Celebrated for both his paintings and prose, eccentric Henri Michaux was preoccupied throughout his career with an all-encompassing quest for self-discovery. Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium, in 1899, and attended Jesuit School in Brussels between 1911 and 1914. In 1919 he enrolled in medical school only to quit one year later, opting instead to pursue a career at sea that he later abandoned as well. Michaux returned to Brussels in 1921 and began to write poetry and prose, quickly receiving recognition from literary circles. When Michaux moved to Paris in 1924, he discovered the works of Paul Klee (1879–1940), Max Ernst (1891–1976), and Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) in a 1925 Surrealist exhibition, which so moved him that took up the brush that same year. Over the next decade, Michaux travelled extensively abroad, visiting South America, Turkey, India, and China. These experiences later figured heavily into his work—Michaux was particularly interested in East Asian calligraphy, encountered during his time in China. Unlike other artists of his generation who were fascinated with Asia for its supposed mystical dimensions and spiritual possibilities, Michaux, who had been frustrated with the limits of language throughout his career, was instead keen to explore issues of representation and communication through calligraphy. In the mid-1950s, Michaux began to experiment with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline while writing and painting in an effort to further his intense pursuit of self-knowledge. Michaux became a naturalized French citizen in 1955, and continued to make spontaneous, abstract works of probing content until his death in 1984.

Despite his reclusive nature, Michaux achieved international renown during his lifetime and was the subject of a retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1978. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many others.

CEJ