and its velocity is part of what you are looking at.

Let the eye go soft, the way shapes form in a cloud, and a second layer comes up. Out of the tangle, fragments of bodies and creatures half-emerge and sink back. A hand nearly resolves, fingers spreading, and then dissolves before it becomes a whole figure. A bird catches for a moment in a wing-curve or the dart of a beak. A soft rounded curve reads as a breast; a tapering body reads as a fish. None of these is drawn-then-finished the way you would draw a hand on purpose. Each is a shape the eye finds in marks that were not made to depict it, the line tipping, again and again, toward a recognizable body or animal and then letting it go. The drawing never settles into one whole figure. It stays at the threshold, all almost.

What is not there matters as much: no ground, no floor, no horizon. Nothing tells you which way is up or where a body would stand. The marks float in an unanchored, all-over field rather than sitting inside a described space. There is no scene for the drawing to be a view of, which is exactly right for a picture that is a record of an act and not a window onto a place.

The sentence that defines what this drawing is reaching for was published the same year, by Breton, in the Manifesto of Surrealism. He wrote it as a mock-dictionary entry, defining the new word the way a dictionary would. Here it is, in the standard English translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Manifestoes of Surrealism, 1969):

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express (verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner) the actual functioning of thought.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.

That is the program this sheet belongs to: an attempt to express “the actual functioning of thought” directly, not a thing seen but the mind in the act of running. Set against the drawing, the phrase “in any other manner” is doing quiet work, Breton wrote it for words, and Masson is the one proving that the “other manner” could be a pen on a blank sheet. The one caution the picture itself has already taught us holds here: “in its purestate” is Breton’s ideal, and the sheet is that ideal pursued by a real hand that elaborated some of the marks afterward.