In La ville crânienne, the cranial city, a head and a built environment are made from one substance. Cut blocks, struts, brick courses and stepped façades compose a structure that is skull and metropolis at the same instant: an eye socket and a window arch are the same opening, and the towers climbing the upper right can be read as teeth or as a far district. There is no seam between the two orders, no point at which the body ends and the building begins. The gouache, unusually emphatic for Masson, locks the whole together. Blue, brick-red, ochre and slate are fired across the surface like enamel on a reliquary, or the leading of stained glass.

The head is shown under pressure, half architecture and half ruin, flinging out rays and splinters from its base as though caught mid-detonation. Masson signed the sheet in Roman numerals, XXXIX, and the year carries the image. Without depicting any event, the drawing belongs to the last months before the war, when the thought of a mind constructed like a city, and as easily levelled, required no gloss. Masson had already seen the rehearsal. He had spent the mid-thirties in Catalonia and watched the Spanish war engulf it, returning to France with an imagery of slaughterhouses and dismembered space. The destroyed body fused with the destroyed town was, by 1939, the master image of the age, fixed two years earlier in Picasso’s Guernica.

What lifts the sheet above emblem is the seriousness of its building. Masson does not draw a skull and ornament it with little houses. He reasons the whole form through as masonry, attending to load and course, the joint of a wall, the turn of a stair, the way a façade steps back into depth, so that the cranium has genuine architecture, a structure that could be surveyed and, just as plainly, demolished. The picture proposes that consciousness has engineering, that a mind is something built, and therefore something that can be brought down.

This is the drawing’s modern terror, and its originality. The old emblem of mortality was the bare skull, the memento mori of a single life. Masson enlarges it into a memento mori of civilisation itself, not one man’s death but the destructibility of the entire edifice of mind and culture, drawn at the moment Europe prepared to test that proposition in earnest. The architectural fantasy he summons is closer to Piranesi’s imaginary prisons than to any real skyline, a labyrinth of interior masonry without exit, vast and oppressive, here turned into the inside of a head.

It is a small drawing that carries an enormous idea. Thought is given walls, rooms and a skyline, then shown straining at its own foundations, as if a head could be shelled like a city and a city could think and suffer like a head. Made in the narrowing weeks of peace, La ville crânienne reads in retrospect as a dense, deliberate premonition, a city of the mind set down just before the real cities, and the minds inside them, began to come apart.

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).