The hand let off the leash

In the autumn of 1924, in Paris, a poet named André Breton (1896–1966) published a pamphlet that gave a name to a new movement and, more usefully, a method. The movement was Surrealism. The method was automatism, and the whole drawing here is one sheet of it, so the word is worth being plain about. To work automatically is to let the hand move without conscious control, fast enough to outrun the part of you that edits and corrects, so that whatever surfaces onto the page comes from below deliberate thought. That “below” is the unconscious: the layer of the mind, in the Freud-soaked thinking of these men, that runs under reason and taste and good manners and is supposedly truer for it. Switch those filters off, the wager goes, and the deeper thing leaks straight onto the paper.

Breton had arrived at the idea first in words. Back in 1919, with his friend Philippe Soupault, he had written Les Champs magnétiques (“The Magnetic Fields”) by automatic writing: racing the pen across the page, transcribing whatever phrases came, refusing to stop and shape them. The point was to catch the mind in the act of thinking, before the writer-self could tidy it. Five years later the Manifesto of Surrealismbuilt a whole program on that experiment, and defined Surrealism itself as “psychic automatism.” His exact words, the ones this drawing answers, come at the end, in front of the sheet they describe.

Automatic writing already existed. The open question in 1924 was whether you could do the same thing with a drawing hand, whether a pen could be turned loose on a blank sheet the way it had been turned loose on a blank page. The man who answered, and who became the method’s leading practitioner, was André Masson (1896–1987). Starting in the winter of 1923, before the manifesto even appeared, Masson was among the very first to draw this way: pen to paper with no subject and no composition decided in advance, the hand moving fast and the marks allowed to fall where they would.

He did not invent the loose idea of an “automatic” drawing from nothing (the Dada artist Jean (Hans) Arp had made chance-driven works a few years earlier) but Masson is the figure who tied automatic drawing to Breton’s program and made it a Surrealist instrument. He had reasons of his own to want a way of making images that did not require composing them. He was a badly wounded veteran of the First World War, carrying what we would now call trauma, and across his wider practice he pushed himself into altered states to loosen his grip on the pen: working in a kind of semi-trance, sometimes after long stretches without food or sleep, sometimes under the influence of drugs, often alongside the writers and painters in his orbit on the rue Blomet, among them Joan Miró, Michel Leiris, and Antonin Artaud. (That is his practice in general; no source ties any one of those conditions to this particular small sheet, so read them as the weather Masson worked in, not as a caption for this drawing.)