"The most beautiful scandal"
ISOU, Isidore. Initiation à la Haute Volupté. Paris: Escaliers de Lausanne. 1960.
8vo. Cream card wrappers with blue lettering to title page and spine; pp. 496, untrimmed and partially unopened; light spotting to fore-edges, light rubbing to spine ends, but generally very good.
First edition.
Romanian-born poet and novelist Isidore Isou was the founder of Lettrism, the French avant-garde movement that emerged in post-war Paris out of the legacy of Surrealism. His Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (1946) set out the first Lettrist manifesto, calling for the abolition of words in favour of letters and redefining artistic creation around “the sign”. Initiation à la Haute Volupté, first published in 1960, later inspired a celebrated series of silkscreens produced by Edizioni Conz in 1989. Isou’s provocations extended beyond literature: the uproar in Cannes over his 1951 film Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise on Slime and Eternity) famously prompted Jean Cocteau to call it “the most beautiful scandal”.
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