Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art.
The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.
So in 1955, when Michaux tried mescaline, derived from the Peyote cactus, he approached it as a surrealist creative technique, not a search for self-expansion. He shut himself up, ate a special diet, then let the drug wear off before he tried to capture in drawings what he had experienced.
The results, on show in the Courtauld’s drawings gallery, where you’d normally expect to see Old Master sketches, are addictive wonders of abstract art. Graphically precise yet sublimely suggestive, these works were first unveiled in a 1956 book called Miserable Miracle. They have the intensity of Jackson Pollock, but on a much smaller scale. They can also save you money and protect your health and sanity – for Michaux gives such a convincing visual account of what mescaline did to his brain that you can feel it work on yours. These artistic miracles don’t just describe a drug experience. They set off a fizzing delirium in your own mind’s eye.
It starts gently. Soft horizontal black lines hover on a sheet of paper, interrupted by more heavily inked eye-like shapes, almost like musical notation. This delicate drawing beautifully suggests an oscillating chord or an underwater pulse. Michaux said he was expressing the tingling state the drug left him in. It’s as haunting as the ping at the start of Pink Floyd’s Echoes.
Of course, you don’t create a work of art as poetic as this just because you took a drug. Michaux had a long artistic life behind him that included using surrealist techniques to release spontaneous images. From these he graduated, like other artists after the second world war, towards abstraction, whose high priests had been the rationalist and geometric Mondrian and Kandinsky. But in the 50s abstraction went wild, improvisatory, expressive, and its hero was the alcoholic American Pollock. What mescaline gave Michaux is the freedom to be a French Pollock.
His lines lead you into knotty forests, throbbing mazes. He never loses a sense of perspective but uses it to give his visions a reality in space. In one drawing, a shimmering network of reverberating lines recedes into the distance to resemble an aerial photograph of a giant prehistoric earthwork. In another, the entire paper is covered with entwined tubular forms in black and red ink, their surfaces dotted and flecked to create a texture like elephant hide.
What is this wood of symbols? It could be vegetation, or arteries, or the brain’s neural network. As a surrealist Michaux was accustomed to seeing images in random marks. It’s a process that touches on how the brain works – and maybe mescaline intensifies it. As you gaze into these drawings, they seem to shape themselves into images, only for the images to slip away, mere phantoms of the mind.
I think I see a spine and a skeletal hand and sometimes Michaux sees them too and sometimes he doesn’t. In one drawing, an owl or a ghost might be peeking out, but any landscape I grope for in the mayhem of its great neighbouring sketch is obviously an illusion. This dark, rough surface is not any one thing even if it can make you see many things.
Michaux takes you to the depths of your own mind where reality and fantasy interbreed. But the more you look, the more violence intrudes. Images turn gory – these include dismembered bodies and, in my eyes anyway, a rattlesnake. Has the Mexican Peyote awakened primal memories of Aztec sacrifices? It’s more likely these cultural associations are hovering in his thoughts – and mine. I am the lizard king, I can do anything.
Michaux’s drawings have the conviction of a Holbein portrait. He believes he is drawing the truth, even if it is inexplicable. This is what makes them uncanny. And like all the most memorable records of psychedelic experiences, they have a disturbing, disillusioned edge. After all Michaux drew them after the mescaline had worn off. In one drawing, a sea monster with squid-like tentacles floats in crystal clarity. Did he really see this? Would you want to? Michaux broke through the doors of perception so you don’t have to. Be grateful.