BRUSSELS.- Henri Michaux (Namur, May 24th, 1899 - Paris, October 19th, 1984) was a French speaking writer, poet and painter of Belgian origin.

Henri Michaux spent his childhood in a family of wealthy hatters, in Brussels, Defacqz street, 69.

After staying a while in a boarding school near Mechelen, he pursued his studies in Brussels, at the Saint Michel College. As a distressed teenager, his first literary experiments were influenced by the reading of Tolstoï and Dostoievski.

In 1919, he gave up his studies of medicine to become a sailor, and tried different kinds of jobs. Reading a lot, he discovered the writings of Lautréamont which incited him to become a writer. In 1924, he settled down in Paris and published: “Whom I was” which makes reference to his childhood.

Numerous journeys: in Asia, South America...
During a trip in India, he discovered the effects of magic, which he(it) assimilated to the process of literary creation. Literature was not for Michaux a representation of his fantasies or a kind of entertainment, but a real-life experiment.

He also made drawings which appeared to him as a liberation process, without the obstacle of words with their charge of a whole content which distorts the real meaning they should have. But to reach the complete exploration of his own perception (inside spaces) and trying to get rid, as much as possible, of constraints from the outside, he used drugs. He discovered this process as a miserable miracle and gave up. Till the very end, Michaux pursued indefatigably the search for a balance without sacrificing his own self.

Childhood, Movement and Body in Henri Michaux's creative process
"I write to discover myself. To paint, to work out, to write means the adventure to be alive."

Michaux handled the specific perception of the reality, which the children have in particular, in his "Child's principles", in “Whom I was”, published in 1927, also in the text "Enfants" (“Children”), first published in 1938 in the magazine Verve, and in the book “Children Essay’s; Children's Drawings”, published in 1983. These dates reveal the passion of a whole life. “Children's Principles” consist of a series of so-called maxims written from the point of view of a child, whereas “Children Essay’s; Children’s Drawings” describes the first attempts of the child to represent the internal and outside worlds through drawing and painting.

Michaux admired the spontaneous creativity of children's drawings which an adult is not capable anymore of expressing. According to him, this spontaneity was equalled by the vibrating vitality of the creative gesture of the children. From one text to another the question of the childhood raises new questions which are connected: the heterogeneousness of the systems of signs, the process of hominization, the mystery of the human face: different ways which overlap in the palimpsest of faces painted by Michaux.

Against the petrifaction of the features and the portrait, Michaux suggests a palimpsest reading of his own writings, in the course of which other faces appear under the eyes of the reader: in this way the fantastic beast closest to Michaux doubtless would be this human octopus, the tadpole-man, non- figure with undifferentiated features.

Michaux aimed at returning the movement of the internal and outside realities, what means the movement of the spirit (creation and interaction of thoughts, feelings and other psychological states) and the movement inside the body (the beating heart, the pounding veins, the ceaseless creation of cells, underlining the medical consciousness of Michaux), in direct relationship) - often on the hostile mode - with the conditions of the outside world. In the creative act, by being at the same time the intermediary between these two conceptions of reality and the transmitter of this collision, the body participates actively in this process.