Pacquement, Alfred; Bellour, Raymond; Michaux, Henri — Henri Michaux: Peintures

Paris, Gallimard, 1993. Hardcover. Quarto. Hardcover in illustrated slipcase. Book bound in grey cloth with stamped titles in illustrated jacket. 319 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 30 cm. French text. In 1939, Henri Michaux, then forty years old, published a pamphlet entitled Peintures, which saw poetic texts associated with some strange gouaches in which ghostly figures and other monstrous heads appeared, which did not conform to the aesthetic canons of the time. The author, already noted for Ecuador and A Barbarian in Asia, "had been painting for a short time," as he wrote at the beginning of his book, adding that by starting to draw so late, he was like a child learning to walk. Some time earlier, he had discovered that pictorial art was not limited to a simple mimicry of reality, that artists like Paul Klee and Max Ernst had opened the way to an art of the imagination, to an exploration of the inner world, which Michaux would make his main objective. From the very first Alphabets of 1925 until his death in 1984, Michaux painted and drew constantly, thus carrying out, alongside his work as a writer, an action of "deconditioning" with regard to the verbal. Long overlooked, his work as a painter is today celebrated, in particular the large Indian ink paintings, achievements of the most accomplished period, which strive, according to Francis Bacon, "to achieve a new definition of the human figure" whose experience of hallucinogens, transcribed in the mescaline drawings, pushes the interminable research even further. This work, a new version of the monograph published in 1993, restores Michaux's work step by step by placing it in the art of his time and by highlighting his plastic autonomy. VG. Some light shelfwear, otherwise clean and unmarked.