A face looks out, and it has plainly been built rather than born. Masson assembles the head of La chambre III from narrow striations that radiate like split reed or raffia, banded in watercolour in rust, ochre, dried-blood red and bone-white, and stretched taut over an armature of ruled ink. The eyes are lidded lozenges, the nose a stack of plates, the mouth a small parted aperture, and at the brow, like a fixed third eye, sits a crystalline flower. The head is frontal, symmetrical and wholly unhuman, nearer to a carved mask than to any portrait.

The title pulls in another direction. A chambre is a room, and the Roman numeral marks this as the third in a sustained inquiry. Masson lets the head and the room collapse into one object. Seen one way, the striations are hair and the lozenges are eyes; seen another, they are slats and panels, and the apertures are windows giving onto an interior. The watercolour deepens the ambiguity. Laid in translucent bands, the reds read at once as pigment and as tissue, so that the mask appears lit from within, a lantern or a reliquary in the shape of a head. Anatomy keeps turning into architecture, and architecture keeps turning back into flesh.

By 1933 Masson had passed through automatism into the denser, mythological language of his Minotaure years, designing the cover of that journal’s first issue in the same season, and his absorption in non-European masks surfaces in the face’s ritual frontality and its blind, returning stare. But he does something to the mask that the mask does not ordinarily permit. A mask is a surface, a thing held up before a face and worn; this one has been given a behind, an inside, a chamber it simultaneously is and contains. The borrowed object becomes a dwelling for an interior life.

The flower at the crown rewards a second look. A blind eye opened at the top of the skull was a fantasy that preoccupied Bataille in precisely these years, the pineal eye, turned upward toward the sun. Whatever Masson did or did not intend, his frontal blossom belongs to the same imaginative climate, in which the head is pierced at its summit and the light gets in. The radiating bands confirm the reading, fanning outward like a solar corona, so that the chamber is also a small sun, burning behind a grille of reed.

This is why the drawing holds the viewer at an uneasy remove. The face meets our gaze and offers no person behind it, and the longer one looks, the more insistently the architecture overrules the anatomy. The eyes become windows, the cheeks become walls, and the whole head resolves into a partitioned, illuminated room with no visible door. Masson has built a dwelling out of a face and stationed us at its only opening, looking in through the eyes at an interior we are never permitted to enter. The result is among his most concentrated images of the head as habitation. It offers not a likeness of a mind but a model of one, sealed, lit from inside, and looking back.

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).