Hand off the wheel
Breton had defined the method. Now somebody had to figure out how to actually paint or draw with the reasoning mind switched off. This is the first of Surrealism’s two streams, the automatist stream, and its rule is simple to state and very hard to do: let the unconscious make the marks. Hand off the wheel. Whatever shows up, keep.
The purest demonstration came from André Masson, whom Breton brought in in 1924. Masson had been bayoneted and badly wounded in the war, and he kept the pen moving even when the line frightened him. He made what he called automatic drawing: he put a pen to paper and let it run with no subject, no plan, no control, the line tangling across the sheet, and only afterward looked for the half-figures, the limbs and beaks and torsos, that had surfaced in the snarl. The picture was not designed and then executed. It was let happen and then read.
A carnival out of hunger
The automatist stream’s founding painting belongs to the Catalan painter Joan Miró, and by his own account it came out of an empty stomach. The Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–25) is a nursery-bright room boiling over with dancing shapes: a winged die, a cat with a guitar, a ladder, a single staring eye, a crowd of little creatures that are not quite animals and not quite toys. Miró said he painted it out of hallucinations brought on by hunger, the visions of a poor young artist who could not afford to eat. The shapes are what get called biomorphic, meaning they look like living forms, blobs and cells and limbs, without being any creature you can name. From here Miró keeps simplifying, and his stream of Surrealism slides, picture by picture, toward pure abstraction.
Rubbing an image up out of the floor
The most inventive automatist was the German painter Max Ernst, who had crossed over from Dada and treated chance as a machine to be engineered. His great invention was frottage, from the French frotter, “to rub.” Lay a sheet of paper over something with a strong grain, a plank floor, weathered wood, and rub a soft pencil across the top so the texture comes up through the paper. Ernst would then look into the random grain the way you look for faces in clouds, and coax out forests, leaves, birds and beasts the wood had suggested. He collected thirty-four of these into a portfolio, Histoire Naturelle (1926), a deadpan field guide to creatures no naturalist ever catalogued because the grain of a floorboard dreamed them up. He had a companion trick for paint, grattage, scraping wet paint off a textured surface so chance shaped what stayed.
Hold all three side by side and the stream comes clear. Masson hands the composition to the running line, Miró to the drifting shape, Ernst to the grain of the wood. None of them sat down to paint a thing they had already pictured. They built methods for getting the conscious mind out of the way, and then read what was left. It is the part of Surrealism that points forward most directly, because twenty years later, in New York, this exact instinct would become the engine of an entirely American movement.
Automatism as a party game
Automatism did not stay solitary. From about 1925 Breton’s circle turned it into a group game called the exquisite corpse (in French cadavre exquis): players take a folded sheet and each, in turn, draws or writes one section of a figure, the head, then the torso, then the legs, without seeing what the others did, passing it along folded so the next hand works blind. Then the paper is unfolded and an absurd composite stares back, a creature no single mind designed. The game took its name from the very first sentence it produced, assembled the same blind way: “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau,” the exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine. It is automatism made social, chance composing the whole room’s picture at once. The American Man Ray ran the same instinct through the camera, making cameraless rayographs (objects laid on light-sensitive paper and exposed, so the picture forms by chance) and eerie solarized portraits, the camera as an unconscious instrument.