German artist and activist Gustav Metzger was born to Jewish parents in Nuremberg in 1926. Having found refuge from the Nazis in the UK in 1939 and having been awarded a grant by the Jewish community there after the war, he was able to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in the late 1940s. His experience of mankind’s destructive capabilities during World War II led him to formulate his concept of Auto-Destructive Art in…
The opening lines of Ed Sanders’s poem For Ted Berrigan recall the origin of the friendship between the two poets on the Lower East Side, where Sanders had moved from Kansas City and Berrigan from Tulsa via Chicago in the early 1960s. The poem is one of two that have been printed in the joint Moloko & Sea Urchin edition In Honor of Ted Berrigan by Ed Sanders, which also contains glyphs and contact prints from Ed’s archive with photos taken on 29 January 1964 at Café Le Metro, New York. Originally created as a PDF for Ron Padgett in 2009, Sanders’s Berrigan tribute…
Henri Michaux was born in Namur, Belgium in 1899 and spent his childhood in Brussels, where he studied medicine until he dropped out of university at the age of 21. Inspired by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Lautréamont, Michaux concentrated on his own literary experiments in 1922. Michaux’s early writings were mainly published in the French-Belgian avant-garde magazine Le Disque vert, for which he edited a…
In 1996 three art galleries from Nantes, France, teamed up to organise a Michaux retrospective in their town. Galerie Covergence, Galerie Jean-Christian Fradin and Galerie Michel Luneau showed a variety of works ranging from frottages, pastels, oil and acrylic paintings, and drawings in ink or crayon covering a period from 1944 to 1983. Apart from reproductions of these works the accompanying catalogue contains an introduction by Michel Luneau, a biography and Michaux’s…
Review of In Honor of Ted Berrigan by Ed Sanders in Beat Scene #104, early Summer 2022.