Demystifying Drawings #19
Tuesday, 1 April 2025. Newsletter 19.
Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings, a foreword to the catalogue by Dr Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, Head of the Courtauld Gallery
“The magnificent gift of modern drawings presented to the Courtauld Gallery in 2020 by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard, not only brilliantly extends The Courtauld's renowned drawings collection, but is also transforming our programme of exhibitions and displays, especially in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery. The Karshan Gift includes two exceptionally fine works by the Franco-Belgian poet and artist Henri Michaux, which are eloquently representative of Linda and Howard's taste and interests. Not only are the drawings the first by Michaux to enter The Courtauld's collection, but they represent a type of drawing which was hitherto almost entirely absent. The process of drawing has surely always been a means to investigate, study and learn, but this analytical and creative principle is given a completely new dimension in Michaux's utterly remarkable personal language of calligraphic marks and gestures. With its topography of dense seismographic lines, one of the Karshan drawings is revealed to have belonged to the group of works that Michaux made as part of his exploration of the effects of the psychedelic drug mescaline. It was the striking quality of this work - somehow both frenetic and lyrical, compressed and expansive - that inspired the present exhibition.”
Henri Michaux (1889-1984), Untitled, 1962, Graphite, brown and black inks on paper Monogram HM lower right, 401 x 270 mm. Private collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
Henri Michaux (1889-1984), Untitled, 1956, Graphite, black and coloured inks on paper, 184 x 131 mm. Private collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025
On mescaline drawings and artistic process, a Q&A with Dr Ketty Gottardo, Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings at the Courtauld Gallery
Michaux was a Franco-Belgian poet, writer and visual artist, known for his experimentation and introspection across a range of media. For those unfamiliar with Michaux and his mescaline drawings, could you provide an overview of his artistic approach and explain what makes these exhibited works particularly significant within his broader body of work?
Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was first a poet and writer before becoming a visual artist; his fascination with the world of words is evident throughout his work, both in his texts and in his art. At the age of 26, Michaux attempted painting for the first time and created his first ‘sign’ drawings, Alphabet and Narration, compositions of ambiguous pictorial signs resembling writing, to which he would return later in his career. During those early years, he painted and drew very little. His first exhibition of paintings and drawings did not take place until 1937 in Paris.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he met André Breton, the photographer Claude Cahun, Salvador Dalí, and André Masson, and encountered the work of Max Ernst and Paul Klee. However, it was his extended travels to South America and Asia between 1928 and 1932 that would fundamentally transform his art. His experiences with distant cultures and philosophies profoundly influenced him. He began practicing meditation, explored Taoism, and experimented with drugs as they were used by local populations in their rituals.
After reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), in which the author described his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline, a non-addictive substance derived from the Mexican peyote cactus, Michaux tried mescaline for the first time in early January 1955. This marked the beginning of a journey that lasted several years, during which Michaux sought to depict the inner workings of the mind through his art. These experiences transformed his artistic life, leading to an outpouring of distinctive drawings and writings.
Michaux’s controlled experiments with mescaline have become the subject of great fascination, and his resulting drawings are often described as surreal, frenetic, and transformative. Could you elaborate on his creative process under (and after) the influence of mescaline and discuss how these altered states shaped both his techniques and the thematic content of his drawings?
First, it is important to clarify that Michaux repeatedly emphasized how difficult, indeed, almost impossible, it was to create anything while under the effects of mescaline. His drawings came afterward. In the foreword to his seminal book Miserable Miracle, Michaux underscores a fundamental aspect of his so-called mescaline drawings: they were not created while under the influence of the drug, but in the hours or even days after its effects had subsided, emerging from what he described as the “vibratory motion that continues for days and days.” The drawings represent Michaux’s inner visions, based on his memory of those sensations and the notes he took following his experiments. Before the advent of brain imaging, attempting to use words and images to record the effects of psychotropic drugs on the brain meant capturing unverifiable mental images which were accessible only to the subject. For Michaux, drawing was always a process of discovery; the act and its outcome had to generate a kind of knowledge that he could not have conceived before making the drawing.
While the Courtauld exhibition presents a monographic display of 21 drawings by Michaux, one of which is Linda Karshan’s promised gift to The Courtauld, it also represents an important milestone in the study and exhibition of experimental art. Could you discuss Michaux’s place within the broader tradition of artists working ‘under the influence’ and explore how his work and this exhibition has deepened our understanding of altered states in artistic practice?
Michaux’s experiences with psychotropic drugs positioned him at the intersection of multiple domains, from science and medicine to spirituality and mysticism. He was neither the first nor the last artist to experiment with drugs. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), for example, preceded him, while Andy Warhol (1928–1987) used amphetamines—initially as a diet aid but later as a stimulant for artistic production. Yet, compared to these figures, Michaux appears more pragmatic in his approach. His experiences were carefully regulated; he took mescaline in a structured manner, often in solitude, with shutters closed, drinking only water (no coffee or alcohol), and listening to a curated selection of music, including classical (Olivier Messiaen, Gustav Mahler), contemporary, and traditional compositions (polyphonic music from the Aka tribe of Central Africa, Indian raga).
As Muriel Pic writes in the exhibition catalogue, the 1950s and ’60s saw a pharmacological revolution in Europe, particularly in Paris and Basel. The pharmaceutical industry had launched extensive research into psychotropic drugs, and it was within this context that Michaux, in collaboration with doctors, regularly experimented with them. He obtained mescaline through specialists such as Dr. Jean Delay of the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris, chemist Albert Hofmann of the Sandoz pharmaceutical laboratories in Basel, and botanist Roger Heim of the Natural History Museum in Paris. This collaboration also led to the production of Images du monde visionnaire (1963), a film produced by the Sandoz Laboratories, in which Michaux sought to convey through moving images the emotions and sensations that could not be fully captured in drawing or writing.
