Lettrism
also: Letterism · Lettrisme
Lettrism (French: Lettrisme) is a French avant-garde movement founded in Paris in November 1945 by the Romanian-born Isidore Isou with Gabriel Pomerand. Its roots lie in Dada and Surrealism, but it set out to rebuild every art from the ground up, beginning with the letter - a unit stripped of meaning and treated as pure sound and pure form. From lettrist poetry the movement branched into hypergraphics (dense, layered compositions of letters, signs, and images), sound poetry, painting, and cinema: Isou's Traité de bave et d'éternité scandalized Cannes in 1951. The Lettrists themselves prefer the spelling 'Letterism' in English. Kept active for decades by figures such as Maurice Lemaître, the movement persists, and its splinters - the Letterist International - fed into the Situationist International.
Defining characteristics
- Letters, syllables, and punctuation freed from meaning and used as pure visual and vocal material
- Hypergraphics (metagraphy): dense overlays of letters, signs, drawings, and color across the picture plane
- Sound poetry built from cries, breaths, and noise rather than words
- Cinema as manifesto: scratched, painted, or blank images with sound deliberately at odds with the picture
- Typography composed for visual rhythm rather than reading
Key figures
- Isidore Isou (1925-2007) — Romanian-born founder of the movement; poet, filmmaker, and chief theorist
- Gabriel Pomerand (1926-1972) — Co-founder of the movement with Isou in Paris in 1945
- Maurice Lemaître (1926-2018) — Painter, filmmaker, and writer; leading practitioner of hypergraphics
Example works
- Traité de bave et d'éternité (Venom and Eternity) — Isidore Isou (1951)
- Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique — Isidore Isou (1947)
- Les journaux des dieux — Isidore Isou (1950)
Sources
- Lettrism - WikiArt institution
- Lettrism - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Venom and Eternity - Wikipedia encyclopedia