The sea has gone out, and the drawing is largely what it left behind. Across a wide sheet kept mostly blank, Masson lets a fine, even ink line describe a coast at the lowest ebb: rocks that bend like wrists and open hands, crystalline reefs rising in clusters, a great fish or bird-fish stranded at the centre, and, set into the cliff at the left, a drowned city, its arches, its windows and a beached wheel surfacing as the water falls away. The title states the event without drama. La mer se retire: the sea withdraws.

The economy is the whole meaning. Where Masson’s European sheets crowd the paper to its edges, this one breathes; the white is not vacancy but tide, a glistening flat from which forms emerge only where the line decides to gather. He is drawing disclosure itself, the moment when what was submerged rises briefly into view, not yet legible, neither fully ruin nor fully creature, before the water can return to cover it. It is among the first drawings in which the openness we think of as American enters his work, with space treated as an active field rather than a ground to be filled.

The motif belongs to a vein Masson had been opening for several years, in which the earth is imagined as a living body and the landscape pulses with organic and sexual life. Here he carries that telluric imagination down to the shoreline, to the intertidal margin where land and ocean trade their tenants, the very zone where, in the deep history of life, the first creatures hauled themselves ashore. The receding sea becomes an image of origins laid bare, an evolutionary low tide, and the city dissolving in the rock, like the drowned cities of Atlantic legend, sets a human ruin among the geological and the biological as merely one more thing the water has taken and will give back.

The year supplies the undertow. In March 1941 Masson sailed from Marseille aboard the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, among the refugees Varian Fry’s committee worked to rescue, sharing the passage with Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Breton and Wifredo Lam. By way of Martinique he reached New York and settled in the Connecticut countryside. A crossing into exile stands behind this withdrawing sea, and a continent left under water behind that drowned and patient city. The beached fish at the centre, a creature stranded out of its element, exquisitely drawn and unable to move, is difficult not to read as the artist’s own image of himself, washed up intact on a foreign shore.

The drawing carries all of this without once describing it, which is the measure of its refinement. What it shows is a world uncovered and provisional, beautiful and not quite readable, waiting to be deciphered before it slips under again. The history that follows gives the sheet its final charge. In America, Masson’s automatism and his organic, earth-born imagery passed directly to Arshile Gorky and to the young painters gathering in New York, feeding the open, gestural field that would become Abstract Expressionism. Seen from that vantage, this delicate, emptied drawing, made in the year of his flight, looks now less like an ending than like the turn of the tide itself, drawn all the way back, at the one instant before it gathers and comes flooding in.

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).