Collection: Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) was a Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. His engagement with visual art was sustained and serious: he wrote on Marcel Duchamp, on Surrealism, and on Henri Michaux, whose work he had addressed as early as 1960. Between 1962 and 1968 he served as Mexico’s ambassador to India, an experience that transformed his thinking about time, language and the sacred. He resigned in protest after the Tlatelolco massacre and returned to Paris, where Ladera Este and Conjunciones y disyunciones appeared in 1969–70.

His contribution to Art Tantrique at Le Point Cardinal in 1970 drew on this immersion in Indian thought. The exhibition, organised with editor Ravi Kumar, presented manuscript pages and yantras rather than contemporary paintings, and Paz’s text situated tantric geometry within a broader argument about the body, language and the limits of Western abstraction.

The printed matter gathered here documents the intersection of his literary and visual thinking.