Richard Howard

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  books September 2002

  Richard Howard on Henri Michaux

  IN THE DECADE BETWEEN 1956 and 1966, Henri Michaux, who had been publishing verse, prose, and drawings since 1927, produced six little books concerning his experiences with mescaline and other, mostly psychedelic, drugs. Several of these volumes, including this first one, are “illustrated” by the author’s astonishing drawings, which frequently afford a more direct account than his discursive writing of the exploratory voyages Michaux inveterately undertook beginning in the late ’20s. These brief texts, often (as in the case of Miserable Miracle) written during the experiments with mescaline and

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  print April 2001

  Dorothea Tanning

  Last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art purchased Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday, 1942, an early self-portrait in which the bare-breasted, bramble-skirted heroine, accompanied by an apparently benevolent minidragon (first of the animal demiurges so often inhabiting the artist's future paintings), stands with her hand on the knob of a white door in an infinite regress of half-open portals. This acquisition has now been celebrated by curator Ann Temkin with a small show of paintings, objects, and drawings from Tanning’s long career, “a hidden treasure of modern art,” concluding with one of the dozen

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  print December 2000

  The art that inspired them in 2000

  Those of us who live and breathe contemporary art will hold to the idea that art does change, if not the world, then the way we live in it. But our “world” can be more insular than we care to admit. So to open our look back at 2000, we asked twenty-one “outsiders” we admire—from novelist J.G. Ballard to musician John Zorn—to tell us about the art that inspired them this year.

  Dave Eggers (novelist)
  
  About a year ago, I saw Marcel Dzama’s stuff in zingmagazine and fell madly in love. Then his show at David Zwirner just killed me. A hundred or so drawings (bears with handguns, whale-men

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  print October 1996

  LEE KRASNER: PORCELAIN, 1955

  Take it down Tear it up Turn it over Make
  
  it new out of old makings:
  
  exert what that venerable scatterbrain
  
  in Weimar once called the Power
  
  of Pulling Yourself Together whereby
  
  the master is first revealed.
  
  Exposed is more like it: shown for what you are.

  Porcelain! If a watched pot never boils, what
  
  happens to a pulverized one?
  
  These are not heroic fragments, nothing here
  
  inherently shapely! No
  
  identifiable vessel remains: you
  
  picked up the pieces all
  
  over the place and laid them down again

  according to your own ragged politics
  
  of reaching and retracting, no
  
  better than breathing really, putting