HENRI MICHAUX
Namur (Belgium), 1899 – París, (France) 1984

He gave up studying medicine in Brussels in 1920, worked as a sailor for a short time and then moved to Paris, where he published his first book, Les rêves et la jambe, a year later. In 1925 he produced his first watercolours, with two themes that recurred throughout his life: heads and alphabets. During the thirties he alternated living in Paris with lengthy travels in Latin America and Asia, which he transferred to some of his books –Un Barbare en Asie (1933), Entre centre et absence (1936). In 1937 he went back to painting. The watercolours on black grounds that he did that year were shown shortly afterwards in his first exhibition, at the Galerie La Pléiade in Paris, and then in 1938 at the Galerie Pierre Loeb, coinciding with the publication of his first major book, Plume (précédé de Lontain intérieur). The Nazi occupation, during which he illustrated various books, including Exorcismes in 1943 and Labyrinthes in 1945, accentuated his aesthetics of black backgrounds, which he now filled with monstrous characters, exhibited for the first time at the Galerie L’Abbaye in 1942. The Expressionism of his portraits and heads increased in the lithographs with which he experimented in the years immediately after the war, which was when his wife died. The album Mouvements, published in 1951, indicated a shift in his approach, into which he introduced chance, play and automatism. He returned to the dynamics of exhibiting in 1950 with Pour connaître mieux Henri Michaux at the Galerie Rive-Gauche in Paris, and in 1954 he exhibited his first multitudes at the Galerie René Drouin and showed work in the United States for the first time, in New York and Seattle. Shortly afterwards he started on his experiments with mescaline, with results that he recounted in detail in various books published between 1956 and 1965. He acquired French nationality in 1955. During the sixties he increased the format of his works, in which he began to use acrylics as well as ink, although without abandoning his world of marks, which he started to employ for the representation of multitudes.
In 1972 he published Émergences-Résurgences, an autobiographical review of his work as an artist, which was shown in a selective exhibition in 1978 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the MoMA in New York.