Courtauld Gallery, London
He lived an avant-garde life in Paris, recording his intense drug-induced visions on paper. Our critic sees a spine, a hand, an owl, a sea monster – or does he?

Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art.

The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.