The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artauds drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent yearsat New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, Viennas Museum moderner Kunst (mumok), and Pariss Centre Georges Pompidouhave entirely transformed perceptions of the artits's work, reorienting it towards the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artauds major writings on his artworks, undertaken during the same era as his essay on the work of Van Gogh, the man suicided by society. All three texts form intensive anatomical explorations and reconfigurations. Artauds drawings oscillate between facial portraits and fragmentary arenas of corporeal contestation.



The Human Face (1947) was written as the catalogue text for Artauds one and only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, and focuses on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. Ten years that language is gone (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebookshis main creative medium at the end of his lifeand their capacity to spark his creativity when language failed him. 50 Drawings to assassinate magic (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artauds drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together these three extraordinary textspitched between writing and imageproject Artauds ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.