At first glance this is a page from a naturalist’s notebook: a dozen specimens spaced evenly across the paper in clean India ink, each granted its own room, as though awaiting a label. But no taxonomy would consent to file these creatures together. A splayed figure holds its own ribcage open like the doors of a cabinet. A sunflower turns predatory and closes on a praying mantis. A leaf grows a pair of watching eyes, a horse’s skull branches into dead wood, and shells and spiny fish-heads share the sheet as equals with a human body. The plate format promises orderly classification and delivers something heretical in its place: kinship.

That is the wager of the title. La fraternité des Règnes, the fraternity of the kingdoms, gathers the three realms of the old natural philosophy, animal, vegetable and mineral, into a single family and lets resemblance pass freely among them. Against Linnaeus, who divided, Masson proposes correspondence: the secret analogies that let a flower acquire a mouth, a leaf acquire sight, a skull put out branches. The lineage is partly French and literary, descending from Baudelaire’s forest of correspondances, and partly German and morphological, reaching back to Goethe’s dream of a single form underlying all that grows. Masson, a serious reader of both traditions, draws their convergence.

His real subject, though, is mimicry, the faculty by which one order of life assumes the appearance of another and the boundary between a creature and its surroundings dissolves. This was the obsession of his associate Roger Caillois, who in the same decade wrote of insects so completely absorbed into the forms around them that they seemed seduced by space itself, and of the praying mantis as an image of devouring desire. The mantis is here, gripped by its predatory flower, and so is the eyed leaf, the supreme emblem of mimicry, watching from inside its own disguise. Masson is not inventing monsters. He is pointing to a capacity nature already possesses, one that unsettles every clean line we try to draw across it.

What raises the sheet far above fantastic illustration is the exactitude of the looking. Each organism is rendered with a field naturalist’s attention to structure, to the articulation of a shell, the set of an eye, the mechanics of a jaw, so that the impossible creatures feel observed rather than dreamt, recorded in the wild rather than conjured at the desk. The ancestry here runs through Grandville, whose metamorphic natural histories of the previous century turned plants and beasts into a parallel society. Masson restores the strangeness Grandville had made charming, and lends it the cold precision of a scientific plate.

The date sharpens all of it. In 1940, the year France fell and Masson moved south and then into hiding ahead of the Occupation, he set down a sheet about the hidden solidarity of all living things, a fraternity of kingdoms composed at the very moment the human kingdom was tearing itself apart. He does not underline the irony, and the drawing is the stronger for his silence. It keeps its calm, taxonomic composure, lays its impossible creatures out for inspection, and lets the buried affinities between them carry a meaning the catalogue page was never built to hold: that the divisions we trust, between species, between realms, perhaps between one people and another, are far more porous than we wish.

NOTES

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).