Drawn From Artaud's Last Days on Earth

Bailey Trela introduces Hyperallergic readers to Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin's new volume, Antonin Artaud: Drawings and Portraits (MIT Press), a print compendium of drawings by the writer and artist, translated by Mary Ann Caws. This is, in Trela's words, "an opportunity to take stock of Artaud’s lesser-known output: the drawings he made in the final years of his life, after nearly a decade in various mental asylums, where he underwent electroshock therapy." More: 

Spanning a period of more than 20 years, the works — simultaneously terrifying and beautiful — are a devastating record of a soul lashing out and grasping at the page and of an artist approaching the end of his life attempting to cohere both himself and the tortured ramblings that constituted his theories.

Artaud spent much of his adult life shuttling from one asylum to the next, with intense bouts of writing in between and lectures that culminated in screams. His close friend Paule Thévenin manages, with her introduction to the book, to inject some order in the chaos. Thévenin lucidly traces the development of Artaud’s interest in the graphic arts, as well as such art movements as Impressionism and Fauvism, and the evocative, at times morose, landscapes of Edvard Munch. In the early 1920s, Artaud designed costumes and stage sets for the atelier company of Charles Dullin in Paris, but he eventually ceased his graphic works. When he took up drawing again nearly 20 years later, his work had a startlingly different character.

The visceral act of expression itself was primary for Artaud; technical execution was secondary to communicating the deep, vital character of the artist. In his later work, this philosophy would be complicated as he sometimes produced deliberately crude works, testing the strength of the expression by submitting it to the the brutal blows of an unhinged craft. This method found its best expression in his so-called “spells,” interminglings of text and image that Artaud began to produce after suffering a nervous breakdown during a trip to Ireland in 1937. These frantic epistolary outbursts showcase his attempt to increase the physicality of his writing. When Artaud was later institutionalized, his doctor cited the “spells” as evidence of mental illness. Burnt with matches and cigarettes and marked over with crosses, infinity signs, and other abstruse symbols, these brutalized scraps of paper were, at heart, stark, shrieking claims to existence.

Read on at Hyperallergic.