Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings

A fascinating exhibition gathers the juddering, gyrating drawings of this Franco-Belgian poet, which capture the nauseating reality of psychedelic drugs

Henri Michaux, Untitled, 1966 (detail). Black and coloured inks, and graphite, on paper, 19.1 x 12.2 cm. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025.

The Courtauld Gallery, London
12 February – 4 June 2025

by JOE LLOYD

Nothing seems to stand still in Henri Michaux’s drawings. In one 1957 work recently gifted to the Courtauld Gallery by the collector Linda Karshan, black lines judder across the page. It could be a topographic diagram of an endless mountain range, or the result of a seismograph gone haywire. Though created with an ink pen, the drawing has a remarkable gradation of colour. Sometimes the scribbles intersect and overwrite each other, forming thicker patches of black. Stare at it too long and the drawing appears to wriggle and vibrate, making its own strange music.

This drawing is the centrepiece of Courtauld’s new exhibition of Michaux’s works, largely loaned from private collections. Before the mid-1950s, Michaux (1899-1984) was a painter and writer, best known – if he was known at all – for his whimsical prose-poems about an Inspector Clouseau-esque bumbler called Plume. A Belgian transplant to Paris, Michaux was a water-drinking abstainer, a far cry from the heavy-drinking bohemians he associated with. In 1954, the publisher Jean Paulhan came to him with a suggestion. Paulhan asked if Michaux would join him in sampling mescaline, a psychedelic drug taken from the Mexican peyote cactus.

Henri Michaux, Untitled (Mescaline drawing), 1957. Pen and black ink on paper. Promised gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan. On long-term loan to The Courtauld Gallery, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025.

Michaux hesitated before agreeing. On 2 January 1955, the two men met in Michaux’s Paris apartment to give it a go, joined by the poet Édith Boissonnas. On this occasion, Paulhan lasted just one night. Boissonnas gave up after three. On his fourth attempt, Michaux overdosed and had to be rescued by a doctor. But he persevered. Over the next few years, he embarked on a series of drug-induced explorations, with mescaline, LSD, Indian hemp, psilocybin, the reserpine-based medications Véricardine and Serpasil, and Lambarene, made from the iboga plant. They were hardly roistering affairs. Michaux would close his shutters, brew tea and listen to music. Every hour, he would report what he saw. He approached the project with semi-scientific rigour and gradually became drawn into the orbit of the scientists and pharmacists then investigating the therapeutic uses of psychedelics.

Michaux’s project was also tied to longstanding artistic ambitions. He was seeking, writes Muriel Pic in the exhibition’s catalogue, “to get as close as he could to what it is that makes art: the experience of sensation alone”. As a young artist, Michaux had believed that artists had to transcend normal states of consciousness to produce truly new art. “Great poetry will always belong to those who have sought more than poetry, to those who have dominated or exceeded human nature, to savants and mystics,” he wrote. But – as anyone who has had a profound revelation while inebriated can attest – those visions often collapse into nonsense when recalled by light of day. So Michaux decided to write what he saw during the trip. The Courtauld exhibition contains an example of his attempts to write during an experiment. His neat handwriting gradually degenerates into a scrawl before regaining some of its form again.

Henri Michaux, Untitled, 1956, Graphite, black and coloured inks on paper, 18.4 x 13.1 cm. Private collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025.

Nevertheless, he published several texts, starting with 1956’s Miserable Miracle. He made a short film about his process, Images du Monde Visionnaire (1959). He also took to drawing, not under the drug’s influence itself, but based on “the vibratory motion that continues for days and days” afterwards. After a few years, he stopped taking the drug entirely, but continued to produce drawings based on his memories of this sensation. The Courtauld presents work from the 15 years after this process began. It begins with one that long predates them, a vaguely figurative 1944 drawing that nevertheless contains some of the shaky lines and eye-like motifs that would characterise Michaux’s later works.

These both appear in the very next drawing, from 1955, in which a column brindled with eyes rises across the page. Michaux wrote that he saw: “Eyes, eyes, eyes … the endless belt kept rolling with its enigmatic eyes.” Another motif was a “furrow without beginning or end” that “comes from one end of the Earth, goes through me and on to the other end of the Earth”. One drawing captures such a depression, which seems to push back layers of landscape with almost explosive energy.

These earliest drawings used just black ink. Gradually, Michaux added coloured ink and graphite pencil to his repertoire. His drawings quickly gain a richness that belies these humble media. One 1956 piece that uses all three is a stew of black, fuchsia, red and blue spots that could be a distant cousin of abstract expressionist action painting. It is non-figurative, although the works we are seeing seldom seem to be entirely abstract. There are paths of ink that might resemble the tentacles of an octopus or a sea star; Michaux wrote about feeling embroiled by a giant starfish, so: “I could not tell if I was becoming the starfish or if the starfish had become me.”

Henri Michaux. Untitled, 1962. Graphite, brown and black inks on paper, 40.1 x 27 cm. Private collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025.

Michaux’s drawings often seem to suggest features of the natural world. A 1959 work in crayon looks like a strange sort of spine. One 1966 ink drawing shows writhing worms, while another from the same year is an almost pointillist depiction of an imaginary insect. Michaux’s agitated pen strokes make it appear almost glistening. Other pieces resemble the cellular structures of animals and plants, algae creeping across a wall, and geological features. These associations flick in and out as one views the drawings, as they might have done for Michaux himself. In trying to depict the mind in extremes, he captured something about how the mind works.

Throughout them all there is a sense of trembling and oscillation, which only softened in the works of the late 60s when the experiments were long over. This jerkiness encapsulates an element of the psychedelic experience that the paisley and tie-dye of the hippies fail to capture, a sense of constant uncertain movement, more nauseating than transporting. Little wonder Michaux eventually stopped. His psychedelia is haunted by the fear that will reveal something about us we would rather it wouldn’t.