In a letter to his publisher, Marc Barbezat, written shortly after the Galerie Pierre exhibition had closed, Artaud revealed the immense scale of the project he was envisioning with his drawings: “I have the idea of putting into operation a new gathering together of the activity of the human world: idea of a new anatomy./My drawings are anatomies in action.”[24]
Although Artaud encountered a great number of the artists who were active and prominent in Paris during the period from 1946 to 1948 while he was creating his final sequence of drawings – among them, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Braque and Alberto Giacometti – his engagement with their work was non-existent. In that final period of his life, Artaud wrote about the work of only two artists: Vincent van Gogh and Balthus.
Artaud had known the Polish-Russian artist “Balthus” (Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola) since 1934, when the painter had been in his mid-twenties; at the time, Artaud was still acting in films and preparing his “Theatre of Cruelty” spectacle, The Cenci, for which Balthus would design the sets.
Although Balthus was very young at the time, he already possessed, for Artaud, an archaic, intentionally obsolete aura: his work had preoccupations which no other artist of the time had, and he was an artist immersed compulsively in his own work, depending for his income – like a Renaissance painter – on a very small group of collectors and patrons, rather than from active participation in the capricious art world. Speaking in 1996, Balthus said: “I am the contrary of a modern man.”[25]
His air of absolute self-obsession and dignity, with its implicit contempt for all subject matters which would have ingratiated him into the contemporary art world – and its contempt, also, for the contemporary world itself – attracted Artaud to him; they were also united by their detestation of psychoanalysis. They briefly became close friends, and Artaud wrote a text for one of Balthus’ exhibitions, held in 1934 at the Galerie Pierre (where Artaud’s own drawings would be exhibited, thirteen years later). He had written then that Balthus was the artist “who makes use of the real only in order to crucify it”.[26]
Balthus, who outlived every one of his contemporaries, would remain a figure who captivated writers and almost always alienated other artists; in the 1980s, the French novelist Hervé Guibert (who, until his death from AIDS in 1991, was often viewed in France as a “successor” to Artaud) tracked down the then-reclusive Balthus to his home in Switzerland and befriended him there.
Balthus had had no contact with Artaud during his years of asylum incarceration, but they met again, early in 1947, after Artaud returned to Paris. Balthus was receiving his habitual attacks from the French art press in the wake of his exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in the previous year, and Artaud decided to show his alliance with Balthus in their marginality (albeit two very disparate marginalities) by writing on his work. In February 1947, during the same period in which he was working on his essay about van Gogh, Artaud wrote two short texts on Balthus’ work. Neither of the texts would be published at the time: one text, entitled Balthus, first appeared in the catalogue of a Balthus retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1983; the other text, Facts Going Back To 1934: The Misery Painter, was published in a French art magazine, Art Press, in the same year. As in the text which he would write two months later about his own work, Ten Years That Language Has Been Gone, Artaud projects Balthus’ work as being bound up with an abrupt and gestural respiratory expulsion. But his exploration of Balthus’ work is more objectively controlled than his writing on his own work or on that of van Gogh; it has relatively little of the explicit insurgence of Artaud’s own presence into the text that dominates his writing on van Gogh. Artaud uses his texts on Balthus to interrogate coolly his concern with the point of intersection between the art work and the human body. To a large extent, Balthus’ paintings themselves become an anonymous presence in this process; not one of his paintings (with their pre-eminent imagery of erotic adolescent girls surrounded by cats in gloomy apartments) is specifically referred to in either of the texts from February 1947. Balthus’ paintings are submerged completely into Artaud’s investigation of the painter’s body and of the painted image as a complex conglomeration of anatomical traces and fluids. He writes: “All painters bring their anatomy, their physiology, their saliva, their flesh, their blood, their sperm, their vices, their sexual diseases, their pathology, their prudishness, their health, their character, their personality or their madness into their works.”[27]
Balthus’ paintings of the 1940s are notable for their figurative coherence and sophisticated technical construction, but this does not deter Artaud from presenting them – with a parallel clarity and cogency – as apocalyptic works of extreme disorder, death and dirt. In his writing on Balthus, Artaud utterly overrules and contradicts the work under his consideration. This sense of contradiction is present too in the language of his texts, which occasionally overrules its own objectivity and veers wildly into glossolaliac outbursts and social condemnations. For Artaud, contradiction is a vital operating principle. This force of willed, irresistible contradiction is present too in the sudden transition from analysis to anecdote, and back again, in Facts Going Back To 1934: The Misery Painter, in which Artaud oscillates between recounting an anecdote about witnessing Balthus making a suicide attempt (over a failed heterosexual relationship), and his meticulous situating of the painter’s body within the space of his work. In this text, Artaud exacts a temporal manipulation of the kind which gives his film scenarios of the 1920s their disruptive power. He reverses time, and places Balthus’ work before that of Ingres and Holbein; Balthus’ obsessions (or, rather, those of Artaud permeating those of Balthus) are so urgent that they negate linear time, making Balthus the precursor of all other figurative artists. As a further contradiction, even Artaud’s anecdote about Balthus’ attempted suicide is internally shattered: he builds a texture of intricately detailed information, exactly locating Balthus’ studio and the precise means by which he had induced the coma in which Artaud (according to his account) had found him; but then, this consistency of information suddenly collapses violently into glossolaliac fragments, with single words split over three lines, and even typographically inverted on the page. As an integral part of producing a discourse on visual art, in his texts on Balthus, Artaud probes the capacity of his language to seize the connections which physical gesture – both the artist’s manual gesture, and his own, allied manual gesture of writing – produces between the body and the image. The space and time of the text are exploded and welded according to the immediate needs of that investigation.
It is Artaud’s essay on Vincent van Gogh, Van Gogh The Suicide Of Society, which is his most celebrated writing on another artist. The essay, written between January and March 1947, was published by K Éditeur as a small paperback book of seventy pages, with black-and-white plates, while Artaud was still alive, in December 1947 (the inexpensive edition, of 3,000 copies, was far in excess of Artaud’s other books, which even at the height of his notoriety habitually appeared in editions of between only fifty and five hundred copies). In 1990, Paule Thévenin assembled a special, large-scale edition of the essay, which was published with very exact correspondences evident between Artaud’s discussion of particular van Gogh works and colour plates of the works themselves, often enlarged to focus in on the details Artaud had emphasized. Van Gogh The Suicide Of Society is Artaud’s final work on any other artist or writer: for the twelve months that remained to him after its completion, he concentrated entirely on his drawings, recordings and notebook texts. The gallery owner Pierre Loeb instigated the essay on van Gogh by sending Artaud a newspaper extract from a book by a psychiatrist named Beer, which diagnosed van Gogh along the lines of a vocabulary with which Artaud was more than familiar. Like Ferdière at Rodez, the psychiatrist approached the art works primarily as materials with which to diagnose psychosis. As Loeb had expected, Artaud was incensed.
Artaud himself is the driving character in his narrat
ive about van Gogh’s relationship with malign psychiatric medicine and suffocating familial pressure (these two forces embodying the “society” which Artaud’s title reviles). Denouncing both his and van Gogh’s psychiatrists as he goes, Artaud accompanies van Gogh intimately on his trajectory towards suicide. Indeed, van Gogh forms part of an oppositional community constructed by Artaud for himself – a community of the only tolerable kind for him, made up from writers (including figures such as Nietzsche, Nerval, Lautréamont and Rimbaud) who never met one another and for whom all social communities were sources of deep antipathy. For Artaud, who highly prized van Gogh’s letters to his brother Théo (whom Artaud casts as an enemy), van Gogh is as great a writer as he is a painter – his textual and visual work forming a dense, volatile and interpenetrating amalgam – and so can be placed within his community of writers. The reader of Artaud’s essay is simultaneously seduced by the vivid evocations of van Gogh’s paintings, and invocatively stigmatized for forming part of the social community which has tormented van Gogh and intentionally precipitated his suicide. At one point, Artaud seems to ally himself with the reader, declaring: “because are we not all, like poor van Gogh himself, suicides of society!”[28] – but this tenuous alliance is soon overturned, and the reader again is the focus of accusations and challenges. Like the spectator of Artaud’s cinema and of his drawings, the reader of his language is sensorially and physically magnetized and enmeshed, but savagely assaulted too, in the eye.
Artaud emphasizes above all the gesturality of van Gogh’s work: the painter digs at the image to virulently bring forth the body of his subject. Artaud tracks his own linguistic, gestural movement as he himself digs into the process of van Gogh’s creative act: “I pierce, I recapture, I scrutinize, I strike, I unseal…”.[29] Such listings of abrasive actions are almost identical to those Artaud uses, in Ten Years That Language Has Been Gone and The Human Face, to evoke his own act of drawing as well as his act of writing, both of which are presented as intensely combative in their grinding of the matter of language and image. In the end, Artaud always brings his exploration of van Gogh inexorably back to himself. He curtails the essay with the image of a huge rock being blasted into a Parisian street from a volcanic eruption. The impact is that of Artaud himself, returning to Paris from Rodez. Van Gogh is obliterated.
The interaction between language and image in Artaud’s work is most powerfully at stake in the pages of the schoolchildren’s notebooks which he made use of, on a daily basis, between February 1945 and March 1948. Aside from letters sent to friends, the first and last words that Artaud wrote – from the point when he broke the silence of his incarceration, until the moment of his death – were inscribed in the notebooks, in fountain-pen ink and graphite pencil. Throughout that time, drawings executed in the same media accompanied the texts in the notebooks. Over the years, hundreds of the notebooks piled up beside Artaud’s bed in his ward at the asylum of Rodez, and then in a trunk at his pavilion in Paris. It was during the two periods when Artaud was most absorbed in producing his drawings – around May 1947, when he was intensively compiling his wounded portrait heads in anticipation of the Galerie Pierre exhibition, and around December 1947, when he was creating his final totems of amassed heads and completing The Projection Of The True Body – that the border between image and text in the notebook pages was, concurrently, most strenuously probed and set into upheaval. The texts are often then arranged as glossolalia, in visually dense, almost figurative arrangements of letters: the glossolalia, for Artaud, are expelled from the body, and are situated between language and the image. After Artaud’s death, Paule Thévenin would publish the vast majority of the texts from the notebooks as eleven volumes of Artaud’s Collected Works (the final published volume, from 1994, ended with the notebooks from February 1947, although prior to her death in the previous year she had transcribed and prepared for publication the contents of the notebooks up to the end of May 1947). In these volumes, Thévenin notes the position of the drawings within the arrangement of each notebook page and gives a brief description of the image. But this strategy carries nothing of the ferocious, endless confrontation of language with image that the notebooks project. Artaud himself, shortly before his death, had envisaged the publication of a catalogue that would have reproduced fifty pages from his notebooks. He wrote an introduction at the end of January 1948 for the proposed volume, to be entitled 50 Drawings To Assassinate Magic, which explored the way in which it was often the drawings, constellated over his notebook pages, that generated his textual language, rather than the other way round; but, once his language had taken on its own existence, it would act back violently on the image, precipitating a virulent, vital battle to seize the point of origin for the body’s gestures. He wrote that, above all, these confrontational assemblages of image and text were aimed at creating a language of the body: they “will make their apocalypse/because they’ve said too much to be born/and said too much in being born/not to be reborn/and to take a body/and so authentically.”[30] The first of Artaud’s two texts on his drawings, Ten Years That Language Has Been Gone, also concerns his intention of instilling a raw physical presence in his notebook pages, through his construction of their internally abrasive visual and textual design. In the event, Artaud was not able to assemble the projected catalogue of his notebook pages, since he died a month or so after the project’s formulation.[31] Following Paule Thévenin’s death, the vast collection of Artaud’s notebooks was stored in the French National Library in Paris.
The most striking visual element of Artaud’s notebook pages is that they directly convey the tangible substance of writing and drawing as one of warfare. The hand and the material of the paper have evidently been in a sustained battle of attack and resistance. The pages are jaggedly indented and ripped, their gestural struggle forming a counterpoint to the collision between the presences of image and text. Often, this rhythm of indentation, laceration and manual impact will accumulate and fluctuate over the course of a notebook, producing a kind of legible, extended narrative of the body’s gestures in their intensification, arrest and reconstitution. The texts and drawings in the notebooks have clearly been executed at high speed – yet another manifestation of Artaud’s determination to elude the process of representation – and it is through this velocity of inscription that the pages are torn.
Especially in the notebooks from the final months of Artaud’s life, the pages emanate a disintegrating body rushing to formulate its last obsession, instantly, with the resulting blur of speed in the figures and words itself forming an integral part of the obsession. Often, the tip of the pencil has broken, and the cracked wood has moved into the surface of the paper, so that a word or image may be visible negatively, discernible only in the cuts and furrows in the page. The metal nib of the pen also carries its multiple trajectories destructively into the paper’s surface, particularly when the ink dries up but the momentum of the hand is unstoppable. In addition, the pencil and ink marks are often smudged, overlayered and intercrossed with one another in intricate strata that have been produced by the gestural movements of the hand directly onto the page.
The space of the notebook page is one of oscillation, of lost and won ground, of supplantation and transformation between image and text. On one page, the drawings (particularly those of the face and the dancing body) will crowd out their accompanying texts into the extreme edge of the paper’s surface; on the next page, the text will proliferate expansively and expel the image away to a peripheral zone.
Sometimes, the preoccupations of image and text will be allied – the text will invoke weapons and anger, and the images will be of nails, broken bones and instruments of torture – and at other times, the two contents are divergent, contradictory or in confrontation. In a notebook page from June 1947, the text condensed at the top of the surface space reads: “they are digested/they are assimilated/shit is made of them/they are made to rot/they are shat out again”. The remainder of the page’s surface space is
saturated with images of damaged organs, insects, limbs, and a tiny self-portrait held in a circular, anal shape. Here, the textual protest against the forcible, execrable appropriation by an exterior power of the body’s elements is opened out visually, with a swarm of threatening forms that both demonstrate that threat and stigmatize it. A further collision which the notebook pages embody is that between excessively overloaded space and the sudden apparition of blank space. In its intricate arena for the crash between image and language, Artaud’s notebook page has a space that is densely determined, even when void, and a time that is always immediate.
Artaud: The Screaming Body: Film, Drawings, Recordings 1924-1948 Page 7