It is accompanied by a thick, essay-filled catalog and a separate publication of ''Emergences/ Resurgences'' in its first English translation, by Richard Sieburth, professor of French and comparative literature at New York University. This show has been organized by Catherine de Zegher, director of the Drawing Center, and Florian Rodari, a Paris-based independent curator and art historian who organized the Drawing Center's recent exhibition of Victor Hugo's ink drawings.
More than 200 of Michaux's works are or will soon be on view in Manhattan, half of them in an exemplary exhibition at the Drawing Center in SoHo. Now, another beachhead is being attempted and may become permanent. He has had only four gallery shows in New York: first at Cordier & Eckstrom in 1963, and most recently at Edward Thorp in 1985.
But the translation of his immense output remains spotty, and his achievement as a visual artist has yet to gain a solid foothold despite a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1978. Michaux, who died in Paris in 1984, is not exactly unknown on these shores - the Beat poets discovered his travelogues of journeys both actual and chemical in the 1950's. In his 1972 poem ''Emergences/ Resurgences,'' which retraces his artistic odyssey, he summarized his response to Chinese calligraphy: ''Lines flung into the air, veering this way and that as if seized by the momentum of sudden inspiration, and not traced out in laborious, prosaic, exhaustive, bureaucratic fashion - this is what spoke to me, seized me and carried me away.'' of that awful reality,'' he later wrote.) He took up art in earnest in the mid-1930's, building on inspiration gained on a trip to Asia. In 1925, exposure to the work of Paul Klee and Max Ernst had alerted him to the possibility that Western painting might not be a dead end, condemned to simply repeat reality.
By then he was living in Paris, thrilled to have escaped Brussels, had been in print for five years and was becoming known for idiosyncratic writings full of invented words, fantasy narratives and stream-of-consciousness musings. The Belgian-born French poet and writer Henri Michaux began to draw and paint in 1927, when he was 28.
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