Henri Michaux

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a poet, writer and painter, Belgian by birth and French by naturalisation, the author of Ecuador, Un certain Plume, Voyage en Grande Garabagne and L'Espace du dedans. His work, among the most singular in twentieth-century French literature, explores the territories of the imagination, states of consciousness and the limits of language. Born in Namur in 1899, he became a French citizen in 1955.

After abandoning his medical studies, Michaux signed on as a sailor and travelled before turning to writing. A stay in South America gave rise to Ecuador in 1929, a travel journal in which observation of the outer world already mingles with the exploration of the self.

With Un certain Plume, published in the early 1930s, he created one of his most famous characters: a passive, bewildered man confronted with an absurd and threatening world. Real journeys gradually gave way to imaginary lands, notably in Voyage en Grande Garabagne and Au pays de la magie, later gathered with other texts in Ailleurs.

From the 1920s onwards, drawing and painting took on a growing importance in his work. Inks, watercolours and graphic signs became for Michaux another way of exploring movement, the body and the workings of thought.

In the 1950s he experimented with mescaline under medical supervision and sought to observe its effects on consciousness methodically. The experience fed Misérable Miracle, L'Infini turbulent and Connaissance par les gouffres, as well as a substantial body of so-called mescaline drawings.

Henri Michaux died in Paris in 1984. On the borders of poetry, travel writing, inner experience and the graphic arts, he left a profoundly original body of work devoted to what he himself called "the space within".