SURREALISM/1924-1969 / Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, etc. LYRIC ART, ABSTRACT, TACHISM/1950-1960 / Jean Degottex, Georges Mathieu, Jackson Pollock, Emil Schumacher, Emilio Vedova, etc.
Henri Michaux was born in Namur (Wallonie, Belgium) in 1899. He grew up in Brussels. He studied in a Jesuit Institut and wanted to devote his life to the religion but his father decided for him and he began studies of medicine in 1919. He gave up this way quickly and joined up the navy. He was a distressed teenager; his first literary experiments were marked by the frequentation of Tolstoï and Dostoïevski. After having read works of Lautréamont, Michaux began writing in 1922.
When he met, in Paris (1925), Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, he started to be interested in painting and graphic arts. Henri Michaux travelled between 1927 and 1937 (Asia, South Africa). He wrote, drew, and painted. His first exhibition was organized in Paris in 1937; his graphic production became more important than his literary production.
During all his life, Michaux will practised the watercolour as much as the drawing, the gouache, the etching and ink. With his new interest in calligraphy, the artist-writer often used it in his works. In the Fifties, Michaux tried out hallucinogens drugs, particularly mescaline. These experiments inspired his art as well as his writings. This time of creation was consecrated with an exhibition to the Gallery La Hune (Paris, 1956), then by two important exhibitions, in Brussels to the Palais des Beaux-Arts (1957) and in Frankfurt (1959).
However, he never belonged to the Surrealist movement, his art was often compared with it. Michaux‘s paintings remained always figurative, in spite of a strong tendency to abstraction. The artist intention is not to flee the world, but to increase the conscience of it. To increase the conscience of the world by the increase of its perception. Henri Michaux‘s works was exhibited in Paris with “The lyric flight, Paris, 1945-1956” presented at the Museum of Luxembourg in 2006.
Henri Michaux died in Paris in 1984, he was 85 years old.
