Frottage

Frottage is a surrealist and ‘automatic’ method of creative production that involves creating a rubbing of a textured surface using a pencil or other drawing material

Max Ernst
The Entire City (1934)
Tate
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2024

The technique was developed by Max Ernst in drawings made from 1925. Frottage is the French word for rubbing. Ernst was inspired by an ancient wooden floor where the grain of the planks had been accentuated by many years of scrubbing. The patterns of the graining suggested strange images to him. From 1925 he captured these by laying sheets of paper on the floor and then rubbing over them with a soft pencil. The results suggest mysterious forests peopled with bird-like creatures and Ernst published a collection of these drawings in 1926 titled Histoire Naturelle (natural history).

He went on to use a wide range of textured surfaces and quickly adapted the technique to oil painting, calling it grattage (scraping). In grattage the canvas is prepared with a layer or more of paint then laid over the textured object which is then scraped over. In Ernst’s Forest and Dove the trees appear to have been created by scraping over the backbone of a fish.

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

You might like

Between terror and ecstasy

Jean-François Chevrier

Stories of hallucinations in art and literature date back to the Bible, but the idea of the artistic hallucination is more recent. As the author of a new book on the subject reveals, the terrain that encompasses artists from William Blake to Sigmar Polke ‘covers a vast field of experiences between terror and ecstasy’, and has embraced many art movements, including Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism and the psychedelia of the 1960s
Giving time to time

Mark Godfrey

One of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century, Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) is renowned for the extraordinary diversity of his works. The curator of his Tate retrospective discovers ‘a world of fascinating ideas, playful and critical, political and poetic’, as he explores an oeuvre that encompassed a consuming interest in numeric, linguistic and classificatory systems – games, numbers, words, dates and sequences – in the artist’s dual role as divine shaman and public showman, and in geopolitics, which resulted in him setting up the One Hotel in Kabul and employing local craftswomen to create large embroidered maps
Becoming Machine: Surrealist Automatism and Some Contemporary Instances

David Lomas

Examining the idea of being ‘machine-like’ and its impact on the practice of automatic writing, this article charts a history of automatism from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring the intersections between physiology, psychology, poetry and art.