Poet-Artists of the French Avant-Garde: 1946 - 79
by Frederic Acquaviva, October 2025
From October 2025 into 2026, we have been exhibiting works by a range of writers, poets and artists from the French Avant-Garde between 1946-79. This collection of Lettrist and Situationist material has attracted considerable interest in academic and institutional circles to the extent that we recently ran out of catalogues. We are delighted to reprint the introduction from writer and composer Frederic Acquaviva here.
We now know the importance of French poets, artists, or poet-artists from the first half of the twentieth century—from Dada to Surrealism, from Apollinaire and Pierre Albert-Birot to Antonin Artaud, through to Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and many others. Much less known, however, is what happened in France in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in Paris, before the centre of art shifted to New York or elsewhere, before splintering with the emergence of the digital world and its many networks.
Yet many poet-artists as well as major movements were born in Paris, and the first among them was Lettrism. Founded in 1946 by Romanian-born Isidore Isou (who later became a French citizen), with the help of Gabriel Pomerand, soon joined by Maurice Lemaître, to name only the first three significant figures of this multidisciplinary movement. Lettrism aimed to overturn the entire spectrum of Knowledge and Learning through a new system of generalised creativity called Creatics, promoted by Isou, which profoundly shook up fields such as cinema, but also dance, poetry, the novel, and many other fields.
Isou’s death in 2007 (followed twelve years later by a first retrospective attempt at the Centre Georges Pompidou) made possible the rediscovery of Lettrism, which had the flaw of living in a closed circuit, practicing anathema and the art of insult long before the Situationists. Scandalously absent from most histories of the artist’s book, it is nevertheless at the Center for Book Arts in New York that the Lettrists will be celebrated from January to May 2026, in an exhibition I am curating with Bill Kartalopoulos, the specialist in experimental comics, since here too the Lettrists innovated radically, as we will also see at Sotheran’s with this selection of early Lettrist material. If their works are fascinating, their lives were no less eventful: psychiatric hospital for Isou; suicide, LSD, and opium for Pomerand—more than enough to fuel future biopics.
Celebrated worldwide and declared a National Treasure in France, Guy Debord is known for founding the Situationist International in 1957. Yet it must be recalled that before theorising The Society of the Spectacle, he had joined Lettrism in 1951, then created the Lettrist International alongside other dissident Lettrists such as Jean-Louis Brau (who mixed Lettrism with Pop art and Beat generation influences, perhaps after living in London in 1962) and the most radical and astonishing artist of this period, Gil J. Wolman, inventor of L’Anticoncept, the ‘megapneumes’, and ‘scotch art’. This first Lettrist International, whose concepts and spirit would reappear in the Situationist International, lasted from 1952 to 1957. At Sotheran’s one will see the only work by Debord—who was neither poet nor artist, but beyond—available: a ‘metagraphy’, isin the term introduced by Isou in 1950, dedicated to his influential friend Wolman. From 1963, François Dufrêne (himself a Lettrist since 1946, later an ‘affichiste’ and ‘New Realist’, as well as one of the most important sound poets) replaced Debord and, with Brau and Wolman, fomented the ‘Second Lettrist International’ (D.I.L.)
To conclude with Lettrism, it seemed important to show certain works concerning Hypergraphy, this Isouian concept of the 1950s, which called for a painting of signs stripped of meaning, where art and writing intermingle through the use of communication symbols or other coding systems. This new aesthetics of the letter and the sign (as seen in the works of Isou and Lemaître in the first section) proposed a third path after figurative art and abstraction, to definitively escape binary thinking. Represented in this section are the contributions of two exceptional Lettrist couples: Jacques Spacagna, considered by many to be the most gifted Lettrist (including critics such as Michel Tapié, who introduced Jackson Pollock and Gutai to France), and his wife Aude Jessemin, whose works are rare and important; as well as Roberto Altmann, with his Hypergraphic Geste comics, his refined editions and artworks, one created together with his wife Maggy Mauritz (the first woman artist to use spray paint, making her a precursor of street & graffiti art), who also produced many works using the now illegible system of German shorthand, subverted for her own purposes.
We then move on to other aesthetics opposed to Lettrism, with a section centred around Metapoetry & Fluxus. Metapoetry was the creation of Altagor alone, around 1948, two years after Isou’s Lettrism. Working from adolescence in the mines of Eastern France, Altagor went completely unnoticed in France until his death in 1992, before the purchase of his Archives thirty years later by the prestigious Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University), which, incidentally, had the foresight to also acquire early on the archives of Maurice Lemaître, Gil Wolman, and Henri Chopin. If Altagor embodies the figure of the absolute loner, the same cannot be said for Fluxus, which sought to abolish the borders between art and life and to encourage open communication between international artists. A few rare French artists joined George Maciunas’s group, such as Ben Vautier and Robert Filliou, two major figures of the movement, both of whom used writing as an artistic resource.
The fifth section gathers the aesthetics of Sound, Concrete & Visual Poetry, with major poet-artists active as early as the 1950s in Paris. This section showcases Henri Chopin (who also lived in London during his most fertile period), the famed editor of the journal OU, creator of ‘typewriter poems’ (the 1960s ones almost all belong to American universities), as well as Bernard Heidsieck, the remarkable poet-banker, here represented with a plate from his prodigious Canal Street series, in which he reused magnetic tapes from his sound poetry. Almost entirely unknown to this day, the experimental poetess of socio-experimental art, Suzanne Bernard, the first French woman to engage in concrete poetry, published two significant books, including the 1962 now-untraceable Un Livre à Inventer (A Book to Invent). Finally, in this section are Pierre & Ilse Garnier who launched the year after Spatialism, a kind of French-style concrete poetry, creating major works on the typewriter and with letraset. French poet Jean-François Bory, who is a living legend of this period of total experimentation, stands for the perfect example of a poet-artist who worked across all media and challenged the definitions of sound, concrete, or visual poetry, through his famous typewriters ‘machines of war’ sprayed in gold paint, his typewriter poems created in 1967 at Gallery Ten in London where he also lived, and his utterly unique books.
Lastly, we bring together the Independant; some iconoclasts who refused to belong to any group, each crossing or continuing in their own way the history of previous movements. Such is the case of Paul-Armand Gette, with his artist’s books and Totems of printing blocks; Cozette de Charmoy (born in London in 1939, now living in Paris, represented by Loeve&Co gallery alongside Maggy Mauritz), whose masterpiece The Colossal Lie was published by Henri Chopin in his OU Collection—the historic original plates of which are shown at Sotheranʼs. These plates served as models for many later graphic novels and were politically prophetic in their denunciation of fake news. Also present in this historical show, Jean-Luc Parant, the incredible poet-artist who recently passed away, who defined himself as a ‘maker of texts about eyes and of spheres’ (one of his rare ‘book-eating spheres’, fusing both universes, will be on view). This section ends with Joël Hubaut, the youngest of them all (born in 1947), a true Epidemic Mixage of everything that came before him, an exceptional performer who has justly received the Heidsieck Prize - Centre Pompidou, prolific and visionary poet-artist, perfectly embodies the synthesis of this fertile period that must urgently be discovered and continued.
In my view, all the artists presented here share a certain added value compared to simple painters: the poetic dimension.
- Frédéric Acquaviva
Composer, curator and historian of the avant-gardes
