Henri Michaux saw art as the gateway to other worlds, and to open it, did not shy away from using hallucinatory means. In this way, the French painter, draughtsman and poet discovered a partly surrealist visual language which he processed in an extensive graphic and literary oeuvre.
(...) Continue readingHenri Michaux – The difficult search for the right path
Henri Michaux was born in the Belgian town of Namur in the Ardennes on 24 May 1899. On his father’s insistence, he reluctantly began studying medicine in 1919, whereas he would rather have become a priest – a wish probably rooted in his childhood where he had attended a Jesuit school and discovered there his love of the defunct language of Latin, and above all, of music. His talent for literary writing had already become apparent in his first French essay; his teacher was so impressed that he advised Michaux to pursue a career as a writer. When the German occupation during World War I delayed the start of his studies, Michaux dedicated his enforced years of rest to avid reading of literary greats such as the Russian writers Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and the French philosopher Ernst Hello. He also studied the writings of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroek and various biographies of Christian saints. When he was finally able to begin his studies, he abandoned them that same year and soon signed up as a sailor on one of the last ocean-going ships.
A literary and painting artist always on the move
Despite various encouragement during his school time, Henri Michaux only found his way to literary writing in 1922 when he happily returned to Brussels and lay his hands on the songs of Maldaror von Lautrémont. These readings were an awakening for him and from then on Michaux worked as a poet and writer. His path to art widened even further when, three years later, he came into contact with the painting of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and Paul Klee. He then began painting himself, but felt increasingly constricted and misunderstood, and a trip to Ecuador was followed by the definitive move to Paris. In the following years, Michaux made further trips to North Africa and Italy, and finally a longed-for extensive trip through Asia, which had a great influence on him. He also visited Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, and in 1940 arrived in France, under the Vichy regime. It was not until 1955, a decade after the Second World War, that he took French citizenship.
Crossing the borders to unknown worlds
Although he had travelled the real world so intensively and persistently, Henri Michaux was not satisfied with these discoveries, but thirsted his whole life for more. It was the seemingly insurmountable limits of human consciousness that he was determined to break through. He thus continued his travels in imaginary ways, tried to artistically capture dream images in word and pictures, and when these experiences were not enough, resorted to mind-expanding agents, and wrote three important books about his experiments with mescaline. He participated three times at Documenta in Kassel as a painter and won the Einaudi Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960. His texts in particular often shone with a dry, sometimes almost malicious humour – although the poet himself was said never to have shown even a semblance of laughter.
Henri Michaux died on 19 October 1984 in Paris. His work was included in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1998.
Henri Michaux - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
