HENRI MICHAUX / OCTAVIO PAZ / ASADULLAH SOUREN MELIKIAN-CHIRVANI — Art Tantrique, Le Point Cardinal, Paris, 1970

Original exhibition invitation for Art Tantrique, held at Le Point Cardinal, Paris, 17 February through the end of March 1970. The show was organised with Paris-based editor Ravi Kumar and presented manuscript pages and yantras — coded ritual diagrams, some dating to the seventeenth century — rather than contemporary paintings. Jean Hugues’s rue Jacob gallery was a meeting place for poets, publishers and artists including Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Victor Brauner and Henri Michaux.

The contributors arrived with receipts. Michaux had travelled through Asia in 1930–31 and spent decades transforming ink into invented alphabets hovering between writing and image. Octavio Paz had already written about Michaux in 1960; by 1970 he had returned from six years as Mexico’s ambassador to India, resigned in protest after the Tlatelolco massacre, and published Ladera Este and Conjunciones y disyunciones. Art historian Souren Melikian-Chirvani supplied the essential corrective: tantric geometry was not simply abstraction ahead of its time. Its forms followed a canon and carried meanings understood by initiates — very different from the individual autonomy claimed by European abstraction.

That distinction had consequences. Paris-based Indian painter Akkitham Narayanan encountered the exhibition and later described it as helping him imagine a third route between European modernism and inherited Indian forms, just as Neo-Tantra was beginning to emerge in India.

Four-page folded invitation. Black printing on orange card stock. 12 × 15 cm closed; 24 × 15 cm open. Labyrinthine tantric cover image with script-like inscription; restrained serif typography within.

Condition: Very good, bright and clean, with light handling and minor edge and fold wear.