Rewriting the World: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Book
Isidore Isou (b. Jean-Isidore Goldstein, 1925-1997) escaped an anti-Semitic pogrom in his native Romania and arrived in Paris in 1945 with an urgent mission: to found a new avant-garde movement – Lettrisme – which would surpass Dada and transform the world towards a paradisiacal society based on creativity. Lettrisme engaged every art form – painting, poetry, performance, film – and addressed theoretical subjects from economics to erotology.
The book is a key Lettrist form, both as a carrier and as an expression of Lettrist ideas. Isou conceived of the new Lettrist novel as metagraphic — or, later, hypergraphic — in that it would combine all possible codes of communication: text, images, mathematical formula, music, asemic writing, and more. Isou first articulated and demonstrated his ideas in Les Journaux des dieux (The Diaries of the Gods, 1950), a book which included a fifty-page sequence that combined a dizzying array of communicative systems in layers of overlapping blue, red, and yellow inks.
Isou saw no limit to the possibilities of the book form. “The novel will be life,” he wrote. “I thought of taking over a whole street with its bistros… the plot of my novel will move from one bar to the next: from one shop to the next…Having become three-dimensional and emerging from the book, the novel will become truly social… I am dreaming of a metagraphic novel week… The novel would thus become a national holiday!” The Lettrist book could – and did – assume any form, and anticipates many later developments in the histories of artists’ books and the graphic novel.
The Lettrist movement is often reduced to a footnote in histories of the more well-known Situationist International, which descended from Lettrisme (Guy Debord was a Lettrist before breaking off to form the Lettrist International, which he later renamed the Situationist International). Drawing on more than one hundred rare items from the archives of Lettrist scholar and avant-garde composer Frédéric Acquaviva and co-curated by comics specialist Bill Kartalopoulos, this exhibit will spotlight an overlooked movement and restore Lettrist book production to its place of seminal importance in the history of the modern artist’s book.
Featuring work by:
Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître, Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J Wolman, Eliane Papaï, Jacques Spacagna, Aude Jessemin, Roberto Altmann, Maggy Mauritz, Alain de Latour, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satié, François Poyet, Michel Jaffrennou, Edouard Berreur, Jean-Louis Sarthou, Jean-Paul Curtay, Broutin, Albert Dupont and Frédérique Devaux
