Böcker av Henri Michaux

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "e;genius,"e; and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "e;is without equal in the literature of our time."e; This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

Allen Ginsberg called Michaux a genius, and Jorge Luis Borges said that his work is without equal in the literature of our time. Henri Michaux (1899-1984) wrote Ideograms in China as an introduction to Leon Chang's La calligraphie chinoise (1971), a work that now stands as an important complement to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa's classic study, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Previously available only as a limited edition, Ideograms in China is a long, gorgeously illustrated and annotated prose poem containing a very deep consideration of the world's oldest living language. Poet Gustaf Sobin's luminous English version beautifully captures the astounding and strange French original. For Michaux, the Chinese culture ranked as the world's richest, a culture grounded in its written language, which bound China together through three millennia and across its enormous territories. Ideograms in China presents an oblique history of that culture through the changing variety and beauty of the ideograms: Michaux looks into a dozen scripts--from ancient bronze vessels bearing ku-wen script to running script to standard k'ai-shu characters--and the poem carries the rhythms of someone discovering the soul of a civilization in its impression of ink on paper.

This selection is from L'Espace du Dedans, which collected eight books of prose poems, sketches and free verse. Brilliantly translated by Richard Ellmann, Michaux asks readers to join him in a fantastic world of the imagination. It is a world where wry humor plays against horror--where Chaplin meets Kafka--a world of pure and rare invention.

This fully illustrated catalog accompanies the first exhibition curated by Brett Gorvy for the Lévy Gorvy gallery in New York. The exhibition features nearly one hundred artworks by twenty-seven artists, including Lee Bontecou, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly and Hannah Wilke. Documenting masterpieces that are rarely on public display, the publication offers a unique perspective on viewership and collecting. An essay by Suzanne Hudson examines works by Johns, Ryman and Twombly, while Sarah K. Rich considers the use of hallucinogens to break down boundaries within the self. A new translation of an excerpt from Henri Michaux's Infinite Turbulence offers a window into the mind of an artist on mescaline. Miranda Mellis' work of short fiction "The Emissaries" conjures a dystopian narrative that beautifully responds to works by Bellmer, Conner, Dubuffet and Rama, and Pablo Neruda's poem "Ode to Things" accompanies reproductions of works by Cornell.