What Is Automatism Art? – The History of Surrealism Automatism

Automatism art suspends conscious choice and lets the process run ahead of the plan: instead of deciding what to paint, draw or collage, the artist starts something and works with whatever it produces. Below: what automatism art is, where the idea came from, how Psychic Automatism became Surrealism Automatism, the techniques Surrealists built from it, how to recognize an automatist work, and which paintings show the method most clearly.

What Is Automatism Art?

Automatism is a term borrowed from physiology, the branch of biology concerned with how living things function, where it describes activity that continues without conscious decision, such as breathing or the heartbeat. Applied to art, it names any way of working that hands part of the decision making to something other than deliberate choice.

The art historical sense grew out of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) used “unconscious” to mean the part of mental life running outside conscious attention during the day, not “asleep.” His method for reaching it was free association: the patient said whatever came to mind, unedited, in any order. The related practice of automatic drawing, letting the hand move over paper undirected, came from nineteenth century psychiatry and spiritualist séances rather than Freud’s consulting room, but by the 1920s the two were discussed together.

Sigmund Freud (1921) by Max Halberstadt; Max Halberstadt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

André Breton (1896-1966) launched the Surrealist movement on these ideas. He had trained in medicine and in 1916 worked as an orderly at a neuropsychiatric centre at Saint-Dizier, treating soldiers broken by the front. In the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) he defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism … the dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns.” Two terms from that sentence are constantly confused: Psychic Automatism, the borrowed principle, and Surrealism Automatism, what artists made of it.

Psychic Automatism

Psychic Automatism is a method for getting past the social, moral and aesthetic filters that shape anything said deliberately. Breton’s first test was verbal rather than visual: over about two weeks in May 1919 he and Philippe Soupault wrote in rapid alternating bursts without revising, published in 1920 as Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields). Breton later called it the first Surrealist work, as the first sustained use of automatic writing.

Freud held that thoughts in a dream are not rationally formulated. In sleep, on his account, the unconscious expresses itself without the inhibitions that govern us awake.

Dream material is hard to report: it arrives as symbols and substitutions, and the waking mind tidies them the moment it tries to explain them. Drawing and painting offered a way round that, which is why the Surrealists treated the visual side of automatism as more than an illustration of the written kind.

Automatic Drawing – Ballet (2009) by J Coleman Miller; J. Coleman Miller, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Breton read the “sur” in Surrealism as above rather than beyond: a superior reality reached by fusing waking experience with dream reality, not swapping one for the other. Automatism was the practical means of getting the second half onto a canvas.

Surrealism Automatism

Psychic Automatism is the principle the Surrealists borrowed; Surrealism Automatism is what came back out of their studios once painters applied it, and the transfer changed it. In the clinic the drawing was evidence for diagnosis. In the studio it was the work, and a result that looked strange or beautiful counted as success rather than symptom.

Breton was not satisfied with the results. Writing about the history of automatic writing in 1933, he judged its record so far a run of misfortune: in practice the method was almost always adjusted, edited or staged, and unbroken examples were rare.

What survived was the assumption that thought runs uninhibited below conscious attention, and that art can bring it up more or less whole. Part of what made that worth attempting was the war: the generation that formed Surrealist artists had watched reason produce the trenches and had little confidence left in it.

How Psychic Automatism Became a Way of Making Pictures

It reached pictures by two routes. The first was unplanned composition: marks made with no subject in mind, then read afterward for whatever they suggested. The second was dream composition, deliberately planned and carefully painted, where unrelated objects sit side by side the way sleep puts them together. Only the first is automatic in the strict sense, and the two look nothing alike.

Max Ernst supplied several of the working methods. He had cut up magazine plates, catalogue illustrations and engravings since the Dada years around 1919, before Surrealism existed, and brought the practice with him. His own automatic invention came in August 1925, when the scrubbed floorboards of a hotel at Pornic set him rubbing pencil over paper laid on the grain. He collected the results in the portfolio Histoire naturelle (1926), and later moved the idea onto canvas by scraping paint over hard objects placed underneath.

Surréalisme, Volume 1, Number 1 (1 October 1924), Yvan Goll’s rival journal; cover by Robert Delaunay; Robert Delaunay, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Automatic Techniques and What They Leave on the Surface

The Surrealists did not only theorize automatism, they engineered it. These methods reduce, delay, distribute or partially surrender conscious control in different ways.

How to Recognize an Automatist Work

No single sign is proof on its own, since even the canonical automatist methods mixed in later correction and calculation, but these checks catch most of what separates a work made this way from one that merely looks loose or strange.

1. The texture came first. The image sits inside a rubbing, blot, poured pool or scraped band that was on the surface before the subject was. Texture painted to imitate texture is not automatism.
2. Correction is minimal. The accidental marks are still legible under whatever the artist added; contours are drawn around them rather than tidied away.
3. The figures are half found. Creatures and faces appear where the accidental marks suggest them, and dissolve again a few centimetres away.
4. The line does not stop. An automatic drawing runs continuously and crosses itself; a drawn contour lifts, restarts and closes.

Automatism and the Methods It Gets Confused With

Four neighbouring practices are regularly filed under automatism. The question that separates them is who or what decided the image.

Automatism and Dream Imagery: Two Surrealist Approaches

The painters most closely identified with automatism are André Masson, Joan Miró and Max Ernst, who worked by the first route, and Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, who worked mainly by the second. Below is one example of each.

Unplanned Compositions: Battle of Fishes (1926) by André Masson

Battle of Fishes (1926) is the clearest surviving demonstration of the unplanned method. Masson brushed gesso freely onto the canvas, threw sand at the wet surface and swept away what had not stuck. The dried ridges left contours suggesting forms, almost always irrational ones by his own account. He then squeezed paint straight from the tube and drew around those contours at speed, trying not to decide anything in advance. What emerged reads as a savage underwater fight between sharp toothed fish that nobody had planned. Sand, gesso, oil, pencil and charcoal on canvas, 36.2 x 73 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Masson was severely wounded at the front in 1917 and never described himself as recovered. He joined the Surrealist group in 1924, and held that pictures could expose the violence running through people and animals alike. The fish give that belief a shape.

Dream-like Compositions: The Difficult Crossing (1926) by René Magritte

The Difficult Crossing (1926) shows the other route, where nothing is left to accident. The Belgian painter René Magritte assembled the strangeness deliberately and rendered it in flat, matter-of-fact paint. A bilboquet, the turned wooden baluster shaped like a chess bishop that recurs across his work, has been given a single human eye.

On the table beside it a disembodied hand clutches a red bird, and the table’s front leg tapers like a human limb. The bilboquet and bird face one another without meeting. The room is lined with boards cut with window-shaped openings, one half covered by a curtain drawn back rather than closed. Behind, a boat rides a thunderstorm, and the painting refuses to say whether that is a view through a window or a picture on the far wall.

Openings that show nothing, a curtain that conceals nothing, a storm that may not be there: readings of the picture usually turn on what perception lets through and what it withholds. 

Automatism Outside of Surrealism

Working with accident and altered attention neither began with Surrealism nor ended with it.

In the 1780s the English watercolourist Alexander Cozens set out a method of making rapid ink blots and developing landscapes from whatever they suggested, published as A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1786). His blot was only half free: the artist fixed a subject in mind first, then blotted. William Blake described parts of his own poetry as coming to him by dictation, written down without premeditation and sometimes against his will.

Castle in a Landscape (1770) by Alexander Cozens; Yale Center for British Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A second line ran through nineteenth century spiritualism, where drawing without conscious control was read as a message from elsewhere, not the self. Georgiana Houghton showed 155 such drawings in London in 1871 to bewildered reviews, and from 1896 the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and four collaborators produced automatic writing and drawings in séance sessions that formed part of the experimental context from which the abstract series she began in 1906 developed.

In New York during the Second World War, with much of the Surrealist circle in exile there, automatism was handed on in person. Over the winter of 1942 to 1943 Roberto Matta ran studio sessions on automatist method with younger American painters including Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes. Pollock’s poured canvases keep the principle and drop the imagery: the record of the process is the picture, and no creature is meant to surface from it.

Garden of Wish Fulfillment (1944) by Arshile Gorky; Pedro Ribeiro Simões from Lisboa, Portugal, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

The name travelled furthest from Paris. In Montreal a group around the painter Paul-Émile Borduas took automatism as its programme and became known as Les Automatistes. In August 1948 sixteen of them, including Borduas, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Françoise Sullivan, published Refus global, a manifesto attacking the hold of the Church over Quebec life. Borduas lost his teaching post at the École du Meuble and eventually left the country.

Automatism was never a style, which is why it left no single look behind. It was a set of ways to begin, and the results run from Masson’s sand paintings to Ernst’s rubbed forests and Riopelle’s palette knife abstractions.

Take a look at our Automatism Art webstory here!

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Automatism Art?

Automatism art is made by deliberately withholding conscious control from part of the process, so the marks arrive before the subject does. The artist starts a mechanical procedure such as rubbing, blotting, scraping or drawing at speed, then works with the shapes it produces instead of a plan.

What Is Psychic Automatism?

Psychic Automatism is the term André Breton used in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 to define Surrealism itself. It names the principle rather than any one technique: expression released from control by reason and from moral or aesthetic concern. Automatic writing, automatic drawing, frottage and decalcomania are all applications of it.

Is Automatism Art Only Connected to Surrealism?

No. Alexander Cozens built landscapes from ink blots in the 1780s, and Victorian spiritualist mediums drew without conscious control decades before Breton. After Surrealism the method passed to New York painters through Roberto Matta and to Les Automatistes in Montreal. Surrealism gave it a name and a theory, not its only home.

Is Any Automatist Artwork Completely Unplanned?

Almost none. Artists select which sheets to keep, crop them, work into the results and title them afterward, and Breton himself complained in 1933 that automatic writing’s pure form was rarely achieved. Automatism is best understood as a way of generating raw material, with judgement re-entering at the editing stage.

How Do You Make an Automatic Drawing?

Fix a time limit of two or three minutes, keep the pen on the paper without lifting it, and do not decide on a subject. When time is up, turn the sheet in all four directions and mark only the shapes already visible in the tangle. The reading stage is where the picture appears.

Nicolene Burger( Multi-Media Artist, Art Writer )

Nicolene Burger is a South African multi-media artist, working primarily in oil paint and performance art. She received her BA (Visual Arts) from Stellenbosch University in 2017. In 2018, Burger showed in Masan, South Korea as part of the Rhizome Artist Residency. She was selected to take part in the 2019 ICA Live Art Workshop, receiving training from art experts all around the world. In 2019 Burger opened her first solo exhibition of paintings titled, Painted Mantras, at GUS Gallery and facilitated a group collaboration project titled, Take Flight, selected to be part of Infecting the City Live Art Festival. At the moment, Nicolene is completing a practice-based master’s degree in Theatre and Performance at the University of Cape Town.

In 2020, Nicolene created a series of ZOOM performances with Lumkile Mzayiya called, Evoked?. These performances led her to create exclusive performances from her home in 2021 to accommodate the mid-pandemic audience. She also started focusing more on the sustainability of creative practices in the last 3 years and now offers creative coaching sessions to artists of all kinds. By sharing what she has learned from a 10-year practice, Burger hopes to relay more directly the sense of vulnerability with which she makes art and the core belief to her practice: Art is an immensely important and powerful bridge of communication that can offer understanding, healing and connection.

Nicolene writes our blog posts on art history with an emphasis on renowned artists and contemporary art. She also writes in the field of art industry. Her extensive artistic background and her studies in Fine and Studio Arts contribute to her expertise in the field.

Learn more about Nicolene Burger and the Art in Context Team.