The title of this exhibition about Henri Michaux (Namur, 1899 – Paris, 1984) is a parody of the famous title of his 1933 book – A Barbarian in Asia. Belgian by birth, but naturalized French in 1955 Henri Michaux was one of the great French-language poets of the 20th century, creating an experimental language, completely idiosyncratic and unique to him. Alongside his written work, which fills three large volumes of the prestigious series La Pléiade, from the late 1920s he developed a considerable body of abstract expressionist painting, considered by Michel Tapié one of the most striking examples of what he called l’art autre – ‘different art’.

The core of the exhibition has a deliberately incantatory, repetitive tone, similar to that in Michaux’s music, which has been lost forever – very much in consonance with the spirit of the poet-painter, a man of obsessions, a man of series, capable of reducing the world to an ideogram, and exploring an inner landscape and its abysses. A man who at the same time, as his biographer Jean-Pierre Martin points out, had a ‘gargantuan, insatiable appetite’, a man of infinite curiosity.

The exhibition is complemented with a selection of books: some monographs, some exhibition catalogues, Michaux’s works translated into Polish, the score of Trzy Poematy Henri Michaux (1963) by Witold Lutosławski, and the corresponding recording Trois poèmes d’Henri Michaux, released in the German series Studio Reihe Neuer Musik; a few selected pieces from his ample collection of Oriental books, Lao Tse, Milarepa, the Mexican Miguel Covarrubias’ Island of Bali, Alexandra David-Néel, René Grousset, Léon Wieger and others, plus the Upanishads, plus treatises on yoga, plus a Hokusai’s book published in 1817, and the very beautiful album of eight lithographs by the Chinese painter Zao Wou-Ki, with the poet’s commentaries, published in 1950 by Robert J. Godet.