Max Ernst's Histoire Naturelle was published in Paris in 1926. Ernst had begun to use frottage (rubbing) in the early 1920s, in the way he used collage, as a visual equivalent to automatic writing. In this technique he saw a way of minimizing the role of conventional artistic skill. But, despite this self-denial, he contrived a series of images which are intensely personal, hauntingly memorable and which remain one of the notable landmarks of Surrealism.