1929

Animal Caught in a Trap

French, 1896 - 1987

The circular boundary represents the ensnaring trap, and the jagged, crisscrossing lines within it are the caught animal. André Masson used flowing crayon marks to condense the dynamism of the animal’s violent struggle. This was an adaptation of a technique that Masson had first explored starting in drawings in 1923. He worked with such apparent rapidity that his line took on a life of its own, rather than simply tracing the outlines of his symbolic figures and objects. These drawings were called "automatist" for their apparently spontaneous manner of production—for seeming to have been made outside of the total control of the artist’s conscious will or reason. Their open-ended formlessness gave those sketches an elusive, abstract character that connected them, in turn, to the experimental techniques used by the Surrealist poets with whom Masson collaborated in the 1920s.