A Page from the
#DrawingPapers Archive
This page from Drawing Papers 14 features “Mescaline drawing”, drawn with ink on paper by
#HenriMichaux in 1955.
The 2000 exhibition “Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux” investigated Michaux’s graphic works in tandem with his poetic practice, addressing the artist-poet’s research into the passages between “writing” and “drawing.” The exhibition took its title from Michaux’s extensive body of untitled drawings and from “Passages”, his book of poetic writings.
Michaux wrote of his Mescaline experimentation, “If, during the following hours when I felt or believed myself set free, and despite my weariness and the often unrewarded efforts it required, I started to draw, the first marks I would sketch out would soon be overlaid by others – minute, multiple zigzaggings far more rapid than the ones I could have drawn, uninvited presences, characters or tiny animals, the advance guard of a large and impatient crowd on the march towards me or towards the...