October 2026
By Guillaume Benoit

This year, to mark the gallery’s 40th anniversary – and bringing history full circle – mother and daughter are organising an exhibition bringing together the two artists: Henri Michaux, the painter-poet born in Wallonia in 1899, and Zao Wou-Ki, the Franco-Chinese painter and printmaker and a leading figure of the lyrical abstraction movement. Having arrived in France in 1948 and set to work straight away, Zao Wou-Ki produced his first lithographs. Immediately captivated, Michaux composed a series of texts to accompany eight of Zao Wou-Ki’s lithographs. This marked the beginning of a wonderful friendship that would bind the two men until Michaux’s death in 1984.

 

In 1926, Henri Michaux attended the Paul Klee exhibition at the Galerie Pierre and rediscovered his love of painting. In 1938, he exhibited his small paintings on black backgrounds at the same gallery. In 1949, Michaux became acquainted with Zao Wou-Ki’s lithographs and invited Pierre Loeb to discover the young Chinese artist’s work. Loeb purchased 11 canvases from him and signed a contract binding them until 1957. This venue, steeped in history, art and friendship, is now home to the Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery, which has long maintained a special relationship with Zao Wou-Ki and with Michaux’s work: both artists are regularly exhibited at the gallery.

 

The Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery now pays tribute to these two great artists with this exhibition, ‘Zao Wou-Ki — Henri Michaux: China — The West’, which spans the period from their meeting in 1949 to the great era of Chinese ink paintings in the 1970s. For Zao the 1970s were marked by the loss of his father, who died in 1968, and by the illness and subsequent death of his wife in 1972.​

 

Michaux persuaded him to return to working with Indian ink… The exhibition, comprising mainly Indian ink drawings and watercolours, is structured around a dialogue between these two great artists, Zao Wou-Ki and Henri Michaux.

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