automatism

automatism. Method of producing paintings or drawings (or writing or other work) in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the movements of the hand, allowing the unconscious mind to take over. There are various precedents for this kind of work, most notably the ‘blot drawings’ of the 18th-century English watercolourist Alexander Cozens, who stimulated his imagination by using accidental blots on the paper to suggest landscape forms. Cozens himself remarked that ‘something of the same kind had been mentioned by Leonardo da Vinci', and slightly before Leonardo, Leon Battista Alberti (in his treatise De Statua, c. 1460) gives an imaginative account of the origins of sculpture, describing ancient peoples observing ‘in tree trunks, clumps of earth, or other objects of this sort, certain outlines which through some slight changes could be made to resemble a natural shape'. Alberti's version of events may be not far from the truth, for scholars of prehistoric art have found examples of such spontaneous discovery of representational images in chance natural formations of cave walls. However, automatism in its fully developed form is a 20th-century phenomenon. The Dadaists made some use of the idea, although they were more interested in chance effects than in automatism as such. In 1916–17, for example, Arp made a series of Collages with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, in which he said he arranged the pieces of paper ‘automatically, without will', and in 1920 Picabia published an ink blot labelled ‘La Sainte Vierge’ in his magazine 391. However, it was the Surrealists who first made automatism an important part of their creative outlook; whereas the Dadaists used the idea dispassionately, to the Surrealists exploration of the unconscious through such methods was deeply personal.

In the first Surrealist manifesto (1924) André Breton discussed automatism in a passage that refers to literary composition but could equally well apply to drawing or painting: ‘Secrets of Surrealist magical art … have someone bring you writing materials, once you have got into a position as favourable as possible to your mind's concentration on itself. Put yourself in the most passive, or receptive, state you can. Detach yourself from your genius, your talent, and everyone else's talent and genius.’ Later, in Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1928), he wrote: ‘The fundamental discovery of Surrealism’ is that ‘without any preconceived intention, the pen which hastens to write, or the pencil which hastens to draw, produces an infinitely precious substance all of which is not perhaps immediate currency but which at least seems to bear with it everything emotional that the poet harbours within him.’ According to René Passeron (Concise Encyclopedia of Surrealism, 1984), ‘the true inventor of “automatic” Surrealist drawing’ was André Masson: ‘in about 1923 or 1924 his drawings developed into “wandering lines” which here and there suggested perhaps the outlines of a beast or a bird.’ Masson soon developed a more elaborate automatic technique in which he drew on the canvas with an adhesive substance, then added colour by sprinkling coloured sands.

Other Surrealists devised different methods, and some of them regarded the use of dream imagery (as in the work of Dalí) as a kind of psychological—as opposed to mechanical—automatism. Sometimes they used chance—rather than strictly automatic—methods to provide the initial image (see DECALCOMANIA, FROTTAGE, and FUMAGE). The Surrealist interest in automatism had a strong influence on the Abstract Expressionists, some of whom took their ideas further. With Surrealists, once an image had been formed by automatic or chance means, it was often exploited deliberately with fully conscious purpose, but with Action Painters such as Jackson Pollock, automatism in principle permeated the whole creative process.

Other types of automatism are those in which the artist works under the influence of drugs (see MICHAUX, for example) or by alleged occult means. Austin Spare claimed to be able to conjure up horrific survivals of man's pre-human ancestry from deep within his mind, but more usually the artist claims to work under the inspiration of a beneficent spirit guide (a notion not necessarily to be taken lightly, as no less an artist than William Blake claimed to have direct inspiration from his dead brother). The British painter Georgiana Houghton (1814–84) gave up conventional art because of grief at the death of her sister in 1851, but in 1861 she began to produce ‘spirit drawings', using coloured pencils and later watercolour and ink. She held an exhibition of them at the New British Gallery, London, in 1871, and examples are preserved in the Victorian Spiritualists' Union, Melbourne. They feature ‘all-over dynamic linear meshes of coloured spirals, vortices, and arabesques in which figure and ground are indistinguishable’ and have been claimed as the earliest abstract pictures (see Tom Gibbons, ‘British Abstract Painting of the 1860s: The Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton', Modern Painters, Summer 1988).

Unlike Blake and Houghton, most psychic artists of this kind have no particular artistic gifts or inclinations in their ‘normal’ life. An example is Madge Gill (1882–1961), an uneducated British housewife who became interested in spiritualism after a series of traumatic events (two of her children died tragically and she lost an eye through illness). From 1919 she produced hundreds of ink drawings whilst in a trance-like state, allegedly directed by her spirit guide ‘Myrninerest’ (one acquaintance said unkindly that the spirit which really guided her was gin). From 1932 she exhibited regularly at shows for amateur artists at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Her drawings ranged from postcard-sized sketches to works more than 20 feet wide. In 1926 her son Laurie issued a broadsheet entitled Myrninerest, the Spheres, in which he described the range of his mother's automatic activities: ‘Spiritual or Inspirational drawings, Writings, Singing, Inspired Piano-Playing, making knitted woollen clothes and weaving silk mats in beautifully blended colours'.