Automatism

automatism, technique first used by Surrealist painters and poets to express the creative force of the unconscious in art.

In the 1920s the Surrealist poets André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault tried writing in a hypnotic or trancelike state, recording their train of mental associations without censorship or attempts at formal exposition. These poets were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and believed that the symbols and images thus produced, though appearing strange or incongruous to the conscious mind, actually constituted a record of a person’s unconscious psychic forces and hence possessed an innate artistic significance. Little of lasting value remains from the Surrealists’ attempts at “automatic” writing, however.

Automatism was a more productive vehicle for the Surrealist painters. André Masson, Arshile Gorky, and Max Ernst, in particular, experimented with fantastic or erotic images that were spontaneously recorded in a kind of visual free association, without the artist’s conscious censorship; the images were then either left as originally conceived or were consciously elaborated upon by the artist. Related to automatic drawing are the techniques Ernst devised to involve chance in the creation of a picture. Among them were “frottage,” placing canvas or paper over different materials such as wood and rubbing it with graphite to make an impression of the grain; “grattage,” scratching the painted surface of the canvas with pointed tools to make it more tactile; and “decalcomania,” pressing liquid paint between two canvases and then pulling the canvases apart to produce ridges and bubbles of pigment. The chance forms created by these techniques were then allowed to stand as incomplete, suggestive images, or they were completed by the artist according to his instinctive response to them.

Between 1946 and 1951 a group of Canadian painters—including Paul-Émile Borduas, Albert Dumouchel, Jean Paul Mousseau, and Jean-Paul Riopelle—known as Les Automatistes, practiced automatism. From about 1950 a group of artists in the United States called Action painters adopted automatic methods, some under the direct influence of Masson, Gorky, and Ernst, all of whom had moved to the United States to escape World War II. Seeking abstract pictorial equivalents for states of mind, painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, and Bradley Walker Tomlin variously experimented with chance drippings of paint on the canvas and free, spontaneous brushstrokes. This approach was seen as a means to strip away artifice and unlock basic creative instincts deep within the artist’s personality. Automatism has since become a part of the technical repertoire of modern painting, though its prominence declined with that of Action painting itself.