About the artist:

Henri Michaux was a Belgian-born French poet, writer and painter. Michaux is renowned for his strange, highly original poetry and prose, and also for his art: the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York had major shows of his work in 1978 (see below, Visual Arts). His autobiographical texts that chronicle his psychedelic experiments with LSD and mescaline include Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones. He is recognised for his idiosyncratic travelogues and books of art criticism. Michaux is also known for his stories about Plume – "a peaceable man" – perhaps the most unenterprising hero in the history of literature, a character subject to many misfortunes.

His poetic works have often been republished in France, where they are studied along with major poets of French literature. In 1955 he became a citizen of France, and he lived the rest of his life there. He became a friend of Romanian pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran around the same time, along with other literary luminaries in France. In 1965 he won the grand prix national des Lettres, which he refused to accept, as he did every honor he was accorded in his life.

Michaux was a highly original visual artist, associated with the Tachiste movement in the 1940s and 50s, although that describes only a small part of his artistic achievement--for example, his hallucinatory representations of faces and heads. His work often makes use of dense, suggestively gestural strokes that incorporate elements of calligraphy, asemic writing, and abstract expressionism. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York both had major shows of his work in 1978.