Antonin Artaud. Zeichnungen und Portraits

When Antonin Artaud (1886-1948), writer, actor, director, and one of the most important theorists of modern theater, first exhibited his drawings in Paris in 1947, the reaction among the artistic circle surrounding Giacometti, Wols, and Dubuffet was akin to a creative earthquake. Immediate and unsettling, infused with the symptoms of his artistic genius and his mental illness, Artaud's drawings are expressions of hallucinatory clairvoyance, a magically transcendent body consciousness, and the capacity for both psychological and physical suffering – components that continue to define so-called "wild," subjective painting today. For our 1986 volume, which we are reissuing on the occasion of Artaud's 70th death anniversary on March 4, 2018, the French philosopher and leading representative of analytical deconstruction, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), wrote the accompanying text.