![[henri-michaux.jpg]] # [The artist who took mescaline so you don’t have to](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/feb/12/henri-michaux-review-mescaline-courtauld-gallery) Psychedelic [[Art]] has an image problem. 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 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. ==He inherited a tradition of bohemian drugs experimentation that went right back to Baudelaire==. So in 1955, when Michaux tried mescaline, he ==approached it as a 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 what he’d experienced==. ![[Untitled>Michaux.jpg]] 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]]. 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 drugs experience. They set off a fizzing delirium in your 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==. You don’t create 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. He graduated, like other artists after the second world war, towards abstraction, whose high priests had been Mondrian and Kandinsky. But in the 50s ==abstraction went wild, improvisatory, expressive==, and its hero was Jackson Pollock. What mescaline gave Michaux is the freedom to be a French Pollock. 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 when the mescaline has worn off. In one of his drawings a sea monster with squid-like tentacles floats in crystal clarity. Did he really see this? Would you want to? Be grateful that Michaux broke through the doors of [[perception]] for you.  Opens 12 February at the Courtauld Gallery.  `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`