A Small Monster

Reuben Mednikoff (1906–1972) was a British artist associated with the Surrealist movement. In 1935 he met Grace Pailthorpe, a surgeon and psychoanalyst 23 years his senior. They began a life-long collaboration in which they used Surrealist ‘automatic’ processes as methods of psychoanalytic experimentation. This pen and ink drawing appears to have been removed from a book and is inscribed ’21 January 1936-7’, indicating it was the seventh drawing made by the artist that day. This detail demonstrates Mednikoff’s working process, drawing with the absence of conscious thought and cataloguing his progress scientifically. The monstrous figure produced is like a creature from a nightmare, indicating how Pailthorpe and Mednikoff hoped to reveal repressed fears and desires through their art.