Henri Michaux "Selected Works"
Edward Thorp Gallery
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Henri Michaux was both a poet and a self-taught painter, he viewed drawing as liberation from words: a new language, rejecting the verbal. He was born in the Belgian town of Namur in 1899, studied in his formative years at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He began then abandoned the study of medicine. He started writing in earnest in 1922, soon becoming known in literary circles. His acquaintance with Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico, whom he met in Paris in 1925, inspired him to make his first painting and drawing. From 1927 to 1937 he traveled extensively abroad, visiting South America, Turkey, China and India; this experience was a powerful influence on his work. The early combinations of poetry and drawing led him to form his own ideograms of expression; this synthesis would be central to Michaux’s work. In 1937 Michaux had his first one-man show at the Librairie-Galerie de la Pléiade followed by important shows abroad. He experimented with frottage from 1945 to 1947, and immediately after the accidental death of his wife in 1948 he produced several hundred visionary ink and watercolor works. By the mid 1950s, Michaux had returned to his earlier use of ideograms in a series of India ink drawings, through which he became closely associated with Art informel. Michaux began experimenting with hallucinatory drugs, particularly with mescaline, executing meticulous ‘all-over’ compositions; detailed depictions of minute forms, organic shapes and repeating patterns. In 1955 Michaux took French citizenship. During the 1960s he continued to use India ink, watercolor and pastel; some works of this period suggest figurative elements. He introduced more color into his work in the 1970s with the introduction of acrylics. Michaux continued to work until his death in Paris in 1984 at the age of 85.
He exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in December 1957 and a retrospective exhibition in Frankfurt/Main in March 1959, works at the "Documenta" in Kassel in 1959 and 1964; he was awarded the Einaudi-Prize at the Biennale in Venice in 1960. In 1965 he won the National Prize of Literature, which he refused to accept. The Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York both had major shows of his work in 1978. A traveling museum show was mounted in Japan in 1983 and an exhibition “Untitled Passages” took place at the Drawing Center in New York in 2000.
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from January 18, 2013 to March 02, 2013