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L'Architecture lettriste collection
880210
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections
Title: L'Architecture lettriste collection
Creator:
Didier Lecointre et Denis Ozanne (Firm)
Creator:
Broutin, Gérard-Philippe
Creator:
DuPont, Albert, 1951-
Creator:
Hachette, Micheline
Creator:
Isou, Isidore
Creator:
Poyet, François
Creator:
Sabatier, Roland, 1942-
Creator:
Satié, Alain, 1944-
Identifier/Call Number: 880210
Physical Description:
58.17 Linear Feet
(28 boxes and 4 flatfile folders)
Date (inclusive): 1968-1988
Abstract: A collection assembled for an exhibition in 1988 at Lecointre-Ozanne in Paris featuring maquettes, projects, plans and writings
of Isidore Isou, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satié, François Poyet, Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Albert DuPont, and Micheline Hachette.
Included are manifestos and bulletins; proposals for playgrounds and housing; designs for towns of the future; and decorative
designs.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language of Material: Collection material is in French.
Open for use by qualified researchers. Contact the repository for information regarding access to the maquettes.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Acquired in 1988.
Materials by individual artists/authors are grouped together following the order in the catalogue of the sale exhibition at
Lecointre-Ozanne. Titles are drawn from the catalogue.
Didier Lecointre et Denis Ozanne, also known as Librairie Lecointre-Ozanne, was a gallery and rare books dealer in Paris run
by Didier Lecointre and Denis Ozanne. Lecointre and Ozanne opened a location in Odéon on the rue de Tournon in the early 1980s,
specializing in twentieth-century avant-garde art movements, photography, and artists' books. They continuously published
catalogues of their holdings and exhibitions, including
Vingt ans d'architecture lettriste in 1988,
Reliures lettristes in 1991, and several catalogues related to the 1991 Biennale du livre d'artiste in Uzerche. In 1987, Lecointre-Ozanne opened
a location in Drouot on the rue de Provence. This location would later operate as Chloé & Denis Ozanne Rare Books, while the
original Odéon location became Didier Lecointre et Dominique Drouet booksellers. Both businesses continued to collect and
sell artists' books and other works by avant-garde groups like the Lettrists and Situationists.
L'Architecture lettriste collection, 1968-1988, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 880210.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa880210
The collection was rehoused upon receipt. Sara McGillivray wrote the finding aid in 2017.
For Lettrist writings see the
Lettrism papers , the
Lettrist movement papers , and the
Jean Brown Collection .
Scope and Contents of Collection
This collection consists of materials assembled for an exhibition,
Vingt ans d'architecture lettriste, held at Librairie Lecointre-Ozanne in Paris in March 1988. The works include maquettes, projects, plans and writings which
date from 1968 to 1988, and were created by seven members of the Lettrist movement: Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Albert DuPont,
Micheline Hachette, Isidore Isou, François Poyet, Roland Sabatier, and Alain Satié. Included are manifestos and bulletins;
proposals for playgrounds and housing; designs for towns of the future; and decorative designs.
The avant-garde movement, Lettrism, was formed in 1945 by Isidore Isou and Gabriel Pomerand. The Romanian-born Isou came to
Paris after World War II, and upon forming the group began issuing leaflets, manuscripts, and manifestos. The group alleged
that arts have life cycles, defining two distinct periods before an art's "death," the
amplique and the
ciselante. The amplique is a period in which an artistic discipline grows and expands (amplifies) through the use of techniques drawn
from other disciplines out of utility, rather than from pre-existing aesthetic techniques. The ciselante follows the amplique
as a period in which the art looks inward and is deepened (chiseled in) through self-reflection, but becomes inaccessible
to the amateur. It then dies due to a lack of possibility for original creation, and all subsequent efforts are known as "neo"-arts.
Lettrists sought out originality in their work, and often denounced revivalist artistic movements as imitative. Early Lettrists
named poetry and music as dead arts and cast Lettrism as a new art. The group drew from poetry and music for their
lettries, compositions of letters assembled for the aesthetic purpose of pleasing the eye or ear. While formatted and often performed
like poetry, unlike the poem, these works emphasize the forms and sounds of letters over words, and as such, have no translatable
meaning; the letter becomes a visual object symbolic only as a phoneme.
The Lettrists' experimentation with notation systems continued into more visual works and expanded into other fields of art,
asserting that, like music and poetry, literature and painting had reached their respective ends and there was no room left
in either field for original creation. Lettrism sought to reinvent dead fields by injecting them with experimental techniques
revolving around the letter, such as uniting pattern and typography, and utilizing pictographs and varied ink colors to arrive
at works that were neither figurative nor abstract. This fusion between art and writing was first termed
metagraphics, and grew into
hypergraphics in the 1950s. While lettries stripped meaning from notational symbols to create purely aesthetic works, hypergraphy introduced
diverse notational symbols into works to add layers of meaning. This allowed Lettrist paintings to be "read," while Lettrist
novels wove together narratives using all manner of symbols. Inserting images into a novel was termed
plasticizing, and Isou's first hypergraphic novel,
Les Journaux des dieux, was published in 1950.
The Lettrists' work regarding architecture can be traced back to Isou's 1968
"Manifeste pour le bouleversement de l'architecture," (#13 in the Lecointre-Ozanne sale catalogue), but would be more fully fleshed out with Roland Sabatier and Alain Satié's
publication of
"Le Bouleversement de l'architecture," in 1979 (#14 in the sale catalogue). Sabatier joined the Lettrists in 1963, Satié and Hachette in 1964, Poyet in 1966, Broutin
in 1968, and DuPont in 1973. These artists would explore the relationship between Lettrist ideas and architecture in the works
within this collection, both individually and collaboratively, as in the proposal for a façade in Fécamp and the exterior
of the Mid Mad Mod store in Paris.
The Lettrists defined architecture up to the Modernists as the discipline's amplique period, and sought to usher the discipline
through its ciselante period and into the hypergraphic. Isou proposed to liberate the architectural form from utilitarian
goals, experimenting with typographical massing in his maquettes featured in this collection. Broutin's maquettes explore
the Pyramid of Cheops' potential as a monumental hypergraphic structure, while Satié and Poyet's work explores the hypergraphic
on an urban scale. Lettrist architecture focused on aesthetics and materiality, and experimented with the part as a whole.
Like Lettrist work creating universal notation systems,
meca-architecture encompassed a universal system of building materials, including any and all objects as possible building components, as illustrated
in Micheline Hachette's piece, "Méca-esthétique pour la construction d'une demeure," where the rubber boot is presented as
both possible building material and possible building form.
Lettrist architecture explored the unbuilt as construction projected in an imaginary dimension.
This is tied to the group's notions of the
infinitésimale and
super-temporelle, which are inter-related Lettrist concepts of imaginary and impossible works which can only be suggested or represented by
surrogates in reality. Infinitésimale works often involved stimulation of the senses, in which a work invokes another thing,
sense, or memory. Two of Isou's maquettes utilize veils and incandescent lights to suggest symbolic and allegorical imagined
projects, while two of Sabatier's pieces pair objects (a mirror and a vinyl record) with hand-written quotes to imply works
that must be imagined by the public. These works require participation on the part of the viewer. Likewise, the super-temporelle
requires audience intervention, it demands the audience "fill-in" the work with their own ideas, meaning that the work is
perpetually in an unfinished state and cannot exist within a typical temporal framework, which allows it to transverse temporal
existence. These concepts are illustrated in the many drawings and maquettes included in this collection.
Sources consulted:
L'architecture lettriste : Ciselante, hypergraphique, infinitésimale & super-temporelle (1968-1988) : 20 ans d'architecture
lettriste : Livres, plans, projets, maquettes
. Paris: Didier Lecointre-Denis Ozanne, 1988.
Acquaviva, Frédéric.
Isidore Isou, Hypergraphic Novels, 1950-1984. Stockholm, Sweden: Rumänska Kulturinstitutet, 2012.
Curtay, Jean-Paul,
Letterism and Hypergraphics : the Unknown Avant-Garde, 1945-1985. New York: Franklin Furnace, 1985.
Failing, Patricia.
An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Letterist Painting : As Exemplified in the Oeuvre of Maurice Lemaître. Paper presented at the First International Symposium on Letterism, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, May 26, 1976. Paris:
Centre de Créativité, c. 1978.
Lemaître, Maurice.
What Is Letterism? : The Only French Avantgarde Movement Born Since Dada and Surrealism. Paris: Centre de Créativité, c. 1979.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Published material from the sale exhibition was separated from this collection and catalogued by the library. These materials
consisted of sale exhibition catalogue number 13,
"Manifeste pour le bouleversement de l'architecture," numbers 14 and 15,
"Le Bouleversement de l'architecture," and number 49,
"Particuliers, promoteurs ne confiez plus vos constructions aux escrocs […]"
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Architectural design
Lettrism