Page 58 - Studio International - April 1965

The visual poetry of Michaux

Paris Commentary by Michel Conil Lacoste

Henri Michaux 'In fact what I appreciate most in painting is the Very quickly the poet perceives that the language is
Ink Painting 1958-59
Musée d'Art Moderne cinema'. This confession comes from Henri Michaux insufficient, the words are limited : 'Can't you see that
whose work, shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne, is the I paint to supersede the words? . . . Gestures, mimes,
attraction of the month. And he adds 'The colours that sounds, lines and colours : these are the primitive means,
dart like fishes on the skin of the water where I put pure and direct of expression'. One must forget culture
them, this is what I love in water-colour; the little to come back to the spontaneous exhalation of
colourful heap which disintegrates in the minutest oneself. From 1925 to 1927 the drawing of Michaux,
particles—these passages and not the final stop.' firstly illustrative, develops like an autonomous art and
The final stop—this is the result. And just like poetry, soon the situation reverses: it is the gouache or the
painting interests the poet Michaux far less in terms of wash which since 1939 in the selection entitled
an end in itself than as a means of knowledge and 'Peintures' suggests the text instead of illustrating it
discovery. What counts is the elusiveness, the change, after reading. This remark is valid only for the books, for
the life, and the techniques are only interesting within poetry and plastic expression continue to be practised,
the measure where more or less perfectly they capture the one independently of the other.
this vital interior influx: poetry, automatic writing, If Michaux has come to the drawing, the wash and
watercolour and washes, drawings executed under the the watercolour only in search of finding liberation and
influence of drugs. Henri Michaux, adventurer of the to express in it what was evading the net of words, all
'faraway interiors', has lived and practised all this. this work has arrived, regardless of whether he wants it
Born in 1899 in Namur in Belgium (he lives in France or not, at a result that certain ardent supporters place
since 1924 and has French nationality for ten years), he on the level of, even above, the creations of Tobey,
is essentially a poet. An original poet but with an Pollock, Wols, Klee. Work, finally very dense which
audience a little intimate, helped since his debut by 'holds' the wall better than one would have thought
André Gide and Jean Paulhan. His many works bear and which consists of many stages: the pages of
subtle titles, paradoxical, untranslatable, where one writing and alphabets of 1927 ; the ghostly goauches
only talks of nights, of magic, of labyrinths, of exorcisms, on black backgrounds of 1937-38, the abandoned and
of monsters, and of precipices. A great traveller, beautiful series of faces in watercolour, constant theme
Michaux, poet and painter, an explorer of this obscure of this visionary: 'There is' he says, 'a certain interior
and exalting place called 'The space of the within'. spirit that one should be able to paint and not the nose,