On view at the Center for Book Arts (CBA) in New York City until May 2, Rewriting the World: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Book examines the book as an expressive medium within lettrism, a postwar, avant-garde artistic movement that began in France. Isidore Isou (1925–2007), a Romanian Jewish refugee who escaped an antisemitic pogrom before arriving in Paris in 1945, envisioned a movement that would leverage every art form and transform the world by radically reimagining creative production. Lettrism aspired to renew all human disciplines including painting, poetry, performance, and film by focusing on the letter and other symbols of language. The visual art of the movement blended text, imagery, mathematical figures, musical notation, and fictional signs.
Isou’s seminal text Les Journaux des Dieux (above), which translates to “Diaries of the Gods” in English, was published in 1950. The book epitomizes Isou’s ambition to produce a “hypergraphic novel,” which would combine literature with other communicative codes, complex illustrations, and forms of expression. Rewriting the World, which is curated by Frédéric Acquaviva and Bill Kartalopoulos, is only the third exhibition on lettrism ever organized in the United States and traces the movement’s evolution over thirty years, featuring work by artists including Roberto Altmann, Aude Jessemin, Maurice Lemaître, Maggy Mauritz, Gabriel Pomerand, Jacques Spacagna, and Gil J. Wolman. The CBA exhibition will also trace the relationship between lettrism and comics—a genre that similarly relies on the experimental interplay between word and image. Alongside the exhibition, CBA will publish a catalogue featuring essays by the curators, historical context on lettrism, and documentation of the works on view.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Frédéric Acquaviva