« Scriptive Images in the Work of Paul Klee and Henri Michaux »

The production and pursuit of lines permeates Klee’s and Michaux’s reflections like a „red thread“, to employ a line-related metaphor, which Michaux also used. In Dessiner l’écoulement du temps (1957) Michaux sought a psychic script which would make the “inner sentence” visible, the “sentence without words”, which he compares to an endlessly twisting thread.
The relationship between drawing and writing, and the scriptive image as the intersection of both these areas, are the focus of the present study. Writing is not only fixed language, but also visual image, because writing like images “speak” to the eyes. Its mission is not only to tell but also to show. Since Lessing’s Laocoon, writing has, in the European history of ideas, resisted classic disjunction of language or image. Klee himself used the term scriptive image in the titles of several works, such as his Secret scriptive image in the titles of several works.