decalcomania

decalcomania. A technique for producing pictures by transferring an image from one surface to another. It is thought to have been invented by the Spanish Surrealist Óscar Domínguez in Paris in about 1935, although the term had been applied in the 19th century to a similar idea used in ceramic design (the word comes from the French décalquer, ‘to transfer', + manie, ‘mania', and in the 1860s there was indeed a craze for transferring pictures to glass, porcelain, etc.). In Domínguez's method, splashes of colour were laid with a broad brush on a sheet of paper. This was then covered with another sheet and rubbed gently so that the wet pigment flowed haphazardly from one surface to the other, typically producing effects resembling fantastic grottoes or jungles or underwater growths. The point of the process, which had the blessing of Breton, was that the picture was made without any preconceived idea of its subject or form (sans objet préconçu). Several other Surrealists adopted it, most notably Max Ernst, who sometimes began a picture by decalcomania and finished it by conventional means. See also AUTOMATISM.