By the autumn of 1924, when Breton issued the first Surrealist manifesto, Masson had already made the threadlike pen drawings that would carry automatism into visual art. These were webs of unbroken line, drawn fast and half-blind, soon to appear in the early numbers of La Révolution surréaliste. This is not one of those sheets. It is their opposite, and far more revealing for being so. A ruled border encloses the image; crosses mark its corners like the registration points of a drawing meant to be measured and transferred; faint orthogonals recede toward a vanishing point. Every sign of the atelier is present. The hand is not outrunning thought here. It is constructing.

What it constructs is a seated nude, taken apart and rebuilt in the Cubist grammar Masson had been practising under contract to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in the building on the rue Blomet where his studio adjoined Miró’s and where Leiris, Limbour and Artaud came to talk. A breast surfaces as a circle pinned by a single dot, half anatomy and half compass point. A torso swings through a slow S, and the rounded body of a guitar lends the figure its hips. A pyramid, a tall mast, stepped planes and zones of hatching and stipple hold everything in a shallow, tilting space. The debt is above all to Gris, to his lucid and almost moral rigour, here pressed toward something more restless than Gris himself would have permitted.

The fascination of the sheet lies precisely where its title appears to misfire. In 1924 Masson stood at a seam between two disciplines: the deliberate architecture of late Cubism, which he had mastered, and the released, involuntary line he was about to stake his art upon. Here the scaffolding is still standing. The crosses and construction lines belong to a picture built to be controlled, and yet the contour of the nude has already begun to wander, looping past its own structure, thickening and thinning with a pressure no ruler dictated. One can watch the two systems contend within a single body.

That contest is the true subject, and it corrects a common misunderstanding of what automatism meant for Masson. He never took it to be the mere absence of structure, a surrender to chance. It was a wager about where form originates, a question of whether order might rise out of impulse rather than be imposed upon it. A sheet titled Dessin automatique that still shows its measured armature is not a contradiction; it is the evidence. Automatism emerged for Masson out of construction, by loosening it from within, rather than by refusing it outright.

Seen this way the drawing becomes a hinge. On one side lies the Cubist still life, with its guitars and ruled planes; on the other, the open biomorphic line of the work to come, in which bodies, landscapes and myths would flow into one another. Here the guitar is already turning into a hip, the plane into a thigh, and the figure is just beginning to slip the geometry that holds it. Within a year the armature would be gone for good. On this sheet it is caught in the act of being abandoned, a rarer and more instructive thing to witness than either the order that preceded it or the freedom that followed.

This drawing is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Comité André Masson, Paris, formally the Association pour la Protection et la Diffusion de l’Œuvre d’André Masson (APDOAM).