From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
‘Dreaming, we don’t write. A mystic in a trance doesn’t write. Enraptured, we don’t write. If we write afterwards, it’s nothing like […] So literature belongs to average people and states.’ For years, the Franco-Belgian artist Henri Michaux wrestled with this problem: how could he transcend normality? Was it possible to peer beneath the heavy blanket his conscious mind had draped over his radical creative potential? He painted hundreds of visionary, dreamlike works in gouache and watercolour, and attempted to tap into an inner well of creativity by making gestural inky blots. But the forces of chance and spontaneity only took him so far. Michaux had experimented with drugs during a year-long trip through South America in 1928, and his outlook was profoundly affected by his subsequent travels to countries including India, Nepal, Japan and Indonesia. Then in 1954 Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, a book describing his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline, extracted from the Mexican peyote cactus. It was a pivotal moment for Michaux. Jean Paulhan, fellow Parisian and director of the Nouvelle Revue Française, suggested to his friend that they might try the effects of the drug together. Michaux replied: ‘I’m your man […] your travelling companion and my apartment our take-off ground.’ They took a trip into the unknown on 2 January, 1955, after which Paulhan called it a day and left Michaux to it. For 12 years the artist continued to take mescaline in a sustained investigation of its effect on his creative powers. A group of the extraordinary drawings he made in the hours, days and weeks after each ingestion, when the main effects of the drug had worn off but he was still able to feel a ‘vibratory motion’ recalling the sensations it evoked, is currently on display at the Courtauld.
Untitled (1956), Henri Michaux. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
As the exhibition’s curator, Ketty Gottardo, points out in a label text, these drawings cannot be called ‘straightforward records of mental images’. Even if Michaux had been capable of drawing while in the grip of the drug, his visions were ineffable. ‘Mescaline eludes form,’ he wrote in Misérable Miracle (1956), a book documenting his experiences. ‘It is never definitively this or that. You do not see. You discern.’ In any case, the impressions came at such breakneck speed that it would have been impossible to keep pace with them. ‘In the huge light-churn, with lights splashing over me, drunk, I was swept headlong.’ His project of drawing these visions-that-weren’t-visions enmeshed him in a Beckettian cycle of trying, failing and trying again. The works in the display are not records so much as memories and recreations, as, pen in hand, Michaux tried afterwards to process his experiences.
Looking round the chronological display of these drawings, one has the sense of Michaux getting into his stride – failing better, perhaps – as he learned to sail ‘the mescaline ocean’. One that he made after an early dose of the drug scrolls queasily down the page, soft parallel lines punctuated disconcertingly with eyes; the label quotes a passage from Misérable Miracle in which he describes a face ‘which kept gliding ceaselessly downward, each lower row disappearing, replaced by others appearing, of slanting eyes, of slanting eyes, of slanting eyes […] the endless belt kept rolling’. The later drawings are less fractured, the sheets of paper covered with intricate marks as Michaux forged a new visual language to describe his mescaline dreams. Some resemble rubbings of tree bark, but more random than anything you might see in the natural world. At a distance others have the appearance of maps, but look more closely: what you might have taken for streets lead nowhere. The eye finds no place to rest among the agitated zigzags and scribbles, no path leading through the fragments and fissures: these intense drawings are genuinely difficult to look at. The more one persists, the more discomfiting is the absence of the order to be found even in the most wildly gestural works of this period. In daring to lift a corner of the mind’s protective blanket, Michaux exposed the raging creativity churning away in what he called the ‘workshop of the brain’. Even at second hand it is a disturbing sight.
Untitled (1962), Henri Michaux. Private collection. Photo: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
And yet Michaux continued to open the doors of perception, evidently more beguiled than disturbed by what he found on the other side. Was he an unhinged visionary or a diligent researcher? He presented himself as the latter, preparing fastidiously for each dose by closing the shutters, carefully choosing music from Mahler and Messiaen to Indian raga and African polyphony and taking (or attempting to take) hourly notes documenting his feelings as the mescaline took effect. ‘Devotees of the simple perspective may be tempted to judge all my writings as those of a drug addict,’ he remarked. ‘I regret to say that I am more the water-drinking type.’ The exhibition reflects his approach and is a model of thoughtful clarity in its presentation of these exceptionally strange works of art (or documentation), inviting the visitor to consider drawing’s role in extreme acts of creativity and self-discovery.
The short illustrated catalogue contains fascinating and informative essays by Michaux experts Franck Leibovici and Muriel Pic, both of which consider the relationship between the artist’s drug use and his creativity. And yet its lack of an introductory essay situating Michaux within a social and art-historical context throws the reader in at the deep end. One must turn to the back for biographical details in the form of a chronology, although this is designed as a reference tool rather than the kind of text that invites linear reading.
In the decade since the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery opened, curators at the Courtauld have explored many aspects of drawing practice by staging in its small space a succession of innovative and thought-provoking exhibitions. ‘Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings’ is the latest in a bold and ambitious programme that continues to ask searching questions about what drawing is, and what it can do.
‘Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings’ is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, until 4 June.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.