Quickly appreciated as a poet and essayist, he had difficulty convincing conservative circles that his drawings and paintings on paper were not simply the sketches of a poet illustrating his writings, but logical extensions of his creative and even visionary research, accelerated by his consumption of hallucinogens: mescaline, LSD or hashish.

By linking writing and painting and drawing inspiration from Chinese calligraphy, he was a pioneer in the history of modern European art. It was not until the 1960s that Michaux gained international recognition as a great inspirer and magician of visual art. His first retrospectives were held in Amsterdam and Geneva in 1964, followed by those at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1965 and, in 1978, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at the Musée national d’art moderne (the Centre Pompidou), as soon as it opened.