In March 1942, fourteen artists displaced by war sat for a group portrait by George Platt Lynes on the occasion of Artists in Exile at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, 41 East 57th Street. The photograph is solemn and slightly theatrical. Among the sitters were Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, André Breton, Roberto Matta, and André Masson, arranged in two rows against a plain ground, looking less like a movement than like a company assembled by circumstance. It was reportedly made in Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment, seven months before she opened Art of This Century.[1] What the photograph records is the arrival not only of artists but of methods, quarrels, and unfinished pictorial problems, several of which would be taken up by painters formed outside the Parisian avant-garde.

Masson’s own arrival, ten months earlier, had been less ceremonial. He left Marseille in the spring of 1941 with the assistance of Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, sailing on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle alongside Breton, Victor Serge, Wifredo Lam, and Claude Lévi-Strauss to Martinique, where Vichy authorities detained the passengers before permitting them to continue north. When he reached New York, customs officers inspecting his portfolio judged a group of erotic drawings pornographic and destroyed them in front of him. Accounts differ on the number, and Masson is reported to have objected that his inspectors possessed no mythology of their own.[2] One of Masson’s first official encounters with America was not with a museum or a gallery but with censorship. By that summer he had settled in New Preston, Connecticut, where he remained productive until his return to France in the autumn of 1945.[3]

What he brought with him had already changed the meaning of drawing. Breton’s first manifesto had staked Surrealism on the promise of “pure psychic automatism,” a formula borrowed from literary practice and left largely undefined for the visual arts.[4] Masson, who had been severely wounded in the First World War and never stopped drawing its consequences, tested the promise at the level of the moving hand.[5] He described automatism afterward as a kind of writing, and returned often to an image of a length of string dropped onto blank paper, falling into configurations no hand would have designed.[6] In the automatic drawings, line stops functioning as contour or as preparatory notation. It becomes the record of its own passage.

The Drawing

The Dessin automatique of 1924 presented here belongs to the year in which that practice took shape, and it is unusual in showing the practice mid-formation.[7] This is not one of the fully released lacelike webs with which Masson’s automatism is usually identified. It is more informative than those sheets, because the armature from which automatism was separating itself is still visible.

A ruled border encloses the image. Crosses mark the corners like registration points. Faint orthogonals recede toward a vanishing point. Every sign of the atelier is present, which is to say that the hand here is not simply outrunning thought; it is constructing. What it constructs is a seated nude, taken apart and rebuilt in a Cubist grammar. A breast appears as a circle pinned by a dot, half anatomy and half compass point. The torso swings through an S-curve. A guitar-like curve supplies the figure’s hips, importing an object from Cubist still life into the body. A pyramid, a mast, stepped planes, hatching, and stipple hold the whole in shallow, tilting space.

The tension between the title and the structure is the evidence, not a discrepancy to be explained away. Automatism, for Masson, was never the absence of order. It was a wager about where order originates. The sheet shows form rising out of impulse rather than form being abandoned, and it sits on the hinge between a Cubist still-life vocabulary on one side and the biomorphic automatic line on the other. Masson had joined Breton’s circle that same year, and the same year Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler gave him his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Simon and became his principal dealer for the remainder of the decade.[8] The drawing was made inside that double affiliation, and it looks like it: a Cubist scaffold housing forms that Cubism could not have produced.

The Museum of Modern Art holds a sheet of the same year, Automatic Drawing.[9] The two works are not versions of one another, and the comparison is useful for the range it exposes rather than for any resemblance. In the MoMA sheet, a fine and largely uninterrupted web releases fragmentary bodies from within its own movement; the drawing has already left the drafting table behind. The present sheet remains closer to the drafting table, and that proximity is precisely its importance. Its interest lies in the friction between construction and release, which is why it belongs to any account of how automatism was arrived at rather than simply practiced.[10]

Drawing as Event

The consequence of automatism was not a new style but a change in what a work of art was taken to be. Five shifts follow from the procedure, and each of them matters for what happened later in New York.

The work moves from image to event: the sheet is not the execution of something previously seen in the mind but the deposit left by an activity. It moves from composition to procedure: what governs the result is a way of proceeding rather than a plan of arrangement. It moves from representation to emergence, since the body in a drawing like this one is not transcribed but permitted to appear. Authorship moves from mastery to a sequence of initiation, recognition, and intervention, the artist beginning a movement, seeing what has surfaced, and deciding where to press. And chance moves from accident to method, becoming constitutive of the work rather than a blemish on it.

Masson’s sand paintings of 1926 and 1927 carried the same argument from line into matter. He applied gesso freely to areas of the canvas, threw sand at it, brushed away the excess, and worked into the contours that remained, drawing around them and applying paint directly from the tube. The forms that emerged were, by his own account, almost always irrational ones.[11] Gravity and adhesion determined much of what stayed on the surface, and the artist’s intelligence operated in relation to those forces rather than above them. This was more than a quarter century before Harold Rosenberg described the American canvas as an arena in which to act.[12]

Transmission Without Succession

The account that follows, in which Surrealism crosses the Atlantic and helps produce Abstract Expressionism, is the conventional one, and it has been under revision for some time. Surrealism Beyond Borders, organized by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern in 2021 and 2022, gathered work from some forty-five countries across eight decades in order to displace the Paris-centered narrative on which the transmission story depends.[13] Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, frequently invoked in support of American succession, argues against reading that succession as an artistic inevitability, situating it instead within Cold War cultural politics.[14] The Masson retrospective mounted at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2024, for the centenary of the first Manifeste du surréalisme, likewise presented an artist whose significance is not exhausted by his position in a relay between two cities.[15]

Those corrections leave a narrower claim standing, and a more defensible one. What passed from Masson to New York was not a style, a national inheritance, or a torch carried between capitals. It was a procedure. Procedures travel differently from movements: they can be learned from a single sheet of paper, adopted without allegiance, and turned to purposes their inventor could not have anticipated. Masson himself had abandoned strict automatism by the late 1920s, finding it constricting, which makes the point plainly enough.[16] The transmission traced below is procedural, and it survives the decentering of Surrealism because it never depended on a center.

Channels

Surrealism reached New York before the exiles did, through the Museum of Modern Art’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism of 1936 and through publications and private collections.[17] What changed after 1941 was the density of contact, and the channels can be named.

Artists in Exile at Pierre Matisse in March 1942 was followed that October by First Papers of Surrealism, hung by Breton with Duchamp’s celebrated webbing of twine through the rooms.[18] Peggy Guggenheim opened Art of This Century in the same month, showing the European collection alongside young Americans and giving Pollock his first solo exhibition in November 1943.[19] Matta, closer in age to the Americans than to Breton, worked directly with younger painters including Motherwell and Baziotes. And Stanley William Hayter, who had known Masson since the late 1920s and had run Atelier 17 in Paris before relocating it to the New School for Social Research in New York, provided the most concrete workshop of all: Pollock made a group of engravings there in 1944 and 1945, and Hayter later recalled Pollock naming him, with Thomas Hart Benton, as one of his two masters.[20] Masson’s own American work circulated through Curt Valentin, his New York dealer from 1943, and through the Connecticut paintings and illustrated books of the exile years, among them Anatomy of My Universe of 1943.[21] These are the mechanisms: exhibitions, a dealer, a workshop, a gallery that mixed generations, and one artist-intermediary of the right age.

Pollock

The relation between Masson and Pollock is best described as a procedural affinity worked out on a shared problem, and it repays precision at a point where the literature has often been careless.

The two artists arrived at the same myth in the same year. Masson painted a Pasiphaé in Connecticut, and is reported to have regarded it as a source for the younger painter.[22] Pollock’s Pasiphaë of 1943, now at the Metropolitan Museum, was originally titled Moby Dick; it acquired its final name after James Johnson Sweeney, visiting the studio, told Pollock the story of the Cretan queen.[23] The documented chain therefore runs through Sweeney rather than through Masson, and the coincidence of subject is better understood as evidence of a shared mythological atmosphere than as an act of borrowing.

The substantive connection lies elsewhere, in the treatment of line. In Masson, automatic line originates in the hand and wrist, ink moving across a sheet at close range. In Pollock, the same procedural premise is transposed to the whole body and to a canvas on the floor, where paint is thrown and threaded and gravity participates in the result. Elizabeth Langhorne has argued that Pollock’s engravings at Atelier 17 were the hinge in this transformation, and that what Hayter taught him about an engraved line moving through the space of the imagination anticipates the three-dimensionality of the poured gesture.[24] The transformation, not the resemblance, is the point. Both painters treat the finished work as the record of an event in which chance and control cannot be separated, and Pollock arrives at that position by changing the scale of the body involved.

Motherwell and Gorky

Robert Motherwell’s education in automatism was firsthand and unusually early. He traveled to Mexico in the summer of 1941 with Matta, spent time in the orbit of Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico City, and returned to New York with automatism understood as a technique rather than as a mystique.[25] For Motherwell it was a way of beginning before convention could intervene, after which judgment resumed: the automatic mark supplies the opening, and composition disciplines what follows. His collages of the mid-1940s show the sequence with unusual clarity, and his editorial work, including The Dada Painters and Poets of 1951, made him the painter-theorist through whom Surrealist procedure entered American abstraction as an articulated method.[26]

Arshile Gorky should not be treated as anyone’s follower. He drew on Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, Matta, and Masson within a broadly biomorphic Surrealist field, and what emerges in paintings such as Garden in Sochi, The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, and Water of the Flowery Mill is automatism converted into memory.[27] The line releases landscape, wound, plant, and erotic form from a space in which recollection and invention cannot be told apart. The kinship with Masson is a shared pictorial logic rather than a debt: the conviction that line can generate forms suspended between abstraction and figuration, and that such forms may carry violence and desire without describing either.

William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko engaged this material more obliquely, largely through the wider Surrealist constellation of myth, psychoanalysis, archaic symbol, and automatic procedure.[28] Masson mattered within that constellation because he refused the separation between abstraction and figuration, which allowed abstraction to carry psychic, erotic, violent, and mythic weight. For painters looking for an exit from provincial realism on one side and formalist purity on the other, that refusal did the necessary work.

Afterward

The consequences run past Abstract Expressionism and in more directions than one. Art Informel and Tachisme in Europe privileged matter, gesture, and the trace of action; Gutai in Japan pressed the relation between body and material further still, and did so on terms that were not derived from Paris or New York. Cy Twombly returned drawing to a field of inscription in which writing, gesture, and erasure are inseparable.[29] The multiplicity is the argument. A procedure released into the world produces parallel inventions rather than a line of descent.

Gerhard Richter offers a coda at a distance. He belongs to no Masson lineage, and the comparison is useful precisely because of the difference. With the squeegee, gesture becomes a semi-mechanical operation: paint is dragged across the surface, the image produced and effaced in the same pass, chance retained but stripped of any promise of revelation.[30] Automatism’s chance was a route to the unconscious. Richter’s is a procedure for testing whether painting can still generate an image at all. The distance between them measures how far the question traveled.

Seen from the distance of Masson’s American exile, the 1924 Dessin automatique is a small sheet with long consequences. It was made two decades before the crossing, by a hand that was building and releasing at the same time, and it already contains the wager that a generation of American painters would take up at the scale of the wall: that the making could be the meaning, and that a body might appear wherever a line was allowed to find one.