With Artaud
Journal, May 1946 to March 1948
by Jacques Prevel
In 1946, the legendary theorist and writer Antonin Artaud was released from the last of the insane asylums in which he had spent nearly a decade - starving, beaten, electroshocked, abandoned - since making his apocalyptic journey to western Ireland in 1937. He then returned to Paris, perceiving himself as a dead man, who somehow still lived. For the next two years, he wrote incessantly, created extraordinary drawings, made three public performances of screams and curses, and spat-out a recording for radio transmission that had to be banned - until his abrupt death aged 51 in 1948.
There existed only one intimate eye-witness to that final moment of Artaud’s life: the young poet Jacques Prevel, who met Artaud almost every day, walked with him through the Paris streets, screamed with him, was cursed by him, supplied him with ever-increasing amounts of drugs - up to the moment when a tubercular haemorrhage ended that life with Artaud. Prevel’s journal is by turns attentive, crazed, bewildered, desperate, passionate, funny, obsessional. He is skin-to-skin with Artaud, bone-to-bone, watching him sleep, always accompanying him at speed.
This is the first English-language translation of Prevel’s seminal, revelatory document of Artaud at his life’s incendiary end.
Translated by Stephen Barber
Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak
Available to pre-order
Release date 01/12/26
Hardbound, 252 pages, 190 x 148mm
ISBN 978-1-915908-16-2
About the authors
Jacques Marie Prevel was born on 21 July 1915 in the Norman town of Bolbec, and moved to Le Havre at the age of eighteen. He married, and through his wife obtained a post as a copywriter in the municipal administration. In 1942 he moved to occupied Paris, where he befriended Arthur Adamov, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and then fatefully, on 27 May 1946, Antonin Artaud. He self-published three short collections of poetry, the first of which is translated here for the first time into English. He died alone in Room 109 of the sanatorium at Sainte-Feyre on 27 May 1951, five years to the day after his first encounter with Artaud. He was buried at Bolbec on 1 June of the same year.
Stephen Barber’s books have been acclaimed as ‘brilliant, profound and provocative’ by The Times newspaper in the UK, and he has been called ‘a writer of real distinction’ and ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ by The Independent newspaper. The Sunday Times newspaper hailed his books as ‘exhilarating and disquieting’.
He is the author of many fiction and non-fiction books, including studies of Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat, Jean Genet and Eadweard Muybridge. Among his recent books are England’s Darkness (SunVision Press) and Berlin Bodies.
Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Her published works include Altered Balance − A Tribute to Coil, Death Mort Tod - A European Book of the Dead, The Torture of the 100 Pieces. Her audio-visual work − Gasper (2015), On the New Revelations of Being (2018), Sandmann (2019), The Projection of the True Body (2022), Johannes Rass - Aktion Bos Taurus (2024) − has been shown at festivals in the UK and internationally. Urbaniak’s installation, based on The Fall of Jerusalem by Hermann Nitsch, was exhibited at Prinzendorf Castle in Austria. She lives and works in London.