Metamorphosis is an essential notion for André Masson, whose conception of the world is one of continuous flux. “There is no completed world,” as the artist himself admits. The artist began a new way of working at this time, punctuated by fine lines that travel across the pictorial surface like Ariadne's thread, and a few “fixed points in a fluid world”, to borrow a phrase from Michel Leiris, a friend of the artist.

This drawing is from a key period of the artist's involvment in the Surrealist group, in which he experiments freely with automatic drawing, a technique he invents in order to apply the subcounsciusness to drawing or painting. In a meditative technique which he describes at length, Masson lets his hand draw freely on the sheet of paper in abstract motifs, which he then brings forth in a motif. In a perfect reunion of contraries, this drawing shows a female and male figure that seem to be melting into one body.