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Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

A Pre-Bretonian Advocacy of Automatism in Art: Spare and Carter's "Automatic Drawing"(1916)Author(s): Joseph Masheck, Austin O. Spare, Frederick CarterSource: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 38 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 179-185Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the PeabodyMuseum of Archaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167514

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180 RES 38 AUTUMN 2000

all-too-artily taste-crafted, quasi-Edwardian indulgencein lavish printing and presentation on behalf of mostly

embarrassingly deficient poetry. Except, that is, for

William Butler Yeats, who might have been welcomed

for the debut issue by virtue of social cachet yet who,

himself involved with the occult, was soon to wed a

known practitioner of automatic writing of the "mystic"sort. And let us face the fact, without condoning bald

superstition (as if that were the basis of today's

hostility!), that just such turn-of-the century

"spiritualism,"which made even William James take

notice, was apparently just where Spare and Carter's

automatic drawingas well as Mrs. Yeats's automatic

writing were, broadly speaking, coming from. The result

however, which (Breton would have been relieved to

know) has nothing much to do with spirit except as

possible warrant for aperhaps fearful irrationality, is if

anything literary beyonda point of affectation?even

curiously so, for a certain piquant weirdness.

No doubt owing to the primacy of literary culture,

especially in the English-speaking orbit, it tends to go

without saying that the more"literally literary" poetic of

the automatic or the spontaneously engendered verbal

text has priority, and that any equivalent "visual-art"

poetic should simply follow suit. Here however, in a

precociouscase of automatic drawing (not automatic

writing), announced preciselyas such, were the

practitioners Spare, a painter, printmaker, and illustrator

(he supplied Beardsleyesque illustrations as well as

initials and decorative "ignudi," like the less automatic

images at hand, for Ethel Rolt Wheeler's volume of

poetry The Veil, 1906) and Carter, also known as a

printmaker and illustrator. As a matter of fact, this Spare

(who as "a young Apollo" was rumored to be taking

drugs and dabbling in the occult as a student at the

Royal College of Art around 1910) is said to have

already shown in his first solo exhibition, in 1914, so

called "psychic" drawings?that is, "a kind of linear

automatism which he later called 'automatic'

drawings."4 Appended to their article is a non-automatic

drawing by each artist, as if for comparison (if not more

squarelyas credentials of less radical competence): first

Carter's self-consciously outrageous Imagination in the

symbolistemanner (a combination female nude-cum

worldtree in crucifixion posture with serpent-twinedarms and burning hair, rising from a

writhingmass of

nudes), and then Spare's Bacchae, asuspiciously

normal-looking academic female nude. And yet both

these practicing artists also maintained literary identities:

Spare edited The Golden Hind as well as Form; Carter

wrote both The Dragon of the Alchemists (1926) and, as

a friend of the novelist, D. H. Lawrence and the Body

Mystical (1932).The artistic results

yielded by Spareand Carter's

experimentations are to be seen in some half dozen

drawings illustrating "Automatic Drawing." Most have a

definite spontaneous character of oneshaping thought,

as itwere, melting suggestively into another (while one

ismerelya conventional piece of fin-de-si?cle book

illustration). It is not possible to say ifany were

collaborations between Spare and Carter, in the manner

of the surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawings, with one

person extendinga line already entailed in an enfolded

image of he-knows-not-what. Two of the drawings,

including the one shown here, bear the single "AOS"

monogram of Spare (where a scribbled signature on two

others plausibly identifies Carter alone). Interestingly, inboth of the monogrammed cases, and not in two other

drawings otherwise stylistically similar, the image proper

is accompanied by a no doubt willfully mysterious,

deliberately enigmatic, quasi-textual inscription inwhat

are surely pseudo-hieroglyphic characters beneath.

Insofar as these would-be characters evoke ancient

writing, hieratic or demotic, Iwould suggest that this is

sojust because they are not so

top-of-the head

"automatic" and probably derive from some established

occult source.5 The surmise seems reasonable (providedthe characters are not merely

an intellectual joke) in

view of the prominence occultism did have in turn-of

the-century culture, alongside its rationalist equivalent,the scientific interest in subconsciousness and

suggestion. Rather than pursue either affair, however, I

would preferto call attention to that more

specifically

literary aspect of Spare and Carter's situation, which

tends, Ithink, to be underexploited?owing perhaps to a

justifiable suspicionon the part of modernists in the fine

4. "In View: Sparea

Thought,"Art and Artists 221 (February

1985):5, tellingthat after a fashionable phase he came to be "decried

as adegenerate," "seedy"

at that, thoughin his last ten years he at last

attained some second recognition.

5. Such as the neoplatonically influenced Cornelius Agrippa's

"alchemical alphabet" (in De Occulta philosophia, 1529); cf. Johanna

Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and

Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 191 (with illus.).



Masheck: A Pre-Bretonian advocacy of automatism inart 181

arts toward whatever in the way of representationalcontent might be critically questionable

as"literary."

Simply to state the matter thusly will also point up the

possible special appeal of "hieroglyphic" characters,

such as at least Spare here indulged.But there is the literary, and there is the literary. It

deserves to be recalled that while surrealism was a

basically French and literary-affiliated movement of

major importance to painting, inEngland there was also

anessentially visually attuned literary "imagism" (in its

own right stimulated by symbolisme). Apropos of the

compacted intensification of "concrete" terms in imagist

writing,a

significant detail in "Automatic Drawing" is

the nonverbal scribble servingas a

marginal

illumination to the word "Sigil." Starred with an asterisk

in the text and likewise in the margin, like a discursive

textual gloss, is this roughly calligraphic

nonrepresentational linear drawing, which, however

lively and spontaneous looking, is actuallyno

spontaneous scribble but, apparently,a little image cut

in real time, as itwere, without reproductive mediation,

as anotably nonobjective woodcut.

Especiallyas a

point ismade of this as a"sigil," from

sigillum (Lat., "seal") as condensed diminution of

signum, "sign," this has aspecial imagist interest?like

the refreshed historiographie appeal of Renaissance and

baroque emblemata in the time of the fluorescence of a

modernist abstract painting of immediate and holistic,

and sometimes also seemingly arcane, signification,

though here even more condensed than emblemata. The

emblemata were part and parcel with the Renaissance

neoplatonic fascination with the very idea of the ancient

Egyptian hieroglyphics?and the rather abstractly

iconographical question, which would arise after World

War II,of whether such were(negatively) all too

inscrutable except to the initiated, or else (affirmatively)

wonderfully self-evident to view, at least to those in the

know.6 The pictogram as well as the hieroglyph thus

held anespecially visually qualified form of "literary"

appeal. Itwas at about this time that Ezra Pound, on

return from America after meeting the widow of Ernest

Fenollosa in London, wasediting, among other

Fenollosa manuscripts, the important imagist essay "The

Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," first

published in Pound's Investigations (1920) after several

refusals by journals.7 In the imagist light, Spare and

Carter's automatic drawing project does indeed hold

special literaryas well as artistic interest (one rightly

hesitates to say "pictorial"), not simply generallyas

?criture but in timely terms of the development withinliterature of an

explicitly "imagist" poetic.8

Beyond the special "imagism" of the Anglo-American

literary avant-garde, there was also the older British

adumbration of automatic drawing in the recourse to

chance-formed "blots" asstarting points for generating

inky hypothetical landscape drawings according to the

pre-romantic "method" of Alexander Cozens (circa

1785),9 whose rediscovery in the 1950s was a little like

findingan adumbration of Dr. Rorschach's

Psychodiagnostics (1921 ) inthe Englandof Sir Joshua

Reynolds. Then too, in the literary sphere, both Horace

Walpole and, as Breton was aware, Carlyle, had already

approximated to surrealist automatic writing.10 Even

invoking Blake, however, will notexplain

anirruption in

6. In "Plastic Art and General Culture," Art Criticism 1 (1981 ):11-19,

reprintedin

Joseph Masheck, Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s

(Ann Arbor: U. M. I.Research Press, 1984), pp. 281-288, Ihave

situated ascontemporaneous with abstract expressionism the then

heated argument involvingE. H. Gombrich and Edgar Wind, over

Ficino'sglossing Plotinus on the Egyptian hieroglyph?specifically,

whether the hieroglyph conceals meaningor reveals it (pp. 283-284,

with refs.).

7. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American

Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 223. Fenollosa's

aesthetics touched several generations of young peopleinAmerica

and beyondas part of a

populistic postimpressionist modernism

broadcast in the field of art education by Arthur Wesley Dow in his

influential Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the

Use of Students and Teachers (1899); see my introduction, "Dow's

vWay'to

Modernity for Everybody,"to the new edition of Composition

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1-61.

8. On British literary imagism in relation to surrealism, see Joseph

Masheck, "Magritte in anImagist Light" (1974), inHistorical Present:

Essays of the 1970s (Ann Arbor: U. M. I. Research Press, 1984), pp.

33-45.Something that Iwould like to

developon a more

appropriate

occasion is how imagism may relate to the analytical emphasison

the "logical content" of statements inthen-contemporary Anglo

Americanphilosophy.

9. Alexander Cozens, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in

Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (London, n. d.),

reprinted in A. P.Opp?, Alexander and John Roben Cozens (London:

Black, 1952; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).

Thanks to Dario Gamboni forreminding

me of Cozens, as well as for

otherhelpful

comments.

10. Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andr?

Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 104. Thanks to

Barbara Lekatsas for a reference.




the maiden issue of aperiodical, which, ifanything,

looks unpleasantly upper-crust, of aseeming paean to

anarchic irrationality in art production. (In surrealist

circumstances of automatic or spontaneous engendering,a

present-day jargon of artistic "production" begins to

seemamusingly clinical, as somehow commonsensically

irrational as the way excitements can manifest themselves

in the condition of the mucus membrane by quite other

than-logical necessity.)Itdoes seem curious how much latitude was here so

happily offered,in

Britainin

1916, andin

classyletterpress

at that, to the seemingly anarchic or

irrational. In this regard,Iwish to call attention to a

certain psycho-cultural observation of special pertinenceto the condition of surrealism in England, before

proceedingto Spare and Carter's "Automatic Drawing,"

which anticipateseven Breton's abiding emphasis

on

automatism asliberating.

In respect to the insular appeal of surrealism, there is

a remarkable theory framed bya British assistant of Carl

Jung.Wondering why Jung's work should quickly have

found wide reading, though little public discussion, in

England, where the national character has such a strong

component of aristocratic introversion, H. G. Baynes

proposed that the very notion of "accepting and

reinstating unconscious functions and elements that

have been suppressed by anexclusively social

adaptation"was "seen as a new extension of the

principle of fair-play," while "Jung's integration of living

concepts from undirected dream- and fantasy

representations" was"recognized

as the necessary

extension of the empirical principleto the realm of

spiritual phenomena." InBaynes's view, "the idea of

relating to the anima and, through the anima, to the

denizens of the unconscious is cogent to the English

mind under the aspect of the knightly quest," including"the idea of giving fair-play to the repressed functions."11

It isworth noting that Herbert Read, that major critic

and advocate within and on behalf of the British

surrealist movement?and not onlyon behalf of the

hearty Protestant, air-force-type surrealism of Henry

Moore's ilk?himself became an editor of the Bollingen

edition of Jung's works in English.

InSurrealism and Painting (1927), Breton would

maintain that as much as a bird's nest under instinctual

construction, or as a musical melody unfolding

according to intrinsic structural necessity, does

automatism access the pleasure principleas if

untrammeled: "Imaintain that graphicas well as verbal

automatism ... is the only mode of expression which

fully satisfies the eye or earby achieving rhythmic unity

(justas

recognizable in the automatic drawing and text

as in the melodyor the nest). . . .And Iagree that

automatism can enterinto composition,

inpainting

as in

poetry, with certain premeditated intentions; but there is

great risk if the automatism ceases to flow underground'

(emphases in original).12 There remains the morepurely

critical fact that, for all their manifest originality in the

sense of blunt priority, and quite apart from the questionof influence, however reformed, the Spare and Carter

"source" drawings actually do seem forced and even

fatally self-conscious in the sense warned against by

Breton, whereas drawingsto come soon after from the

hand and brain of Andr? Masson, though interestingly

"retroactively" adumbrated by these, are among the

finest drawings of the twentieth century.13

The wartime displacement to New York of Breton and

Masson, in 1941, but also of others as different in

outlook as Piet Mondrian (already in 1940), served

famously to stimulate the consolidation of "New York

School" abstract expressionist painting, in the formation

of which surrealist automatism was vital?not that

Breton was assumed to preside over that (a town with

more than one bishop is nopushover for a self

appointed pope). Apart from personalities and party

politics, the obvious inevitable aesthetic difficulty, in

terms of apractically theological commitment to pure

abstraction, which to this day, despite postmodernism, is

still strong inNew York, wasBreton's?sorry!?

11. H. G. Baynes, "Analytical Psychology and the English Mind," in

Analytical Psychology and theEnglishMind and Other Papers

(London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 34-60, esp. 47, 51, 55.

12. Andr? Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1927), asexcerpted and

trans, in Ratrick Waldberg, Surrealism (1965; reprint, New York: Oxford

University Press, 1978), pp. 81-88, here 84.

13. Ihave suggestedthe notion of "retroactive influence" for

situations inwhich a "later work influences . . . [an] earlier one,

casting back onto it a reflected light that can enliven latent meanings

that, needless to say, may never have been prosaically intentional

anyway." Joseph Masheck, "Two Blasts from the Past in Picasso (and

Yes, Marcel, You Too)" (1985), inmy Modernities: Art-Matters in the

Present (University Park: PennsylvaniaState University Press, 1993),

pp. 213-222, here 220; see also "Notes on Influence and

Appropriation" (1985), in ibid., pp. 223-229, esp. 226.



Masheck: A Pre-Bretonianadvocacy

of automatism in art 183

hopelessly literary outlook asadmitting, if not of Dali's,

nevertheless of a still irredeemably descriptive-pictorialsense of the image. So there was reason for artists to

gravitate instead to such an automatist alternative as the

"psychological morphologies" of Roberto Matta

(Echaurren), the Chilean painter who had worked in the

Paris studio of the constructivist painter-architect Le

Corbusier. Stylistically,one of the closest single points of

contact with New York surrealism would seem to be

between Spare and the rather gothically "far-out"

graphics

of Kurt

Seligmann(another occultist).

Althougheven Matta would be found too much a

chairman, he himself seems also to have been

influenced by the thinking of the younger British

surrealist Gordon Onslow-Ford, who in 1940 could

write of automatism as a "scientific poetry" inwhich

"lies aphilosophy" and indeed as

worthy of a "bureau

of analytical research."14 In that year, too, the British

printmaker Stanley William Hayter, who belonged to

Breton's and Masson's generation and who had worked

in Paris since 1926, would transfer his Atelier 17 to New

York (1940-1951), where itwould stimulate the

automatism of Jackson Pollock himself?no doubt by his

example of springy linear arrays, not altogether unlike

Spare and Carter's, in his ownengraving and etching,

as

well asby Hayter's famously astute technical tutelage.

And both Onslow-Ford and Hayter would be saluted byBreton in the New York surrealist journal V7ew in 1941.

Now then what one would really like to know is if

Hayter or Onslow-Ford, not to mention Breton, Masson,

or even Jackson Pollock, justso

happened to be

acquainted with the first number of Form.

(In the following version of the original article, a

"sigil" originally occurring in the margin of the largealbum-like page is here inserted into the text at its point

of referencing. Except at two excessively awkward

points in the following re-presentation, Ihave avoided

correcting eccentricities of punctuation inorder to

preserve the artifactual integrity of the original text.

Original page breaks are here marked by slashes, and

two notes have been inserted.)

AUTOMATICDRAWING (1916)

by Austin O. Spare and Frederick Carter

Out of the flesh of our mothers come dreams and

memories of the gods. Of other kind than the normal

inducement of interest and increasing skill, there exists a

continual pressure upon the artist of which he is

sometimes partially conscious but rarely entirelyaware.

He learns earlyor late in his career that power of literal

reproduction (such as that of the photographic apparatus)

is not more than

slightly

useful to him. He is

compelledto find out from his artist predecessors the existence, in

representation of real form, of super- / sessions of

immediate accuracies; he discovers within himself a

selective conscience and he is satisfied, normally, in

largemeasure by the extensive field afforded by this

broadened and simplified consciousness.

Yet beyond this is aregion and that a much greater

one, for exploration. The objective understanding,as we

see, has to be attacked by the artist and a subconscious

method, for correction of conscious visual accuracy,

must be used. No amount of manual skill and

consciousness of error will produce good drawing. A

recent book on drawing by a well-known painter is acase in point; there the examples of masters of

draughtsmanship may be compared with the painter

author's own, side by side, and the futility of mere skill

and interest examined. Therefore toproceed further, it is

necessary to dispose of the "subject" in art also (that is

to say the subject in the illustrative orcomplex sense).

Thus to clear the mind of inessentials permits througha

clear and transparent medium, without prepossessionsof any kind, the most definite and simple forms and

ideas to attain expression.

Notes on AutomaticDrawing

An "automatic" scribble of twisting and interlacinglines permits the germ of idea in the subconscious mind

to express, or at least suggest itself to the consciousness.

From this mass of procreative shapes, full of fallacy,a

feeble embryo of idea may be selected and trained bythe artist to full growth and power. By these means, may

the profoundest depths of memory be drawn upon and

the springs of instinct tapped.Yet let it not be thought that a person not an artist

may by these means become one: but those artists who

arehampered in expression, who feel limited by the

hard conventions of the day and wish for freedom, who

14. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of AmericanPainting:

A History of

Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, n. d.), chap. 2, "The

Imagination of Disaster," pp. 29-43, esp. p. 43 n. 26, with reference to

Gordon Onslow-Ford, "The Painter Looks Within Himself," London

Bulletin 18-20 (June 1940):31.




strive for self expression but have not attained to it, these

may find in it a power and aliberty elsewhere

undiscoverable. Thus writes Leonardo da Vinci:?

"Among other things, Ishall notscruple to discover a

new method of assisting the invention; which though

trifling in appearance, may yet be of considerable

service inopening the mind and putting it upon the

scent of newthoughts, and it is this: ifyou look at some

old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of

some streaked stones, you may discover several thingslike

landskips,battles,

clouds,

uncommon

attitude,draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects the

mind will be fur- / nished with abundance of designsand subjects, perfectly new."[15]

From another, amystical writer!:] "Renounce thine

own will that the law of God may be within thee."[16]

The curious expression of character given by

handwriting is due to the automatic or unconscious

nature that itacquires by habit. So Automatic drawing,one of the simplest of psychic phenomena, is a means of

characteristic expression and, if used with courage and

honesty, of recording subconscious activities in the

mind. The mental mechanisms used are those common

in

dreams,which create

quick perceptionof relations in

the unexpected, as wit, and psycho-neurotic symptoms.Hence it appears that single

or non-consciousness is an

essential condition and as in all inspiration the productof involution not invention.

Automatism being the manifestation of latent desires (or

wishes) the significance of the forms (the ideas) obtained

represents] the previously unrecorded obsessions.

Art becomes, by this illuminism or ecstatic power, a

functional activity expressing in asymbolical language

the desire towards joy unmodified?the sense of the

Mother of all things?not of experience.This means of vital expression releases the fundamental

static truths which are

repressed byeducation and

customary habit and lie dormant in the mind. It is the

means of becoming courageously individual; it implies

spontaneity and disperses the cause of unrest and ennui.

The dangers of this form of expression come from

prejudice and personal bias of such nature as fixed

intellectual conviction orpersonal religion (intolerance).

/These produce ideas of threat, displeasureor fear, and

become obsessions.

In the ecstatic condition of revelation from the

subconscious, the mind elevates the sexual or inherited

powers (this has no reference to moral theoryor

practise) and depresses the intellectual qualities. So a

new atavistic responsibility is attained by daring to

believe?to possess one's own beliefs?without

attempting to rationalize spurious ideas from prejudicedand tainted intellectual sources.

Automatic drawingscan be obtained by such

methods asconcentrating

on aSigil?

by any means of exhausting the mind and body

pleasantly in order to obtain a condition of non

consciousness?by wishing in opposition to the real

desire after acquiringan

organic impulse towards

drawing.The Hand must be trained to work freely and without

control, by practisein

making simpleforms with a

continuous involved line without afterthought, i. e. its

intention should just escape consciousness.

Drawings should be made by allowing the hand to

runfreely with the least possible deliberation. In time

shapes will be found to evolve, suggesting conceptions,forms and ultimately having personal

or individual style.The Mind in a state of oblivion, without desire

towards reflection orpursuit of materialistic intellectual

suggestions, is in a condition to produce successful

drawings of one's personal ideas, symbolic inmeaningand wisdom.

By this means sensation may be visualized.

LA

15. This rendition of one of the favorite topoi of the surrealists,

borrowed from Leonardo's Treatise onPainting, may come from the

once-popular English version of John Francis Rigaud (1802), though

seekingto

verify the point would risk apointless pedantry.

16. Meister Eckhart, perhaps?



Masheck: A Pre-Bretonianadvocacy

of automatism in art 185

Figure 1.Austin Osman Spare, Untitled pen and inkdrawing illustratingAustin O.

Spareand Frederick Carter, "Automatic

Drawing,"1916.

a pre-bretonian advocacy of automatism in art spare and carter's automatic drawing

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