Pen to paper, no subject, no plan

The procedure was almost nothing, which is the point. Masson sat down with a small sheet of paper and a pen of ink, and he did not decide first what to draw. There was no subject in his head to be set down, no scene to be arranged, no figure to be placed. He simply began to move the hand, and to move it fast, faster than judgment could intervene to correct a line or improve a shape. MoMA, which owns the sheet, describes the hand in exactly this register: moving across the paper “like a medium channeling a spirit.” The line is laid down before the deciding mind can catch up to it.

What you get from that, at first, is a tangle: a fine, lacelike web of pen marks with no obvious picture in it. And then the second thing happens, the thing that made the method interesting rather than merely random. As Masson worked, he “soon found hints of images emerging from the abstract, lacelike web of pen marks.” The line, racing along with no plan, kept almost resolving into something (a hand, a bird, a fragment of a body) and then dissolving again. The image was not decided in advance and then drawn; it surfaced, half-formed, out of marks that were made for their own sake.

Here is the part the romantic version of the story leaves out, and it matters. The legend of automatism is a pure trance with zero conscious input, the artist a passive channel and nothing more. That is the ideal; it is not quite how the sheet was finished. The sources are explicit that Masson let the automatic marks stand but then, at times, elaborated on them with conscious changes or additions, once a shape suggested itself in the tangle, he might coax it a little, let it stand, nudge the web toward the form it was tipping into. (In his related sand paintings of a couple of years later he did this more openly, going back in with pencil to draw figures out of the poured ground.) So the description is not “pure” automatism but a drawing that is largely automatic, with conscious shaping after the fact. The hand ran free; the eye, afterward, chose what to keep.

That distinction is the difference between a slogan and a fact. “Psychic automatism in its pure state” is Breton’s definition of an aim. The sheet in front of us is the aim pursued by a real hand that could not entirely stop being an artist. Both things are true at once, and the drawing is more interesting for it.