Philosophical and biographical accounts of Antonin Artaud's late
visual work, all reproduced in color.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)--stage and film actor, director, writer, and
visual artist--was a man of rage and genius. Expelled from the
Surrealist movement for his refusal to renounce the theatre, he founded
the Theater of Cruelty and wrote The Theater and Its Double, one of
the key twentieth-century texts on the topic. Artaud spent nine years at
the end of his life in asylums, undergoing electroshock treatments.
Released to the care of his friends in 1946, he began to draw again.This
book presents drawings and portraits from this late resurgence, all in
color. Accompanying the images are texts by by Artaud's longtime friend
and editor Paule Thévenin and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
"We won't be describing any paintings," Derrida warns the reader.
Derrida struggles with Artaud's peculiar language, punctuating his text
with agitated footnotes and asides (asking at one point, "How will they
translate this?"). Thévenin offers a more straightforward biographical
and historical account. (It was on the walls of her apartment that
Derrida first saw Artaud's paintings and drawings.) These two texts were
previously published by the MIT Press in The Secret Art of Antonin
Artaud without the artwork that is their subject. This book brings
together art and text for the first time in English.
